Class, culture, and difference in England deconstructing the institutional norm

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
This article examines a group of ethnically diverse male and female students’ critical exploration of the complex interconnections between working‐class school careers, identity formation, and cultural practices within English educational institutions. More specifically, it focuses upon the students’ deconstruction of academic and teacher representations of working‐class students’ state schooling. The students’ combined experiences of inner‐city schools and higher education institutions have provided them with unique insights at a local level into the differential pedagogical implications for different social groups of the hegemonic institutional values that frequently remain unexamined by policy makers, researchers, and teachers. Without reducing their cultural origins to ethnic essences or without romanticizing working‐class life in the 1990s, they use this qualitative study to present the case for “bringing back” social class as a significant explanatory variable of educational inequality and the construction of diverse social/cultural identities.

This publication has 7 references indexed in Scilit: