Joining the Club? Academia and Working-class Femininities Correspondence : Valerie Hey,Brunel University,Department of Education, 300 St Margarets Road,Twickenham TW 1 1PT,UK. E-mail: Valerie.hey@brunel.ac.uk

The feminist working-class academic is an exemplary queer subject, someone whose presence (and practice) questions the norms of the academy without ever being able to completely occupy the 'other' term. She is an archetypal late modern subject of reflexivity and mobility. This article explores some consequences of this position by looking at class as lived as a re/location, reflecting on its pleasures and pains. The author looks principally at autobiographically inspired accounts of class, as well as other auto/biographical material, which have influenced these personal narratives. In doing so she alludes to more research-based texts to point to the cumulative importance of this particular class literature to problematise a sociology without a society.     

Practice in Irish infant classrooms in the context of the Irish primary school curriculum (1999): Insights from a study of curriculum implementation

This paper begins with a brief outline of the philosophical and methodological basis and the corresponding early education classroom practice envisaged and advocated by the current child-centred Irish Primary School Curriculum (1999). In the context of an overall 'fidelity-type' study, which sought to examine the degree to which the aforementioned curriculum guidelines were actually informing infant classroom practice, it goes on to present and discuss the results of a Target Child Observation Study of pupil activity across a variety of 15 Irish senior infant classrooms ('senior infants' is the second year of formal schooling in Ireland, with the average age of the pupils between five and six years old). A composite picture of general Irish infant classroom practice thus emerges. The paper concludes with a discussion on the core factors identified as militating against the implementation of a more child-centred, activity-based curriculum in the Irish early years classroom.     

Shaun's Story: Troubling discourses of white working-class masculinities

This article tells the story of a hard-working, well-behaved, poor, white, working-class boy trying to achieve academically in a 'sink' inner-city boys' comprehensive school, whilst simultaneously trying to maintain his standing within the male peer group culture. In doing so, it raises questions about the possibilities of bringing together white working-class masculinities with educational success in inner-city working-class schooling. It is argued that to combine the two generates heavy psychic costs, involving young men not only in an enormous amount of academic labour but also an intolerable burden of psychic reparative work. Shaun's narrative also suggests that the problem of 'failing boys' cannot be solved through school-based initiatives. Until social processes of male gender socialisation move away from the imperative of privileging the masculine and allow boys to stay in touch with their feminine qualities, the problem of 'failing boys' will remain despite the best efforts of teachers and researchers.     

Engaging with commonality and difference: Theoretical tensions in the analysis of working-class women's educational discourses

In this article the authors contribute to ongoing theoretical debates concerning the conceptualisation of multiple social identities and oppressions. The article begins by briefly tracing the path towards current critical/feminist/sociological positions 'between modernism and postmodernism', in which identities ('race', class, gender, etc.) are conceptualised as socially constructed, fluid, shifting and yet grounded in 'real' inequalities and oppressions. The article then builds upon, and contributes to, current theoretical dialogue by highlighting ongoing tensions and unresolved problematics within the theoretical approach, drawing out the particular implications of these for educational research. Issues are discussed with specific reference to recent work by Brah (1999) and illustrations are provided using examples from the authors' research with inner city, working-class women.     

Uneasy Hybrids: Psychosocial aspects of becoming educationally successful for working-class young women Correspondence : Helen Lucey,South Bank University,Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences,London Road,London SE1 0AA,UK. E-mail: Luceyh@sbu.ac.uk

Drawing on a longitudinal study of middle-class and working-class girls growing up, this article focuses on those few working-class young women who managed to get to university and face the prospect of a 'professional' career. The authors examine the concept of 'hybridity' as it is used to understand shifts in the constitution of contemporary feminine subjectivities and argue that although hybridity may be a social and cultural fact, in this psychic economy there are no easy hybrids. The authors explore some of the more difficult emotional dynamics in their families that have nevertheless helped sustain their success; of 'never asking for anything', of parents as burdened, of envy, love and pride. Moving into the intellectual domain is a massive shift for working-class young women who do well at school, requiring an internal and external 'makeover'. It is therefore essential to explore the complexities of the losses as well as the gains involved in educational success and upward mobility for working-class young women if we are serious about the project of equality in education. Without a consideration of the psychodynamic processes involved, the deep and enduring failure of the majority of working-class girls and boys will continue unabated.     

Children,School Choice and Social Differences

Research into school choice has focused primarily on parental perspectives. In contrast, this study directly explores children's experiences as they are going through the secondary school choice process in two inner London primary schools. While there were important commonalities in children's experience, in this paper we have concentrated on the differences. These, we argue, lay in (a) children's material and social circumstances, (b) children's individuality, and (c) the ways in which power is played out within families. However, despite both individual and family differences there remains a strong pattern of class-related orientations to choice. We also found that while the vast majority of children were actively involved in the choice process, the children's accounts highlight an important distinction between making and getting a choice. In this particular urban locale, there is less choice for black and white working-class boys than for other groups of children.     

Young working-class men do not read: or do they? Challenging the dominant discourse of reading

ABSTRACT

In the majority of the research on boys’ and young men’s relation to reading, it is argued that boys and young men read too little, read poorly and in all the wrong ways. However, few studies focus on how boys and young men read the texts they do encounter. In particular, there is a lack of research on young men of working-class background, whose relationship to reading is stressed as particularly problematic in many studies. In this article, we approach the reader histories of three young working-class men from a life story perspective, on the basis of a broad definition of text and reading, to capture how reading and texts are used in their identity construction. Our analysis shows that the young men engage in reading in different ways, from listening to audio books and reading aloud to watching films. We argue that our approach makes it possible to re-envision working-class men as readers who, among other things, use reading to construct softer masculinities, thus challenging the dominant narrative of working-class masculinity and working-class men’s relationship to reading and texts.     

Being nature: interspecies articulation as a species-specific practice of relating to environment

Rather than categorically teaching us ways to be less anthropocentric, environmental education could be about educating us of the ways in which we already are nature as human animals. In this paper, one species-specific practice of human relating to environment – interspecies articulation – is argued as one way of being nature. Interspecies articulation is about finding and composing connections to our surrounding nonhuman world with a focus on as if the joints comprising meaningful connections between us and the not us. The interest is in how humans and nonhuman animals continually create the conditions for each other's existence. The data of the Rautio's recent study on perceived beauty in everyday life environments speak for a need to decentralize the human agent as the sole author of his/her self-environment relation. A crucial aspect of the ‘making' of this relation through articulation was found to be a fundamental openness to the serendipitous agency of one's material surroundings – human as well as nonhuman and also inanimate.     

Understanding working-class 'drop-out' from higher education through a sociocultural lens: Cultural narratives and local contexts

The 'drop-out' of working-class students from universities has been identified as one of the most pressing issues for the higher education (HE) sector in the United Kingdom. This article draws on the initial findings of a major research project that explores the meanings and implications of such withdrawal from HE amongst young working-class people. The article argues that drop-out should be seen not just as an educational problem, but also as a manifestation of sociocultural change. To understand drop-out we need to look beyond student support needs or institutional barriers to cultural narratives and local contexts. This enables us to use a sociological frame to understand the educational question, and employ the educational data to contribute to sociological debates on class. The article analyses 'drop-out' as a self-fulfilling cultural narrative that is increasingly connoted as working class, as well as being a consequence of the material exigencies of working-class circumstances. It illustrates how class identity mutates yet stays the same, with the working class still positioned in terms of 'lack'. Although the possibility of university study has become a part of working-class identity, the expectation that this experience may be 'flawed' or 'spoilt' has also become engrained. The article analyses drop-out as two sides of one coin: as both significantly influenced by local culture and as having a perceived impact upon that culture, with different effects in different locales.     

WHITE HEAT: racism,under-achievement and white working-class boys

This paper examines students' experience of inner-city education in one of England's most disadvantaged areas. In particular, we reflect on the views of white working-class boys, a group that has recently been identified by policy-makers and the media as especially at risk of educational failure. These boys recognize the educational disadvantage they face on a daily basis, made explicit in a tangible lack of resourcing and institutionalized through selection systems (like banding and setting). These injustices are reworked through the students' perspectives, taking cues from national and community racist discourses of white victimhood. In this way, the white students view their educational and class disadvantage as a ‘race’ issue. It is concluded that this is an important but largely unrecognized way in which racism continues to work through a system that, despite changes in rhetoric, refuses to engage with the reality of racism as a deeply rooted and defining characteristic of the education system.     

Real or Imagined Women? Staff representations of international women postgraduate students 1

In Australia's globalising universities many support staff and teaching staff now work with international women postgraduate students. But are they aware of the issues facing these women, and is their understanding of them adequate? Indeed, how do they represent them? In this paper we draw on a small-scale pilot study involving key university personnel. We argue that the ways in which such staff represent this group of students is problematic. Focusing primarily on academic issues and on the literature on learning styles, we analyse these staff members' representations of international women postgraduate students from a postcolonial perspective. We explore the extent to which such representations, and the learning styles literature that reflects and informs them, are what Edward Said calls 'Orientalist'. In so doing, we point to both the constitution of the international woman student as postcolonial female subject and show how this situates her in relation to the prevalent learning styles discourse. Further we argue that such representations of the students differ in crucial ways from the students' self-representations, suggesting that in certain subtle ways such staff members are engaging with 'imagined' rather than 'real' women.     

Theorising Inner-city Masculinities: 'Race', class,gender and education

Inner-city boys continue to be stereotypically associated with a range of social and educational 'problems', despite feminist calls for more nuanced and complex analyses to be undertaken of the racialised and classed aspects of masculinities. This article engages with the question of how to theorise diverse, working-class male pupils' masculinities within an inner-city, multicultural context. Data drawn from discussions with boys at one inner-city London school are used to illustrate the boys' complex constructions of 'culturally entangled' masculinities. Particular attention is given to the boys' constructions of 'bad boy' masculinities that are positioned in opposition to education and which we discuss in relation to themes of hegemony, patriarchy and racial/class inequalities.     

Languages of Female Colonial Authority: The educational network of the Ladies Committee of the British and Foreign School Society, 1813-1837

This article focuses on the way women in the network surrounding the British and Foreign School Society Ladies Committee used constitutional, familial, religious and educational languages to claim an authoritative role for themselves in the development of education for non-Western women and girls. It highlights some of the ambiguities of colonial power for British women educators, which were implicit in women's self-representation of themselves as authoritative and their depictions of the non-Western female 'other'. It argues that in the two-way relation of metropole and periphery, the notion of the universal 'rational' mother employed within the network constituted an early 'professionalisation' of motherhood in relation to non-Western women, which worked to confirm the authority, responsibility and the 'Britishness' of British women themselves.     

Telling and Retelling Our Stories on the Professional Knowledge Landscape

Drawing on a 3-year study focusing on the shaping influences of the professional knowledge landscape on the personal practical knowledge of experienced teachers, we first explore how stories are shaped as they are told and responded to in different places and, second, explore whether or not this sharing leads to imagining new possibilities for retelling and reliving stories. By sharing and exploring a story of a disagreement between a parent and a teacher, we focus on what we do when we tell stories in schools and what we do when we tell stories off the school landscape. In making meaning from this story, we show that both in the teacher's living of the story with the parent and in her numerous recountings of the story to others on the school landscape, she did not have opportunities to figure out new ways to relive the story. In our research group, she shared her story again. In this telling, we asked her to focus on who she, the mother, and the principal are in the story, and we inquire into what plotlines each were living. We ask questions about how they were positioned as characters in relation to one another. Re-searching the story in this way enabled us to understand the embodied nature of the teacher's knowing and how this knowledge shaped the events of the story as they were lived out, particularly how the teacher's living of a relational story countered the story of teacher and principal as positioned above parent. By drawing on Nelson's work on 'found' and 'chosen' communities, we imagine ways in which schools could become chosen communities where the story of school might be one of fostering the living out of multiple stories. We imagine the stories emerging from such communities might significantly shape the landscape of schools by opening up new possibilities for living in relation with others.     

Schooling,masculinity and class analysis: towards an aesthetic of subjectivities

The retreat from social class within the sociology of education has been accompanied by the intensification of socio-economic and cultural inequalities. This paper seeks to draw upon cultural analyses of social class by addressing a classificatory shift of white English working-class males, who have moved from an ascribed primary socio-economic status to an embodied aesthetic performance. We examine the reconfiguration of social class within state schools and historical and contemporary shifting images of white working-class males within the education literature. We suggest the need to engage with a multi-dimensional explanatory frame in order to understand how working-class young men now inhabit a new cultural condition in the post-colonial urban space of inner-city schools. This shift is best captured by exploring the simultaneous articulations of multiple categories of difference – including class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and generation – in relation to contemporary representations of social class.     

Constructions of locality and gender and their impact on the educational aspirations of working-class children

Over recent years the moral panic that has surrounded 'boys' underachievement' has tended to encourage crude and essentialist comparisons between allboys and allgirls and to eclipse the continuing and more profound effects on educational achievement exerted by social class and 'race'/ethnicity. While there are differences in educational achievement between working-class boys and girls, these differences are relatively minor when comparing the overall achievement levels of working-class children with those from higher, professional social class backgrounds. This article argues that a need exists therefore for researchers to fully contextualize the gender differences that exist in educational achievement within the overriding contexts provided by social class and 'race'/ethnicity. The article provides an example of how this can be done through a case study of 11-year-old children from a Catholic, working-class area in Belfast. The article shows how the children's general educational aspirations are significantly mediated by their experiences of the local area in which they live. However, the way in which the children come to experience and construct a sense of locality differs between the boys and girls and this, it is argued, helps to explain the more positive educational aspirations held by some of the girls compared with the boys. The article concludes by considering the relevance of locality for understanding its effects on educational aspirations among other working-class and/or minority ethnic communities.     

'Bettering Yourself'? Discourses of risk,cost and benefit in ethnically diverse,young working-class non-participants' constructions of higher education

'Widening participation' and increasing student diversity are currently key concerns across the higher education sector, and particular attention has been drawn to the persistent under-representation of working-class students within British universities. It is thought that widening participation in higher education (HE) can result in a number of social and economic benefits, at a national level, for under-represented social groups and for individual participants. Less is known about the viewpoints and understandings of working-class non-participants, such as whether 'official' perceptions regarding the value of HE are shared or contested. Focus group discussions were conducted with 109 non-participant Londoners, aged between 16 and 30 years, from a range of working-class backgrounds. Findings focus upon non-participants' constructions of risks, costs and benefits during application, participation and graduation. These perceptions of 'value' are discussed with relation to widening participation strategies amongst ethnically diverse 'working class' groups.     

Girls and Transition to Second-level Schooling in Ireland: 'Moving on' and 'moving out' Correspondence : Maeve O'Brien,Department of Human Development,St Patrick's College of Education,Drumcondra, Dublin, 9. E-mail: Obpm@eircom.net

This article explores how groups of Irish girls from different social class backgrounds negotiate the transition from first- to second-level schooling and seeks to understand how their classed and gendered identities are produced and reproduced at this time of change. We hope to argue that the school choice process, although highly significant, is only one step in a series of challenges that girls and their families must negotiate at this disjuncture in schooling. Having made a 'choice' and secured a place at second level, girls face a complex web of emotional, social and academic transitions that shape and are shaped by their social classed and gendered identities. While transition to second level is a highly significant move for all groups, it is especially challenging for groups of working-class girls who experience emotional pain and loss in leaving their familiar and familial primary schools. The experiences of female students suggest that they are included, excluded and differentiated on the basis of their adherence to and acceptance of dominant middle-class and gendered norms, particularly in convent, single-sex secondary schools. Girls' resistance to these controlling mechanisms within their schools leads to alienation and marginalisation even in this first year in the second-level system and signals a step towards moving out of the system while others move on.     

Winning and Losing: A case study of university tutor-student teacher interaction during a school-based practicum

Using a case study this paper analyses in some detail the ways in which both a university based subject tutor's and student teacher's implicit theories manifest themselves in the heat of the conversational moment. It illustrates how easy it is for tutor and student to 'get across each other' or to pick up messages that may or may not be intentionally communicated, and to adopt a stance that is in the last analysis self-preservative rather than developmental. The tutors' art, and their responsibility, is to present their enquiries and comments in such a way that the chances of this 'closing down' are minimised; and to be adept at repairing the relationship when it does go wrong. In defensive mode, both participants in the case study are convinced of their own rightness, take their judgements about each other as literal truth, and are quite unable to reflect on their contributions to the situation. The paper ends with some suggestions for avoiding such an impasse in similar situations.     

Reclassifying Upward Mobility: Femininity and the neo-liberal subject

While the concept of class does not sit easily with a very changed labour market in which traditional markers of working-class masculinity have been eroded and many people would not define themselves in class terms, the differences and inequalities associated with class have certainly far from disappeared. This article aims to explore how we might think about the ways that 'class' enters the production of subjectivities in the present. In particular, the article explores the way in which narratives of upward mobility are lived as success and failure, hope and despair, for some young women entering the labour market in Britain at the turn of the millennium. The multiplicity and fracturing of past and present, belonging, not belonging, the dreams, aspirations and defences are explored in some detail.