Conflict and contentment: Case study of the social mobility of working‐class students in Canada

This article offers a tentative exploration of how working‐class students' mobility is affected by the push to enter middle‐class careers and lifestyles, and the pull of their working‐class origins. Based on a nine‐year qualitative longitudinal study of working‐class students at a Canadian university, I will show that few study participants experienced mobility as an uncontested or linear trajectory. Two key storylines can be identified: (a) a story of adjustment, modification and contentment; and (b) a story of conflict, loss, and struggle. For most, educational mobility was tempered by revisions of occupational ambitions, by returns to their home communities and by lifestyle choices that do not fit simple narratives of status mobility. And yet, all expressed a growing sense of self‐confidence, appreciated their education as an experience of personal growth, and achieved on their own terms, in post‐graduate education and newly discovered careers.     

Goal Aspects of Teacher Education

Despite the central role of teachers in any education system, teacher education is frequently the weakest of the links in the process of educational reform.

In examining this problem, the author focuses on the question of the goal aspects of teacher education. Examples from the Federal Republic identify some of the constraints affecting goal achievement; these include legalistic, traditionalist and socio‐economic constraints. The more open the society, the more visible are these difficulties.

The article then examines in depth five separate goal aspects of teacher training: the economic (income), social (status), formal‐legal (position), professional (everyday activity) and socio‐educational (system); these factors interrelate one to the other.

Some desiderata for the development of teacher education are identified. These include a view of the teacher as reformer, recognition of the realities of teacher employment, and also a realisation that the ‘school of tomorrow’ poses a challenge to ‘the school of today’.