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Subscribe to Working-Class Perspectives - Working-Class Perspectives offers weekly commentaries on current issues related to working-class people and communities. Contributors discuss a variety of issues, from what class means to how it intersects with race and gender to how class is shaping American politics. We welcome relevant comments of 500 words or less.
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The State of the Working Class
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Tag Archives: working-class students
Shakespeare and Working-Class Students: The Value of Irrelevance
In these tough times for higher education, English departments almost routinely begin each year reviewing grim reports of decreasing numbers of majors. This sparks hand-wringing, soul-searching, and the inevitable conclusion that we must “market ourselves better” to show the “practical” … Continue reading
Posted in Class and Education, Contributors, Guest Bloggers, Issues
Tagged Shakespeare, working-class students
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Teaching Work and Learning from Working-Class Students
It was my freshman year at university, and we were just back from Easter break for the first tutorial of the summer term. The seminar leader, an older middle-class professor, went around the table asking each of us what we … Continue reading
Posted in Class and Education, Contributors, Issues, Tim Strangleman
Tagged teaching, working conditions, working-class students
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Just Not Posh Enough? Social Mobility and the “Class Ceiling”
This autumn marks twenty-five years since I went to college at Durham University in the North-East of England. Durham is the third oldest university in England, and one of its colleges is housed in the Norman castle on top of … Continue reading
What Works — and What Doesn’t — about Obama’s Free Community College Proposal
In this week’s State of the Union address, President Obama will once again argue that higher education is, as he put it in a preview video, “the key to success for our kids in the 21st century.” To increase access, … Continue reading
A Tale of Two Universities: Class Differences in Higher Ed
Two years ago, after 22 years of teaching mostly working-class students at Youngstown State University, I moved to Georgetown University, where most of my students come from very privileged backgrounds. Many people have asked about the differences between the two … Continue reading
Back-to-School Blues: Moving Kids from Playgrounds to Workstations
The end of summer: back to school, back to work. No more play — at least that’s what the usual end of vacation and the resumption of routine mean. Aside from the return of football, play seems pretty low on … Continue reading
Working-Class Renegades and Loyalists
I never had much time or sympathy for working-class renegades until I read Allison Hurst’s College and the Working Class this summer. Hurst, a sociologist at Furman University, classifies first-generation college students as renegades if they “have learned to value … Continue reading
The Challenge of MOOCs: Technology, Costs, and Class
College professors these days are in a position very much like journalists were twenty years ago. Because we believe in the social value of our work, and because we’re intellectually curious and creative, we’re intrigued by the possibilities of technology … Continue reading
Critical Literacy in Working-Class Schools
In her recent post Kathy Newman discusses the lengths to which schools go to improve students’ high-stakes test scores and reminds us that parents’ income is the best predictor of students’ performance on standardized tests. Nevertheless, when working-class public school … Continue reading
How the Working Class Gets Schooled
I just returned from a rousing three-day street corner teach-in called “Occupy the Department of Education,” held in Washington DC. I wanted to occupy the DOE because, for me, what started as a fairly straightforward involvement in a movement against … Continue reading
