“I Need Help!” Social Class and Children’s Help-Seeking in Elementary School

2011 ◽  
Vol 76 (6) ◽  
pp. 862-882 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica McCrory Calarco
Keyword(s):  
Elementary School ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Help Seeking ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Unequal Opportunities ◽  
Do So

What role do children play in education and stratification? Are they merely passive recipients of unequal opportunities that schools and parents create for them? Or do they actively shape their own opportunities? Through a longitudinal, ethnographic study of one socioeconomically diverse, public elementary school, I show that children’s social-class backgrounds affect when and how they seek help in the classroom. Compared to their working-class peers, middle-class children request more help from teachers and do so using different strategies. Rather than wait for assistance, they call out or approach teachers directly, even interrupting to make requests. In doing so, middle-class children receive more help from teachers, spend less time waiting, and are better able to complete assignments. By demonstrating these skills and strategies, middle-class children create their own advantages and contribute to inequalities in the classroom. These findings have implications for theories of cultural capital, stratification, and social reproduction.

scholarly journals Class Diversity and Youth Volunteering in the United Kingdom

2015 ◽  
Vol 45 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 95S-113S ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Dean
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Young People ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Diverse Populations ◽  
Widening Access ◽  
The United Kingdom

This article utilizes Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of habitus and cultural capital to offer some explanation as to why there is a lack of class diversity in formal volunteering in the United Kingdom. Recent studies have shown that participation in volunteering is heavily dependent on social class revolving around a highly committed middle-class “civic core” of volunteers. This article draws on original qualitative research to argue that the delivery of recent youth volunteering policies has unintentionally reinforced participation within this group, rather than widening access to diverse populations including working-class young people. Drawing on interviews with volunteer recruiters, it is shown that the pressure to meet targets forces workers to recruit middle-class young people whose habitus allows them to fit instantly into volunteering projects. Furthermore, workers perceive working-class young people as recalcitrant to volunteering, thereby reinforcing any inhabited resistance, and impeding access to the benefits of volunteering.

Responses and Ramifications

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica McCrory Calarco
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
School Teachers ◽  
Working Class Students ◽  
Problem Solving Strategies ◽  
Unequal Opportunities ◽  
Do So

Chapter 6 reveals the critical role teachers play in translating class-based problem-solving strategies into unequal opportunities in school. Teachers almost always rewarded middle-class students’ strategies of influence. They did so by granting requests for assistance, accommodations, and attention and by creating conditions in which middle-class students (but not working-class students) felt comfortable making requests. That privileging of middle-class students, however, did not seem intentional. Teachers tried to support working-class students, but time and accountability pressures made it difficult for them to recognize students’ tacit struggles, forcing teachers to rely on students to voice their own needs. Teachers also relented in granting middle-class students’ requests, even when they seemed reluctant to do so. In those moments, teachers gave in because they wanted their students to feel supported and, more problematically, because it was often easier and less time-consuming to say “yes” and much riskier to say “no.”

Hidden Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Class

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sébastien Goudeau ◽  
Jean-Claude Croizet
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Academic Culture ◽  
Sixth Graders ◽  
School Contexts ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Regular Classrooms ◽  
Working Class Students

Three studies conducted among fifth and sixth graders examined how school contexts disrupt the achievement of working-class students by staging unfair comparison with their advantaged middle-class peers. In regular classrooms, differences in performance among students are usually showcased in a way that does not acknowledge the advantage (i.e., higher cultural capital) experienced by middle-class students, whose upbringing affords them more familiarity with the academic culture than their working-class peers have. Results of Study 1 revealed that rendering differences in performance visible in the classroom by having students raise their hands was enough to undermine the achievement of working-class students. In Studies 2 and 3, we manipulated students’ familiarity with an arbitrary standard as a proxy for social class. Our results suggest that classroom settings that make differences in performance visible undermine the achievement of the students who are less familiar with academic culture. In Study 3, we showed that being aware of the advantage in familiarity with a task restores the performance of the students who have less familiarity with the task.

Paradise Lost? Patterns and Precarity in Working-Class Academic Narratives

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-44
Author(s):  
Deborah M. Warnock
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Student Debt ◽  
Survivor Guilt ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Impostor Syndrome

Through an analysis of eight collections of autoethnographic essays written by working-class academics and published over the span of thirty-two years, I identify stable themes and emergent patterns in lived experiences. Some broad and stable themes include a sense of alienation, lack of cultural capital, encountering stereotypes and microaggressions, experiencing survivor guilt and the impostor syndrome, and struggling to pass in a middle-class culture that values ego and networking. Two new and troubling patterns are crippling amounts of student debt and the increased exploitation of adjunct labor. I emphasize the importance of considering social class background as a form of diversity in academia and urge continued research on the experiences of working-class academics.

scholarly journals Mastery of Cultural Capital, Social Class Segregation of High Schools and Winning at Sport

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pat Rubio Goldsmith ◽  
Richard D. Abel
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Capital Theory ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
Cultural Capital Theory ◽  
Resistance Theory ◽  
Using Data

According to cultural capital theory, middle-class families cultivate their children’s cultural capital to promote their social mobility through success in school. We advance the explanatory power of the theory by measuring cultural capital in terms of mastery rather than participation or attendance using data on more than 12 thousand schools about their success in interscholastic athletics. We find that predominantly middle-class schools win more contests and by larger margins than economically integrated and predominantly working-class schools. The margins of victory become larger as the social class differences between the opposing schools grows. We also find evidence consistent with resistance theory because predominantly working class schools also experience success, albeit relatively modest. Our findings have implications for cultural capital theory, resistance theory, and our methods for studying them. By measuring mastery of cultural capital, we identify large social class differences among participants in cultural capital and a close alignment between middle-class culture and school culture.

scholarly journals Re-Imagining Social Mobility: The Role of Relationality, Social Class and Place in Qualitative Constructions of Mobility

2021 ◽  
pp. 136078042098512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louise Folkes
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Educational Achievement ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Occupational Position ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Key Techniques ◽  
Class Community

Discussions around social mobility have increasingly gained traction in both political and academic circles in the last two decades. The current, established conceptualisation of social mobility reduces ‘success’ down to individual level of educational achievement, occupational position and income, focusing on the successful few who rise up and move out. For many in working-class communities, this discourse is undesirable or antithetical to everyday life. Drawing upon 13 interviews with 9 families collected as part of an ethnographic study, this article asks, ‘how were social (im)mobility narratives and notions of value constructed by residents of one working-class community?’ Its findings highlight how alternative narratives of social (im)mobility were constructed; emphasising the value of fixity, anchorage, and relationality. Three key techniques were used by participants when constructing social (im)mobility narratives: the born and bred narrative; distancing from education as a route to mobility; and the construction of a distinct working-class discourse of fulfilment. Participants highlighted the value of anchorage to place and kinship, where fulfilment results from finding ontological security. The findings demonstrate that residents of a working-class community constructed alternative social mobility narratives using a relational selfhood model that held local value. This article makes important contributions to the theorisation of social mobility in which it might be understood as a collective rather than individual endeavour, improving entire communities that seek ontological security instead of social class movement and dislocation.

Social Class and Code Elaboration in Oral Communication

1971 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 421-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Millicent E. Poole ◽  
T. W. Field
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Oral Communication ◽  
Class Groups ◽  
Parental Occupation ◽  
The Social ◽  
Linguistic Coding

The Bernstein thesis of elaborated and restricted coding orientation in oral communication was explored at an Australian tertiary institute. A working-class/middle-class dichotomy was established on the basis of parental occupation and education, and differences in overall coding orientation were found to be associated with social class. This study differed from others in the area in that the social class groups were contrasted in the totality of their coding orientation on the elaborated/restricted continuum, rather than on discrete indices of linguistic coding.

scholarly journals Shifting power dynamics in interviews with children: a minority ethnic, working-class researcher’s reflections

2021 ◽  
pp. 146879412110347
Author(s):  
Imane Kostet
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Capital ◽  
Ethics Committees ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Class Background ◽  
Minority Ethnic

This article aims to contribute to the literature on power dynamics and researchers’ positionality in qualitative research, by shedding light on the experiences of a minority ethnic researcher with a working-class background. Drawing on Bourdieusian concepts, it discusses how middle-class children confronted the researcher with language stigma and how they, while drawing boundaries vis-à-vis those who ‘lack’ cultural capital, (unintentionally) drew boundaries against the researcher herself. In turn, it illustrates how during interviews with working-class children, manners had to be adopted with which the researcher is no longer familiar. This article calls on ethics committees to more strongly consider how researchers might become ‘vulnerable’ themselves during fieldwork and to acknowledge intersectional experiences that potentially cause power dynamics to shift, even in research involving groups that are socially believed to have little power, such as children.

Social class, intensive parenting norms and parental values for children

2021 ◽  
pp. 001139212110485
Author(s):  
Trevor Tsz-lok Lee
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Academic Excellence ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
Competing Values ◽  
Parental Values ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
Value Choices ◽  
Intensive Parenting

As the global trend towards both middle- and working-class families raising their children intensively increases, social class differences in parenting beliefs and choices for their children have become more subtle. In light of the proliferation of intensive parenting norms, however, few studies have explored particular mechanisms underlying the subtle class differences linked to parental values. Drawing on in-depth interviews of 51 Hong Kong Chinese parents, this study investigated how parents contended with competing values in socialization, which in turn shaped their parenting choices. Three common values emerged from the interviews – academic excellence, hard work and happiness – showing that the middle and working classes managed their values for children in two different ways, termed here as ‘values coupling’ and ‘values juggling’, respectively. Middle-class parents were able to make their value choices cohesive through a ‘twist’ to reconcile between competing values. However, working-class parents were inclined to ‘drift’ their value choices in the face of unreconciled value tensions as well as structural constraints. Subtle differences in parental values were found to be tied to class position, and contributed to maintaining class inequality and social reproduction.

Reconceptualizing College Knowledge: Class, Race, and Black Students in a College-Counseling Field

2021 ◽  
pp. 003804072110460
Author(s):  
Melanie Jones Gast
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
College Access ◽  
Help Seeking ◽  
College Counseling ◽  
College Knowledge ◽  
High School Counseling ◽  
College Going ◽  
Knowledge Class

Past work and college–access programs often treat college knowledge as discrete pieces of information and focus on the amount of available college information. I use ethnographic and multiwave interview data to compare college–aspiring working- and middle–class black 9th and 11th graders across almost two years in high school along with their post–high school updates. Respondents were exposed to college–going messages but faced racial constraints and unclear expectations for college preparation and help seeking. Working-class respondents drew on hopeful uncertainty—a repertoire of hope for college admissions but uncertainty in the specifics—and they waited for assistance. Twelfth-grade working–class respondents experienced the effects of counseling problems and frustrations near application time. Middle-class and some working–class respondents used a repertoire of competitive groundwork to improve their competitiveness for four–year admissions, targeting their help seeking to navigate impending deadlines and late–stage counseling problems. My findings point to the timing and process of activating repertoires of college knowledge within a high school counseling field, suggesting the need to reconceptualize college knowledge in research on racial and class inequality in college access.

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