Divergent Approaches to Access: How Selective College Admissions Offices Recruit Lower-Income, First-Generation, and Working-Class Students

In recent years, selective colleges and universities have made diversifying their student bodies a top priority, yet the class diversity on these campuses has barely shifted. While most research on class disparities in college admissions focuses on student explanations, this study seeks to understand how campus admissions approaches to recruitment may also contribute to why so few lower-income, first-generation, and/or working-class students (LIFGWC students) attend selective colleges. To address this question, we conducted interviews with seven admissions officers from selective campuses with both relatively strong and weak records of LIFGWC students recruitment. Institutions with stronger records of recruiting LIFGWC students actively sought out new initiatives to make their college more accessible for LIFGWC students, and these actions were motivated by a shared focus on improving larger societal inequality. Although campuses with weaker records also expanded their recruitment strategies, their efforts were often piecemeal and motivated by competition for students and institutional rankings rather than a larger mission to improve diversity and equity. These findings suggest that institutional missions and philosophies are central to increasing access.

What Freirean Critical Pedagogy Says and Overlooks from a Durkheimian Perspective

“Critical pedagogy” has become a prevalent grammar furthering the necessity of a change in pedagogy from a banking‐style to problem‐posing approach, which it argues will facilitate students’ development of independent values and equip them to lead the liberation of society from authoritarianism into democracy. To achieve this, classrooms need to serve as cultural forums, through which either engaged pedagogy or negotiated authority empowers teachers and students to engage in free dialogues that problematize school textbooks as “cultural politics.” This empowerment demands that teachers perform as transformative intellectuals, dedicating themselves to the amelioration of inequity in educational results by reconstructing new texts, making them more accessible to working‐class students. While these theoretical lexicons envision a new perspective for the “educational function,” alleviation of the phenomenon of cultural reproduction can only occur if critical pedagogists pay more attention to academic curricula. Student achievements in such curricula, which respond to the demands of the social division of labor, have a profound influence on their potential social mobility.

Class and creativity in fashion education: A comparison of the pedagogies of making and design at British technical schools and art and design schools, 1870s–1950s

Discourses of creativity play a crucial role in shaping cultural perceptions of what constitutes creative labour, who performs it and where it is located. This article explores the historical role that businesses, policy-makers and education providers played as co-producers of discourses about creativity in British fashion and textile design education. Beginning with the emergence of new vocational courses for textile design and manufacture in the 1870s, it traces how the language used to describe conceptions of creativity evolved in relation to educational provision for textiles, dressmaking and, later, fashion over the first half of the twentieth century. During this period, creativity became associated with labour related to designing fashion and textile goods – such as illustration – rather than the labour of making them. This shift resulted from the establishment of fashion and textile design as respected courses within art and design schools, which backed the ideal of a professional designer. It was implemented at the expense of, and with the effect of undermining the creative labour of staff and students in vocational trade schools. As a result, this article challenges the idea that the development of fashion and textile design courses in art and design schools democratized the creative labour of design in the British fashion industry by opening opportunities for the middle-classes. Rather, it finds that discourses around creative labour worked to exclude the creativity of the predominantly working-class students at technical schools, with long-term implications for the relationship between socio-economic status and access to the creative industries.

ARTE E AUTOESTIMA: JOVENS TECENDO SENTIDOS SOCIOAFETIVOS E ROMPENDO SILENCIAMENTOS

This study aims to analyze and identify in what aspect the practices and experiences with art are influencing the levels of self-esteem of a group of young students from the low-income working low-income working class students who are in a situation of social vulnerability. We will reflect on the ways young people are being narrated in the media and, especially, discuss the socio-affective contributions contributions resulting from the artistic productions produced by these young people. We conducted a conceptual about self-esteem, understanding the main theoretical foundations that address this conception. such conception. This research is qualitative in nature, adopting the case study of a community outreach project as the locus community outreach project as the locus of research. For data collection, we made use of participant observation The level of self-esteem was identified. The level of self-esteem was identified in two phases, before the beginning of the artistic practices the beginning of the artistic practices promoted in workshops, in which the young people were involved (capturing their perceptions (capturing their perceptions about the relationship between their self-esteem and the way of being young that is imposed by society) and, later, identifying the level of self-esteem of the subjects during and after the period of artistic practices. The results indicate that the experience in the project is providing positive influences on the levels of self-esteem of the young people researched.

The New European Political Arithmetic of Inequalities in Education: A History of the Present

The article describes the emergence and development of positive epistemology and quantification tools in the dynamics of inequalities in education. It contributes to a history of the present at a time when datafication and experimentalism are reappearing in educational policies to justify the reduction of inequalities across international surveys and randomised controlled trials. This socio‐history of metrics also sheds light on transformations about relationships historically established between the welfare state and education that have shaped the representation of inequalities and social programs in education. The use of large‐scale surveys and controlled experiments in social and educational policies developed in the 1920s and 30s, even if their methods and techniques have become more sophisticated due to statistical progress. However, statistical reasoning is today no less persuasive in justifying the measurement of student skills and various forms of state intervention for “at‐risk” children and youth. With the rise of international organisations, notably the European Commission, demographic issues related to school population and the reduction of inequalities have shifted. It is less a question of selecting the most talented or gifted among working‐class students than of investing in human capital from early childhood to improve the education systems’ performance and competitiveness for the lifelong learning economy and European social investment strategy. This article attempts to illustrate this new arithmetic of inequalities in education at the European level.

Making Wine Without Grapes: The Case for Quality Teaching With Limited Resources

This article illustrates the significant role that creative, conscientious, dedicated, motivated, and committed teachers play in guiding, directing, and developing students' thinking, perspectives, and future lives. It highlights the importance of teacher agency in connecting learning to students' lives. It argues that good teachers can employ pedagogical practices that are not dependent on the availability of resources. It employs Pierre Bourdieu's theories of capital, field, and habitus to show how teachers can develop students' dispositions, consciousness, perceptions, perspectives, and lives. It also uses Nancy Fraser's theory of social justice to show how teachers can develop in working-class students, the essential knowledge, skills, and understandings that enable them to compete on a par with middle-class students. It uses life course theory to understand how the participants' schooling experiences, relationships, interconnectedness, and transitions influenced their thinking, doing, and lives. It employs a qualitative paradigm to explore five students' and one teacher's notions of how teaching and learning practices assisted the students to overcome the issue of inadequate resources. To locate the participants' perspectives and to analyse how their schooling experiences in the period 1968-1990 influenced their lives, the article uses the life history technique. The findings of the research stress that it is the inventiveness, competence, and attitude of the teacher that are the defining factors in the provision of quality education-not merely the availability of material resources.

Abraham Flexner’s Lasting Effects on Medical Education in the United States and Canada

In 1910, a document produced by an American educator changed the course of medical education ushering in a new philosophy based on the scientific method, active learning, and competency-based education. Abraham Flexner’s report, Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, was a groundbreaking study undertaken to improve the quality of medical education and ensure capable, competent physicians and surgeons in the United States and Canada. However, the Flexner Report was not without consequences, both intended and unintended. A large majority of schools examined by Flexner did not meet the standards by which he judged them. Nearly half of the schools in the report closed; most of those were programs dedicated to medical education for African Americans, women, and working-class students changing the demographics of the medical profession in ways that it has only recently begun to remedy.