Abstract
This paper explores the possibilities of working with White, working-class teacher education students to explore the “complex social trajectory” (Reay in Women’s Stud Int Forum 20(2):225–233, 1997a, p. 19) of class border crossing as they progress through college. Through analysis of a course that I have developed, Education and the American Dream, I explore political and pedagogical issues in teaching the thousands of teacher education students who are the first in their families to attend college about social class. Arguing that faculty in teacher education too often disregard the significance of deep class differences between themselves and many of their students, I propose that teacher education include coursework in which upwardly-mobile students (a) draw upon their distinctive perspectives as class border-crossers to elucidate their “complex social positioning as a complicated amalgam of current privilege interlaced with historic disadvantage” (Reay in Women’s Stud Int Forum 20(2):225–233, 1997a, p. 25) and (b) complicate what Adair and Dahlberg (Pedagogy 1:173–175, 2001, p. 174) have termed a cultural “impulse to frame class mobility as a narrative of moral progress”. Such coursework, I suggest, has implications for the development of teacher leaders in stratified schools. The paper draws upon the literatures on social class and educational attainment, on the construction of classed identities in spite of silence about class in public and academic discourse, and on pedagogies for teaching across class differences.
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Notes
For example, a popular book in foundations courses in teacher education is Oakes and Liptons’ Teaching to Change the World. In this book, class is consistently conflated with race.
While it is common to lament that the teaching force in the United States is mostly White and middle class and thus very different from the population in many public schools, anecdotal shorthand cannot substitute for class analysis.
Two exceptions in the literature are Brantlinger’s (2003) study of differences in the perceptions of teachers from middle-class and working-class backgrounds to equity-based reforms in one district and Sloan’s (2006) hypothesis that the professional identity of one teacher as a hard-working but essentially uninspired teacher might be attributable to her working-class background.
Peter Sacks (2007) has demonstrated that with intensified competition for admission to private and flagship universities, low-income and first-generation students are increasingly segregated at regional public universities where, coincidentally, most teachers are educated. The effects on teacher education of campuses increasingly segregated by income and class would be a worthy topic of study.
Approximately a quarter of the students who take the course each year are from middle-class backgrounds, and they learn a great deal about class privilege and about the invisible struggles of many of the children in their own classrooms. The remainder of this paper, however, will focus particularly on upwardly mobile students from poor and working-class backgrounds.
We also observe that while academic authors—particularly those writing within critical traditions—almost always disclose their race, gender, and sexuality, it is very rare for authors to disclose their own class backgrounds. I challenge students to identify the class background of any of the authors that they’ve read while in college. Few can.
In addition to the whole-class forums, students also discuss a variety of books and films in small e-groups. Among the books I’ve assigned in recent years are Mike Rose’s (1989) Lives on the Boundary, Ellen Brantlinger’s (2003) Dividing Classes, Annette Lareau’s (2003) Unequal Childhoods, Meredith Maran’s (2000) Class Dismissed, Lyn Mikel Brown’s (1998) Raising Their Voices. Films that I’ve chosen for their representations of dilemmas of education, mobility, and identity have included 42 Up, Metropolitan, Real Women Have Curves, Rushmore, Educating Rita, Good Will Hunting, and Breaking Away.
In the end, Julie was awarded two scholarships and finished the teacher education program. In her essays for the scholarship applications, she reframed conventional ways in which a “commitment to teaching” might be demonstrated to speak of her own schooling and the efforts that she was now making to stay in school.
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Van Galen, J.A. Class, Identity, and Teacher Education. Urban Rev 42, 253–270 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-009-0136-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-009-0136-z