Abstract
Educators’ first-person class stories can be a powerful resource for raising social class awareness and creating a safer space for student disclosure. They can demonstrate the subtle ways class stratification and class identity impact day-to-day experiences. Sharing class backgrounds brings the challenging topic of social class to life, but is a high-risk activity to ask of students. Educators can take the lead by sharing their own stories, but there are pitfalls—different pitfalls for educators from each end of the class spectrum. In this article, a mixed-class-background pair of authors gives examples of how they have each successfully connected with students by telling their own class stories, and also problems they have encountered while doing so. They offer advice on preparing and timing educators’ first-person class stories to create transformative experiences in the classroom.
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Marshall, A., Leondar-Wright, B. (2018). Untold Stories: Bringing Class into the Classroom. In: Haltinner, K., Hormel, L. (eds) Teaching Economic Inequality and Capitalism in Contemporary America. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71141-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71141-6_3
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