Muddled Talk about Class
January 14, 2009
… in which they pretty much all get it wrong.
No class bias in the media? Huh?
Social Class Links 01/13/2009
January 13, 2009
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Easily Confused: “Context is so little to share, and so vital”
Poweful writing, powerful grappling with class.
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The 10% Fight Is Back :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education’s Source for News, Views and Jobs
College admissions goes to the top 10% of high school seniors in Texas, and relatively high graduation rates of minorities from competitive Texas universities.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Social Class Links 01/09/2009
January 9, 2009
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The Education Optimists: A Class Gap in the “Gap Year”
Class differences in the reaons for and consequences of taking time away from school between high school and college.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Teachers, Ruby Payne, and Moving the Conversation Forward
January 5, 2009
I wrote last week about Scott McLeod’s post on Dangerously Irrelevant about the large number of districts hiring Ruby Payne to speak to issues of childhood poverty in spite of how little evidence there is for most of her claims.
There was a lively discussion in the comments on Scott’s post, and Alice Mercer, one of the women chiming in there, has continued the conversation on the In Practice blog with the first of what she promises will be a series of posts on “Why not ‘cure’ poverty instead”.
The conversation threatens to degenerate into camps of “theorists/ practitioners”, as if those lines are completely clean.
But perhaps, in these ongoing discussions, there’s the chance to move beyond the unfortunate assumption in too much of this discussion that people who critique Payne for ignoring the deeper structural causes of poverty somehow expect teachers to solve problems of poverty themselves or to simply suspend further work in classrooms until all children come to school well fed, toting their photos from Disney World, and dreaming of Harvard.
So, perhaps some of the teachers, scholars, parents, staff people, and the idly curious who read Education and Class could head over there to join the conversation.
Nixon, Frost, Education and Class
January 2, 2009
*Mild spoiler alert*
In the Nixon Frost movie, there is a pivotal scene in which Nixon, in a lengthy monologue, speaks with equal measures of pride, trepidation, resentment, anxiety, and glee about being educated among the elite and about always wondering– at levels more complex and more deep than any questions that his elite classmates may ever had had about him — whether he’s finally shown them that he’s their equal.
I wish I had the clip to teach from.
Whether grounded in historical evidence or not, both the content and the circumstances of this five minutes of cinema say a great deal how deeply class is embodied and about how mobility may be experienced in profoundly complicated ways.
Did anyone else see it?
