Social Class Supports

Social Class Supports
Author: Georgianna Martin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2023-07-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000979172

Historically, higher education was designed for a narrow pool of privileged students. Despite national, state and institutional policies developed over time to improve access, higher education has only lately begun to address how its unexamined assumptions, practices and climate create barriers for poor and working class populations and lead to significant disparities in degree completion across social classes.The data shows that higher education substantially fails to provide poor and working class students with the necessary support to achieve the social mobility and success comparable to the attainments of their middle and upper class peers. This book presents a comprehensive range of strategies that provide the fundamental supports that poor and working-class students need to succeed while at the same time dismantling the inequitable barriers that make college difficult to navigate.Drawing on the concept of the student-ready college, and on emerging research and practices that colleges and universities can use to explore campus-specific social class issues and identify barriers, this book provides examples of support programs and services across the field of higher education – at both two- and four-year, public and private institutions – that cover:·Access supports. Examples and recommendations for how institutions can assist students as they make decisions about applications and admission.·Basic needs supports. Covering housing and food security, necessary clothing, sense of belonging through co-curricular engagement, and mental health resources.·Academic and learning supports. Describes courses and academic programs to promote full engagement among poor and working class students.·Advising supports. Illustrates advising that acknowledges poor and working class students’ identities, and recommends continued training for both staff and faculty advisors.·Supports for specific populations at the intersection of social class with other identities, such as Students of Color, foster youth, LGBTQ, and doctoral students.·Gaining support through external partnerships with social services, business entities, and fundraising.This book is addressed to administrators, educators and student affairs personnel, urging them to make the institutional commitment to enhance the college experience for poor and working class students who not only represent a substantial proportion of college students today, but constitute a significant future demographic.

Social Class and Classism in the Helping Professions

Social Class and Classism in the Helping Professions
Author: William M. Liu
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2011
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1412972515

Social Class and Classism in the Helping Professions is a supplementary text that is intended for courses in multicultural counseling/prejudice, which is found in departments of counseling, psychology, social work, sociology and human services. The book addresses a topic that is highly relevant in working with minority clients, yet has not received adequate treatment in many core textbooks in this arena. This book provides a thorough overview of mental health and social class and how social class and classism affect mental health and seeking treatment. Social class and classism cut across all racial and ethnic minority groups and is thus an important factor that needs to be highly considered when working withádiverse clients. The book examines the differences among poverty, classism and inequality and how it affects development across the life span (from infancy through the elder years). Most importantly, the book offers concrete, practical recommendations for counselors, students, and trainees.

Straddling Class in the Academy

Straddling Class in the Academy
Author: Sonja Ardoin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2023-07-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1000971279

Why do we feel uncomfortable talking about class? Why is it taboo? Why do people often address class through coded terminology like trashy, classy, and snobby? How does discriminatory language, or how do conscious or unconscious derogatory attitudes, or the anticipation of such behaviors, impact those from poor and working class backgrounds when they straddle class? Through 26 narratives of individuals from poor and working class backgrounds – ranging from students, to multiple levels of administrators and faculty, both tenured and non-tenured – this book provides a vivid understanding of how people can experience and straddle class in the middle, upper, or even elitist class contexts of the academy.Through the powerful stories of individuals who hold many different identities--and naming a range of ways they identify in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, ability, and religion, among others--this book shows how social class identity and classism impact people's experience in higher education and why we should focus more attention on this dimension of identity. The book opens by setting the foundation by examining definitions of class, discussing its impact on identity, and summarizing the literature on class and what it can tell us about the complexities of class identity, its fluidity, sometimes performative nature, and the sense of dissonance it can provoke.This book brings social class identity to the forefront of our consciousness, conversations, and behaviors and compels those in the academy to recognize classism and reimagine higher education to welcome and support those from poor and working class backgrounds. Its concluding chapter proposes means for both increasing social class consciousness and social class inclusivity in the academy. It is a compelling read for everyone in the academy, not least for those from poor or working class backgrounds who will find validation and recognition and draw strength from its vivid stories.

Social Class

Social Class
Author: Annette Lareau
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2008-07-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1610447255

Class differences permeate the neighborhoods, classrooms, and workplaces where we lead our daily lives. But little is known about how class really works, and its importance is often downplayed or denied. In this important new volume, leading sociologists systematically examine how social class operates in the United States today. Social Class argues against the view that we are becoming a classless society. The authors show instead the decisive ways social class matters—from how long people live, to how they raise their children, to how they vote. The distinguished contributors to Social Class examine how class works in a variety of domains including politics, health, education, gender, and the family. Michael Hout shows that class membership remains an integral part of identity in the U.S.—in two large national surveys, over 97 percent of Americans, when prompted, identify themselves with a particular class. Dalton Conley identifies an intangible but crucial source of class difference that he calls the "opportunity horizon"—children form aspirations based on what they have seen is possible. The best predictor of earning a college degree isn't race, income, or even parental occupation—it is, rather, the level of education that one's parents achieved. Annette Lareau and Elliot Weininger find that parental involvement in the college application process, which significantly contributes to student success, is overwhelmingly a middle-class phenomenon. David Grusky and Kim Weeden introduce a new model for measuring inequality that allows researchers to assess not just the extent of inequality, but also whether it is taking on a more polarized, class-based form. John Goldthorpe and Michelle Jackson examine the academic careers of students in three social classes and find that poorly performing students from high-status families do much better in many instances than talented students from less-advantaged families. Erik Olin Wright critically assesses the emphasis on individual life chances in many studies of class and calls for a more structural conception of class. In an epilogue, journalists Ray Suarez, Janny Scott, and Roger Hodge reflect on the media's failure to report hardening class lines in the United States, even when images on the nightly news—such as those involving health, crime, or immigration—are profoundly shaped by issues of class. Until now, class scholarship has been highly specialized, with researchers working on only one part of a larger puzzle. Social Class gathers the most current research in one volume, and persuasively illustrates that class remains a powerful force in American society.

Social Class and Changing Families in an Unequal America

Social Class and Changing Families in an Unequal America
Author: Marcia Carlson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2011-06-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0804770891

This book offers an up-to-the-moment assessment of the condition of the American family in an era of growing inequality.

Class and Schools

Class and Schools
Author: Richard Rothstein
Publisher: Teachers College Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2004
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780807745564

Contemporary public policy assumes that the achievement gap between black and white students could be closed if only schools would do a better job. According to Richard Rothstein, "Closing the gaps between lower-class and middle-class children requires social and economic reform as well as school improvement. Unfortunately, the trend is to shift most of the burden to schools, as if they alone can eradicate poverty and inequality." In this book, Rothstein points the way toward social and economic reforms that would give all children a more equal chance to succeed in school. This book features: a summary of numerous studies linking school achievement to health care quality, nutrition, childrearing styles, housing stability, parental economic security, and more ; aA look at erroneous and misleading data that underlie commonplace claims that some schools "beat the demographic odds and therefore any school can close the achievement gap if only it adopted proper practices." ; and an analysis of how the over-emphasis of standardized tests in federal law obscures the true achievement gap and makes narrowing it more difficult.

Higher Education, Social Class and Social Mobility

Higher Education, Social Class and Social Mobility
Author: Ann-Marie Bathmaker
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2016-07-30
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1137534818

This book explores higher education, social class and social mobility from the point of view of those most intimately involved: the undergraduate students. It is based on a project which followed a cohort of young undergraduate students at Bristol's two universities in the UK through from their first year of study for the following three years, when most of them were about to enter the labour market or further study. The students were paired by university, by subject of study and by class background, so that the fortunes of middle-class and working-class students could be compared. Narrative data gathered over three years are located in the context of a hierarchical and stratified higher education system, in order to consider the potential of higher education as a vehicle of social mobility.

Facing Social Class

Facing Social Class
Author: Susan T. Fiske
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2012-03-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1610447816

Many Americans, holding fast to the American Dream and the promise of equal opportunity, claim that social class doesn't matter. Yet the ways we talk and dress, our interactions with authority figures, the degree of trust we place in strangers, our religious beliefs, our achievements, our senses of morality and of ourselves—all are marked by social class, a powerful factor affecting every domain of life. In Facing Social Class, social psychologists Susan Fiske and Hazel Rose Markus, and a team of sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, and legal scholars, examine the many ways we communicate our class position to others and how social class shapes our daily, face-to-face interactions—from casual exchanges to interactions at school, work, and home. Facing Social Class exposes the contradiction between the American ideal of equal opportunity and the harsh reality of growing inequality, and it shows how this tension is reflected in cultural ideas and values, institutional practices, everyday social interactions, and psychological tendencies. Contributor Joan Williams examines cultural differences between middle- and working-class people and shows how the cultural gap between social class groups can influence everything from voting practices and political beliefs to work habits, home life, and social behaviors. In a similar vein, Annette Lareau and Jessica McCrory Calarco analyze the cultural advantages or disadvantages exhibited by different classes in institutional settings, such as those between parents and teachers. They find that middle-class parents are better able to advocate effectively for their children in school than are working-class parents, who are less likely to challenge a teacher's authority. Michael Kraus, Michelle Rheinschmidt, and Paul Piff explore the subtle ways we signal class status in social situations. Conversational style and how close one person stands to another, for example, can influence the balance of power in a business interaction. Diana Sanchez and Julie Garcia even demonstrate that markers of low socioeconomic status such as incarceration or unemployment can influence whether individuals are categorized as white or black—a finding that underscores how race and class may work in tandem to shape advantage or disadvantage in social interactions. The United States has one of the highest levels of income inequality and one of the lowest levels of social mobility among industrialized nations, yet many Americans continue to buy into the myth that theirs is a classless society. Facing Social Class faces the reality of how social class operates in our daily lives, why it is so pervasive, and what can be done to alleviate its effects.

College Aspirations and Access in Working-Class Rural Communities

College Aspirations and Access in Working-Class Rural Communities
Author: Sonja Ardoin
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2017-12-20
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1498536875

College Aspirations and Access in Working Class Rural Communities: The Mixed Signals, Challenges, and New Language First-Generation Students Encounter explores how a working class, rural environment influences rural students’ opportunities to pursue higher education and engage in the college choice process. Based on a case study with accounts from rural high school students and counselors, this book examines how these communities perceive higher education and what challenges arise for both rural students and counselors. The book addresses how college knowledge and university jargon illustrate the gap between rural cultural capital and higher education cultural capital. Insights about approaches to reduce barriers created by college knowledge and university jargon are shared and strategies for offering rural students pathways to learn academic language and navigate higher education are presented for both secondary and higher education institutions.