Review: Equity in Education
In their new book Equity in Education Professor Lee Elliot Major and Emily Briant offer a practical guide for teachers looking to play their part in levelling the playing field of learning. When I used to teach about equality of opportunity in education I’d start things off by choosing the smallest student in the class […]
Welcome to the NepoVerse
If you’re having trouble explaining concepts like social and economic capital, Nepo Babies could help…
The Class Ceiling
Examining the concept of a class ceiling across three dimensions: what it is, how it’s measured and why it exists.
Using Analogies: How Inequalities Create Inequality
This Lesson Outline is designed (yes, really) as a kind of skeleton structure you can flesh-out with ideas and information as and how you see fit. In other words, while it provides a basic structure for a lesson it doesn’t necessarily tell you what to teach, which means it’s not something you can just take […]
Education: 4. Role and Function: 2. Marxism and Neo-Marxism
marxism For traditional Marxism the main role and function of education is cultural reproduction – a concept based on a different interpretation of secondary socialisation to that favoured by their Functionalist (Structural) counterparts. Althusser (1971), for example, argues the reproduction of capitalism involves each new generation being taught the knowledge and skills required in the […]
Education: 3. The Purpose of Schools
The final part of the “Structure and Organisation of Education” trilogy (Part 1: Structure and Organisation and Part 2: Schools, Marketisation and Parentocracy are, as is the way of trilogies, also available) ends with a !Bang! (if by “bang” you mean “a slightly loud noise”) by looking at various forms of school organisation (from the […]
Education, Achievement and Class
Another trawl through what I like to think is a carefully selected and curated trove of educational treasure – although some may see it more as a random collection of stuff I’ve picked-up from time to time “because it might be useful” and largely forgotten about – produces this rather large (and then some) PowerPoint […]
Types of Cultural Capital
If you need a short, relatively simple, student-friendly outline / overview of cultural capital this should fit the bill. Written by Nikki Cole, the article is useful because it breaks the concept down into three easy-to-understand component types: Embodied involves thinking about the cultural capital individuals acquire simply though living – their socialisation, education, experiences […]
The Rules of the Game
How “predicted grades” and the “personal statement” contribute to the relative failure of high-performing disadvantaged kids in the “game” of university entrance. While a-level sociology students do a lot of work on education and differential achievement, the narrative in relation to social class tends to focus on “middle class success”, “working class failure” and the […]
Visualising Social Mobility: A Mountain to Climb?
Broadly-speaking, the underlying idea here is to both make the study of social mobility slightly less dull and to replace a somewhat hackneyed, not-to-say, highly misleading visualisation of mobility (“a ladder”) with something a little more dynamic and visually thought-provoking (“climbing a mountain”). Although this post could be more accurately described as a “Lesson Suggestion” […]