Rising Up: Critical Education Scholars from Poor and Working-Class Backgrounds

Educational Foundations, Summer 2003 by Van Galen, Jane

This special issue of Educational Foundations is a collection of narratives of educational and social mobility written by critical education scholars who were first generation college students. The authors engaged schooling as poor and working class children yet now, largely through success in school against the odds, are highly educated middle-class education researchers. We write about childhood experiences at the margins of the economy; about ways in which schooling contributed to and hampered aspirations; about political, relational, and curricular facets of formal education that contributed to our understanding of the limits and possibilities before us; and finally, about how social class backgrounds shape our experience of this academic life we've chosen and our questions and commitments as teachers and scholars in the field of education.

We have compiled this volume because we have realized that while living the complexities of social class stratification, it has been only recently in our educational and personal histories that we have finally had access to interpretive lenses that allowed us to name and frame those experiences as manifestations of the dynamics of class. Throughout most of our schooling, from kindergarten through graduate school, class was rarely named and was rarely included within the rich and diverse critical intellectual traditions within which we had come to locate ourselves professionally and politically. As Linkon (1999, p. 2-3) has observed, "the principles of inclusion and recognition that have been so important in creating spaces for gender studies, black studies, queer studies, and ethnic studies [in educational settings] have generally not been extended to class."

Educational researchers have long documented the correlation between educational achievement and attainment in the U.S. and the economic status of the parents of school children (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1999; Nunez, CuccaroAlamin, & Carroll, 1998; Riley, 1999), yet these studies are most commonly framed as being about disadvantaged "Others", not about a system of stratification in which the winners are also implicated, regardless of their critical persuasions. As a number of scholars have noted (Brantlinger, 1993, 2003; Brown, 1998; Chafel, 1996; Faulkner, 1995; Grant & Sleeter, 1996; O'Dair, 1993; Van Galen, 2000; Weis, 1990; Zandy, 1990), critical scholars have paid relatively limited attention to the complexities of social class in shaping educational experiences apart from a long tradition of study of the schooling of poor urban children of color.

Thus, in part, we have compiled this volume in the hopes of generating richer and deeper consideration of the intersections of social class and schooling and to suggest ways in which class warrants much more of our academic and our political attention, because class is not about "them"; it is inevitably about each of us. The authors of these narratives, along with other academics from poor and working class backgrounds, occupy a conflicted borderland, where, as Diane Reay (1997) cogently observes, we may have first recognized the illusion of middle-class superiority just as we were experiencing a sense of legitimacy and importance within the middle-class for the first time. There is much to be learned from those straddling social and economic borders about the depths and breadth of those borders and about the social landscapes on either side.

Yet beyond the relative silence about class in the research agenda of critical scholars, we have noticed silence of another sort. Within critical academic traditions, it is very common for authors to locate themselves within other political and social categories: Researchers acknowledge that men might speak only cautiously on behalf of women, that straight people might speak only cautiously on behalf of gays and lesbians, and that whites do well to speak only cautiously of the lives of people of color. We seem curiously untroubled, however, that theoretical and empirical work on the educational "needs" of poor and working class children is done almost entirely by middle-class scholars, who often write as if they work outside of, rather than within a class system (Power, 2000).

In these times of identity politics, many of us have remained curiously silent about our own social class backgrounds in our writing. Academics are positioned squarely within the middle-class, but it is very rare for scholars speaking on issues of economic justice and educational equity to disclose whether they are speaking from the perspective of those who have always lived within relative material comfort or if they are among the "ones who got away", and have experienced "the complex social trajectory" (Reay, 1999) of upward social and economic mobility. We do not know if normative scholarship about class and education is being done primarily by scholars who have only known economic privilege, or if those writing on behalf of poor and working class students have themselves lived among those for whom they now advocate. We believe that these distinctions matter, and so, in this issue, we write about how our own backgrounds matter in the work that we now do.