Session Information
05 SES 09 A, Poverty, Class and Schooling: Connecting Pedagogy with Learners’ Lives
Symposium
Contribution
The paper explores poverty from the perspective of the intergenerational transmission of culture. That is, it suggests that communities, and specifically a post-industrial community in south Wales, developed coping strategies and specifically forms of solidarity to manage the dangerous and precarious character of employment associated with mining and steel industries. The argument is framed by studies of poverty and educational achievement that have, once again, come to recognise that culture matters (e.g. Sellar and Gale, 2011, Smith, 2011; Walkerdine and Jimenez, 2012) and extend this work to consider the intergenerational transmission of cultural values from a psychosocial perspective. The study took place in a post-industrial ex-mining town in south Wales that had two generations of worklessness, and is now marked by poverty. Interviews undertaken with 40 young people aged 14-17 years, that used photographs depicting skills in four contexts (domestic, school, leisure and work) as stimulus material, were analysed to uncover what participants valued as ‘real work’. Finding indicate the clash between the historical, enduring, collective values of social solidarity, on the one hand and the individualistic culture of schooling that focus on test based learning and examination success, on the other. The importance of solidarity and the role of place were found to provide young people in ex-industrial communities with a sense of security. Policy makers have failed to recognise the importance of place, and the history of place as part of the coping strategies required to manage scarcity and lack. We ask how can schools embrace and value the forms of social solidarities build up in mining communities across decades, as valuable resources, while recognising the need to furthering political and social agendas to improve young people’s educational achievement, measured by public examinations and tests?
References
Sellar, S. & Gale, T. (2011b): Mobility, aspiration, voice: a new structure of feeling for student equity in higher education, Critical Studies in Education, 52:2, 115-134. Smith, L. (2011): Experiential ‘hot’ knowledge and its influence on low-SES students' capacities to aspire to higher education, Critical Studies in Education, 52:2, 165-177. Walkerdine, V. and Jimenez, J. (2012) Gender, work and community after de-industrialization: a psychosocial approach to affect, Basingstoke, PalgraveMacmillan.
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