Researching class in the classroom: addressing the social class attainment gap in Initial Teacher Education

Abstract

IntroductionThis paper focuses on a small group of student teachers who volunteered to participate in a research project on the achievement of working class pupils. Alongside the exploration of the substantive issues within schools and classrooms, a key purpose of this initiative was to inform programme development in Initial Teacher Education (ITE). In this paper we focus on the student teachers themselves and on how their involvement in the project shaped their understandings of both social class and underachievement. These were used to reflect on how ITE might ). This paper reports on one aspect of a schoolbased research project that was designed to explore the ways in which working class underachievement is addressed in schools and in ITE. The initial aim of the research was to draw on the perspectives of student teachers, teachers and pupils to explore the relationship between social class and underachievement. Second, these research findings were to be used to make recommendations about how ITE providers could equip future student teachers to address the underachievement of working class pupils more effectively. In this paper we focus on the student teachers themselves and on how their involvement in the research project helped them to identify social class and underachievement as overlapping processes in which the teacher was of central importance.We begin this paper with a brief overview of the breadth and scope of the 'problem' of working class underachievement in education. We consider briefly the practical difficulties associated with 'measuring' social class in educational research and suggest that more productive recent theorisations that conceptualise social class as 'process' can provide valuable insights into how social class operates in educational contexts to reproduce the underachievement of many working class pupils. We then discuss the current failure of ITE to deliver effective training in relation to the significance of social class to education processes and outcomes, despite an increased recognition of the need to reduce the social class attainment gap (DfES, 2006a).We briefly outline aspects of the research methodology and methods, highlighting those aspects most pertinent to the discussion here of the student teachers. This is followed by a three-part discussion of the research findings. The first of these describes the student teachers' initial understandings of social class and how, despite their initial resistance and use of social class stereotypes, the research process led to a growing awareness of their preconceptions about the influence of the home on educational achievement. The second part demonstrates how the student teachers extended their understandings of underachievement in ways that stimulated them to challenge constructions of pupil underachievement. The final part focuses on how the student teachers used the opportunities as school-based researchers to reflect critically on professional practice within the classroom and then utilised these more informed understandings o...

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