Class and the College Classroom

Essays on Teaching

We have long been encouraged to look to education, especially higher education, for the solution to social problems, particularly as a way out of poverty for the talented and the hard working. But in its appointed role as the path to upward mobility that makes inequality more acceptable, higher education is faltering these days. As funds for public institutions are cut and tuition costs soar everywhere; as for-profit education races into the breach; and as student debt grows wildly; the comfortable future once promised to those willing to study hard has begun to fade from sight.

So now is a good time to take a more serious look at the ways class structures higher education and the ways teachers can bring it into focus in the classroom. In recent decades, scholarly work and pedagogical practice in higher education have paid increasing attention to issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality.But among these four terms of analysis -- and clearly they are interrelated -- class is often an afterthought, and work that does examine class and higher education tends to focus only on admissions, on who is in the college classroom, not on what happens there.

Class and the College Classroom offers a broader look at the connections between college teaching and social class. It collects and reprints twenty essays originally published in Radical Teacher, a journal that has been a leader in the field of critical pedagogy since 1975. This wide-ranging and insightful volume addresses the interests, concerns, and pedagogical needs of teachers committed to social justice and provides them with new tools for thinking and teaching about class.