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 Presentation focused on social class and differential educational achievement.

Although I’m not sure where I found it (which, the more-astute reader will probably note, suggests the idea of “careful curation” should be taken with a bucket of salt) and there’s no indication of who produced it, the Presentation was created around 2010 and runs to 50 slides on all things social class and education (with a strong emphasis, for reasons that will become clear, on theories and theorists).

As you can probably imagine, the Presentation of this size could do with a menu system and if you’ve got the time or inclination that’s easy enough to do (again, this probably tells you I have neither). Alternatively, with a quick slice’n’dice you could chop this down to a lot of smaller Presentations that just focus on the things you want to present / teach.

Although I haven’t changed the text, as such, I have made a few slight presentational changes (such as altering the slide format to 16:9 and tidying-up the text structure) and removed some slides. The author used 3 or 4 slides at the start of the Presentation to introduce a selection of statistics about social class and educational achievement as a way of setting-the-scene for the theoretical explanations covered in the Presentation (on slide 3, the author says “Now that we’ve looked at what’s happening to kids’ results in terms of their social class background, we need to focus on why these patterns persistently occur.”).

These statistics were drawn from the turn of the century and, as such, were seriously outdated. If you use the Presentation, therefore, it’s probably useful to pre-prep your students with a selection of statistical data about contemporary class achievement in education.

In terms of content, this falls into two distinct categories:

1. Overview and Summary slides on:

Material and Cultural deprivation

Types of gratification

Cultural capital

Language codes

2. A series of research slides covering the work of:

Douglas

Sugarman

Bernstein

Bourdieu

Reay

Ball, Bowe and Gerwitz

These are interesting and useful because they provide both an overview and summary of the research, plus a “methods in context” slide for each that identifies the methods used, their strengths and weaknesses.