I’ve long been interested in the complicated processes of crossing class barriers, especially when that crossing is navigated through success in school. With British sociologist Diane Reay, I believe that we learn a great deal about class when we learn more about the experiences of “the ones who got away”. One way to learn more […]
About Jane Van Galen
The Dreams of Poor and Working-Class Students
I was half-listening to the radio last week when I heard an interviewer ask a question that made me pause in my work to listen. “So”, the interviewer warmly asked, “You knew even as a small child that you wanted to be a concert cellist?” “Oh yes”, the woman answered. “Since I was eight.” I’ve […]
Moving the Bar
At first glance, I thought that it was just another article about disappointing test scores. I almost didn’t click through to read it, in part because I spend so much time in my teacher education courses trying to contextualize the rhetoric about “the achievement gap” and testing and my students’ role as teachers in closing […]
Class in the Classroom
There is a loud silence about social class in U.S. public schools. The silence was deafening on the first day of the course I recently taught — a course in which teachers look closely at how education in the United States is deeply entangled with social class. In this course, students look closely on their […]
