Classed Contexts: Why Place Matters When Considering Class and Educational Trajectories

This paper utilizes Figured World’s Theory (FWT) (Holland et al., 1998) to examine the reciprocal nature of how students’ social class status is negotiated within the classed cultures of their schools and communities. The data are drawn from a 1-year, ethnographic study with 6 West Virginian high school seniors from 2 economically different communities as they transitioned to college. In the project I examined how students’ social class backgrounds were implicated as they progressed through the middleclass school system. The work was uniquely situated in West Virginia where many middleclass people work in traditionally blue-collar professions. The work attends to classed practices and how these are constructed and negotiated at the personal level, as well as at group levels. In the analysis I attend to positionality and how that influences individual and group processes. Major findings of the study revealed differences between how social class was constructed at the two sites. Values within the rural community supported a broad range of students and countered discourses of competition during the postsecondary transition. In the suburban community, discourses of competition and achievement served to other students who did not excel and did not as strongly support students in the postsecondary transition. These differences mediated the ways that class influenced students’ lives and thus positioned them differently within the postsecondary transition