Critique, Contradiction, and the Construction of Classed Selves: Teach for America Teacher?s Day-to-Day Negotiations of Social Class

Rachel Throop

While there is consensus that social class profoundly affects educational outcomes, scholars have not adequately explored the way class operates in the day-to-day happenings of the classroom, a space where the politics of class difference are often neutralized by a shared belief in schooling and social mobility. My dissertation takes this problem as its starting point. Through 12 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, I am exploring the way class difference is created, negotiated, elided and challenged in everyday classroom encounters. Methods utilized include participant observation, unstructured and semi-structured interviews, discourse analysis, and content analysis. My project produces needed ethnographic knowledge on social class and Teach for America. It also contributes to theoretical and methodological conversations on the study of social class in both the social sciences broadly, and in educational contexts.

About Rachel Throop

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