Class and the College Classroom ― Essays on Teaching

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 has often been an afterthought. Several recent books have been about admissions, about who is in the college classroom, not about what goes on there; this is a good time for a book that takes a broader look at college teaching and social class.

Class and the College Classroom collects and reprints (from the journal Radical Teacher) twenty essays that can help college teachers and others think about class. An Introduction explores larger questions of how class is experienced and viewed in US society generally. Two challenges facing those who would teach seriously about issues of class come immediately to mind: first, the widespread belief that just about everyone in the United States is "middle class," a way of thinking that masks the power and importance of class; and, second, the reality that most students who pursue higher education are doing so with an eye to rising in social class and are reluctant to entertain, for example, the possibility that lines between classes are less permeable than they might wish or think. And then, of course, there is the genuine complexity of defining just what "class" is. This is a wide-ranging and insightful collection of essays that will be helpful to all educators who wish to engage with this issue of teaching in the college classroom.

Robert C. Rosen is Professor of English at William Paterson University, US. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Radical Teacher.