In contrast to research that focuses on the underperformance of young Black males in the British education system, the dominant notion of this volume is educational success. By aiming to understand how young, Black—notably African and Caribbean—male education plays out in different educational spaces, this book provides new insights around intersections between, and across, different structural forces and educational contexts. Examining the political, cultural, and structural factors that shape the educational journey of young Black men in the British education system, the book will cover topics such as: Race, gender, and class, and the attainment gap Contextualising Black men’s educational narratives The role of family and parenting in achieving success The role of community resource in achieving success Young British African and Caribbean Men Achieving Educational Success will be of interest to researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of multicultural education and gender and sexuality in education, as well as educators concerned with how Black male masculinities play out in educational discourses. Cecile Wright is Professor in the School of Sociology and Social Work, University of Nottingham, UK. Uvanney Maylor is Professor of Education in the Institute for Research in Education, at the University of Bedfordshire, UK. Thomas Pickup is a Principal Policy and Project Officer in local government in the UK.

Black Males in Secondary and Postsecondary Education contributes to the existing literature on this population with a focus on teaching, mentoring, advising, and counseling Black boys and men, from preschool to graduate/professional school and beyond into their careers.

This book presents a series of analyses of educational policies – largely in the UK, but some also in Europe – researched by a team of social scientists who share a commitment to social justice and equity in education. We explore what social justice means, in educational policy and practice, and how it impacts on our understanding of both ‘educational science’ and ‘the public good’. Using a social constructivist approach, the book argues that social justice requires a particular and critical analysis of the meaning of meritocracy, and of the way this term turns educational policies towards treating learning as a competition, in which many young people are constructed as ‘losers’. We discuss how many terms in education are essentialised and have specific, and different, meanings for particular social groups, and how this may create issues in both quantitative survey methods and in determining what is ‘the public good’. We discuss social justice across a range of intersecting social characteristics, including social class, ethnicity and gender, as they are applied across the educational policy spectrum, from early years to postgraduate education. We examine the ways that young people construct their identities, and the implications of this for understanding the ‘public good’ in educational practice. We consider the responsibilities of educational researchers to acknowledge these issues, and offer examples of researching with such a commitment. We conclude by considering how educational policy might contribute to a socially just, equitable and inclusive public good.

Sophisticated Racism: Understanding and Managing the Complexity of Everyday Racism adopts a fresh approach to the study of racism. Victoria Showunmi and Carol Tomlin identify the prevalence of sophisticated racism and explore how it manifests itself in society, particularly in the workplace. The authors narrate examples of everyday racism from the lived experiences of Black women. They take the reader on a compelling journey from the sources of racism through narratives of disquieting racist events to the destination of affirming approaches to preserving a sense of self and individual identity in the face of sophisticated racism. The authors explain how the interplay between Black women and White women originates in historical patterns of behavior which emerged on the plantations during enslavement. The term ‘White women syndrome’ has been coined to represent attempts to defend the limited space for female success by denigrating and excluding Black women. A unique feature of the book is that it reaches beyond the historical context to the provision of strategies for managing sophisticated and everyday racism in contemporary society.

In First-Generation Student Experiences in Higher Education: Counterstories, we meet eight students who attended university through an access program, and hear their stories of deciding to enter university, navigating and negotiating the institution, and bringing their university experiences with them into adult life. Their "counterstories"—drawn from application statements, weekly group meetings, diary entries, group conversations, interviews, and media reports—challenge the stereotypes commonly applied to marginalized students in higher education. Chapters offer insights into a range of salient themes and highlight the students’ strategies, challenges, successes, and trajectories, as well as their nuanced relationships with their networks, communities, families, and significant others. With this volume, James and Taylor present a valuable resource for educators, administrators, scholars, students and community agencies interested in extending understandings of first-generation university students.

Offering a vital, critical contribution to debates on gender, sexuality and schooling in South Africa, this book highlights how South African educational practices, discourses and structures normalize cisheteronormativity, along with how these are resisted within schools and through contemporary forms of activism. Not only does it add fresh insights to the existing research literature on gender, sexualities and schooling, it also underscores the valuable contributions of queer and transgender social movements, which have made influential legislative, teaching, learning and support contributions to education. Drawing on ethnographic research with queer and transgender activists, teachers, school managers, parents and school attending youth, the book provides everyday real-life quotes and observations offering a deeply critical contribution to the debates on gender and sexualities, education and activism. Using spatial and affect theories, it troubles the assumptions that frame this field of research to make a novel contribution to the national and international literature and research. The book provides research-based insights for thinking about and calls for informed action to challenging cisheteronormativity within and beyond schools.

Positing the washroom as an onto-epistemological site which exemplifies the way in which school spaces govern how gender is experienced, normalized, and understood by youth, this text illustrates how current school policies and practices around bathrooms fail to dismantle cisnormativity and recognize trans lives. Drawing on media-policy analysis, empirical study, and arts-based methodologies, it demonstrates how school spaces must be re-thought via a trans-centred epistemology, to be reflected in teacher education, policy, and curricula. Beginning with a review of the theoretical constellation of the heterotopia and critical trans-ing informing the analysis of data, it moves to offer a critical media and policy analysis of how trans and gender-diverse students are de-limited, erased, or harmed. This position is supported by analysis of empirical data from a school bathroom project, including student photographs of washrooms, and other visual expressions of gender-diverse and gender-complex individuals. These elements—the media-policy analysis, the empirical study, and the archival online material—ultimately combine to offer new justifications for critical trans-informed policies and practices in education that recognize and centre trans and gender-diverse knowledges, expressions, and experiences. Centring the specific and nuanced debates around trans phenomena via an innovative methodology, it makes a unique and extremely timely contribution to the debate on gender-inclusive bathrooms, as well as trans rights to self-identification. As such, it will appeal to scholars, postgraduates, educators, and faculty working in the area of gender and sexuality in education, with interests in trans phenomena.

This significant text employs an intersectional analysis and considers the role of queer frameworks to understand the experiences of Queer People of Color at historically white institutions of higher education in the U.S. By presenting data from student interviews and reflection journals, the book explores what it means to hold multiple minoritized identities, and asks how such intersections are navigated, contested, and experienced on college campuses. Exploring both micro- and macro-level mappings of marginalization and power, the text reveals issues including institutional erasure, pervasive whiteness in college and LGBTQ+ communities, and institutionalized racism and heterosexism, and offers in-depth insights into the material, psychological, emotional, and social impacts on queer students of color. Ultimately, the analysis highlights the necessity of employing intersectional frameworks for addressing interlocking systems of oppression and offers recommendations for the integration and support of queer students of color at historically white institutions (HWIs). This monograph will offer invaluable insights for scholars, researchers, and graduate students working in the fields of gender and sexuality, higher education, and issues of educational equity, who wish to realize the potential of intersectionality as an analytic framework for the study of identity and development of affirming educational environments.

Girls outperform boys in educational achievement, yet women in work are less well paid, are underrepresented in positions of power and carry a disproportionate burden of care and childcare. Gender, Education and Work analyses and interprets the latest data and research in the field to offer detailed historical and sociological explanations for this continuing inequity, exploring different dimensions of inequality and how they intersect. With discussion questions and selected further reading to support reflection on your own understanding and assumptions, it covers key topics: Historical approaches to the education of girls and women Key theories and debates Patterns of achievement and intersectionality Attainment gaps and socio-economic status Ethnicity and attainment gaps Gender in the classroom and gender identity in schools Patterns of employment and the nature of work The gender pay gap Women’s experience of work Gender, Education and Work provides the arguments together with the historical evidence and research data required by serious education studies and sociology students engaged in the analysis of this urgent and complex topic.