About
79
Publications
24,491
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
10,793
Citations
Introduction
Emerita Professor of Sociology of Education and former Director of the Centre for Educational Research in Equalities, Policy and Pedagogy in the School of Education, University of Roehampton, London, UK. Gill Crozier is a sociologist of education and has researched and written extensively on parents, families and school relationships, race, class and gender.
Current institution
Publications
Publications (79)
This chapter sets out the nature of racism and the debates that surround it in the context of Education, together with a discussion of Whiteness. The theoretical ideas of Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Theory, employed in the discussion and interrogation of racism, are outlined and critiqued. The chapter also endorses the importance of...
Whilst some BAME children are doing extremely well academically, the picture of academic achievement is not uniform. Data across many years clearly show that there continues to be an achievement gap between children and young people of Black Caribbean, Pakistani and ‘Gypsy’, Roma and Traveller heritage and their peers. Additionally, evidence shows...
This chapter draws together and summarises the key arguments made in the book including the discussions of the nature and endurance of racism or racisms and Whiteness and their impact on BAME children and young people in the Education system. It exposes the complex and fluid nature of racisms and their manifold ways of impacting on lives and life c...
This chapter argues that policies on ‘race’ are intended to manage diversity rather than challenge racism. This is discussed with reference to historic and contemporary policies and extant research. In relation to these policies, migration/immigration, socio-economic factors, developments such as BREXIT and the rise of right-wing populism and the i...
Teacher expectations and teacher attitudes are particular concerns of this chapter. These are analysed in relation to a critical engagement with Whiteness. The denial or failure to recognise the dominance of Whiteness and its implications are discussed. It is shown that through teachers’ attitudes and pedagogy, differential treatment of students an...
As a White person my positionality and reflexive approach are essential elements of the book. In this chapter I engage in a reflexive examination of the role and il/legitimacy of the White researcher and critic of Whiteness—supremacy and privilege—and seek to be aware of the danger of the impact of White power and perspectives, especially in this f...
Since the development of the neoliberal Education system, parents have been expected to play a central role in the function and successful operationalisation of the education market through school choice processes and supporting schools in achieving and then maintaining their market position in the inspection ratings and rankings. I discuss the err...
This chapter introduces the book. It sets out the rationale for the significance and relevance of writing about racism and education at this time together with its aims. The chapter also presents the structure of the book and a brief summary of each chapter.
In this chapter I build upon the theoretical aspects and issues raised in Chap. 2 and the policy issues raised in Chap. 4. I discuss the curriculum as ideological and examine how the process of Othering and racialisation has developed and continues to develop through the curriculum and pedagogy. I also explore the problematic concepts of ‘differenc...
This chapter offers a systematic review of sociological research in England on the relationship between race/ethnicity and educational inequality between 1980 and 2017. Five major research traditions are identified: (1) political arithmetic; (2) racism and racial discrimination; (3) school effectiveness and inclusion; (4) culture and educational ou...
Through the case-study experiences of 24 White and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) working-class students from three very different universities, we aim to illuminate the often hidden struggle for recognition and respect for classed, ‘raced’ and gendered ways of being in the university. We discuss how the students perceive their identities...
This chapter analyzes the changes in the expectations of parents through government policies, schools, and the neoliberal project. It discusses how these changes have played out in contributing to the further construction or re‐construction of the “good” and the “bad” parent, already well‐rehearsed concepts in the education arena, and in particular...
The educational landscape in Britain in the early twenty-first century is constantly changing. It shifts according to changes of government, economic instability and global pressures. The key concerns around race and anti/racism of the 2000s have waned into the policy background. The focus now is once again on sameness – on assimilation, an emphasi...
Higher education is in a current state of flux and uncertainty, with profound changes being shaped largely by the imperatives of global neoliberalism. Changing Pedagogical Spaces in Higher Education forms a unique addition to the literature and includes significant practical pointers in developing pedagogical strategies, interventions and practices...
In spite of the relative success of the Widening Participation policy and strategies to increase the numbers of students from Black and Minority and White working-class backgrounds going to university, universities in Britain continue to be White and middle-class-dominated institutions. We found, in our two-year qualitative Higher Education Funding...
Struggles over the right to higher education have become increasingly entangled with a moral panic over a ‘crisis of masculinity’ and assumptions that higher education has become ‘feminized’. Such assumptions have contributed to the reproduction of dualistic thinking about gender and a ‘battle of the sexes’, reasserting problematic constructions of...
This chapter offers a systematic review of sociological research in England on the relationship between race/ethnicity and educational inequality between 1980 and 2010. Five major research traditions are identified: (1) political arithmetic; (2) racism and racial discrimination; (3) school effectiveness and inclusion; (4) culture and educational ou...
In England, neo-liberal education policies have led to certain types of parental behaviour which show that “parental involvement” goes beyond the simple task of checking their children’s homework or listening to them read. Today, parents have a key role in their capacity to establish a market in education. They now expect to be able to choose a sch...
The white middle-class parents who chose to send their children to urban comprehensives largely rejected engaging in the usual competitiveness for educational success. Nevertheless the parents in our study still found themselves wittingly or otherwise captured by that same discourse. Their children are high achievers and are regarded as a valuable...
There are substantial reports on working-class student non-completion and the challenges of engaging or not with the teaching in higher education. The students in our study were all successful at university but the different universities provided different types of experiences for their respective students. In this paper we focus on the pedagogic p...
This book examines experiences and implications of "against-the-grain" school choices, where white middle class families choose ordinary and "low performing" secondary schools for their children. It offers a unique view of identity formation, taking in matters like family history, locality and whiteness.
Mike Savage (2003 p. 536) argues that ‘the unacknowledged normality of the middle-class needs to be carefully unpicked and exposed.’ This book unpicks the unacknowledged normality of both whiteness and middle-classness. It does so through an analysis of white middle-class identities and privilege and the importance of personal and family histories...
The parents in our study reside in three urban locales which differ in a variety of complex ways. These include size of city, ethnic diversity and global links. London is the key global, cosmopolitan city which in turn offers a rich variety of resources and experiences to those in a position to exploit them, leading Butler with Robson (2003) to des...
Given the dominance of ideas like ‘choice’, ‘diversity’ and ‘the market’ in educational policy and implementation, it is perhaps tempting to see secondary school choice through the most apparently simplistic of economic perspectives, as if it was best understood through choices made by rational, calculating individuals in an increasingly informatio...
This chapter examines the democratic possibilities that emanate from middle-class identities which are grounded in sociality and openness to difference. In what ways might these identities work against, and disrupt, normative views of what it means to be ‘middle-class’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century? In the US context Kahlenberg (2001...
An appreciation of the practices and consequences of ‘against the grain’ secondary school choices needs to be set within some understanding of the wider policy framing of choice, and indeed the nature of ‘mainstream’ choosing, in relation to schooling. Accordingly, this chapter looks briefly at the emergence and recent development of choice in educ...
Contemporary theorizations of class, unlike many of their predecessors, are less concerned with class as a form of socio-economic classification, a position in the labour market or as a relationship to the means of production, and more concerned with the ways class as an identity is forged and experienced.
The main focus of this chapter is the frequently overlooked anxieties, conflicts, desires, defences, ambivalences and tensions within middle-class identities, what we have termed the psycho-social. Although they are rarely made explicit, either by Bourdieu himself or the many scholars drawing on his theory, there are strong links between the psycho...
What do we learn from these white middle-class parents? Clearly, there are partially realised goals, undercurrents of provisionality and surges of anxiety associated with against-the-grain choices of secondary school. But looking at the often pragmatic, sometimes conflictual aspirations of most of the parents in the sample, we also learn a great de...
Drawing on the growing literature on whiteness in the United States and more recently in the United Kingdom, this chapter interrogates whiteness as integral to white middle-class identity. The first part of the chapter describes the high value attributed to multicultural schooling by the parents, mapping out positive aspects of their self-intereste...
Middle-class parents, ambitious for their children, tend to have a sense of ‘futurity’ (Prout 2000) or what Butler with Robson (2003) term ‘horizon’, that is middle-class parents are confident in how they envisage their children’s future trajectories and how to ensure these (p. 141). Underpinning these objectives lies a strong, implicit desire to s...
This article considers how the nature and effects of neoliberal policy in education are illuminated by the outcomes of a study of white middle-class families choosing ordinary state secondary schools in England. Having described the main features of the study and some of its findings, consideration is given to specific ‘global’ dimensions — one in...
Drawing on case studies of 27 working‐class students across four UK higher education institutions, this article attempts to develop a multilayered, sociological understanding of student identities that draws together social and academic aspects. Working with a concept of student identity that combines the more specific notion of learner identity wi...
This article draws on case studies of nine working-class students at Southern, an elite university. 1 It attempts to understand the complexities of identities in flux through Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and field. Bourdieu (1990a) argues that when an individual encounters an unfamiliar field, habitus is transformed. He also writes of how the move...
This paper outlines and discusses work carried out with teachers of Roma children in the North East of England. The paper draws upon continuing professional development (CPD) work carried out in two primary schools as part of the Comenius IN‐SErvice Training for Roma Inclusion (INSETRom) project. The project spanned a number of school terms over an...
Charles Taylor underlined the inescapably social nature of identity when he wrote … we are only selves insofar as we move in a certain space of questions’ (1990: 34). In this chapter, we examine a particular ‘space of questions’, namely that of families making and living with choices about secondary schooling. Our research project Identity, Educati...
This article explores teacher expectations of second-generation UK South Asian students (of Bangladeshi and Pakistani heritage) and their views of the parents as lacking high aspirations for their children. A range of misguided perceptions and stereotypical views are discussed and challenged. The author argues that these views are largely based on...
With reference to an ESRC/TLRP project conducted across two academic years with working‐class students in higher education (HE), this paper explores the relationship between geographies of home and those of university at two UK HE institutions. It addresses how social relations inflected by class influence the experience of students as they adapt t...
This article draws on a two‐year study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) of South Asian parents and their children’s views on the school experience (Parents, Children and the School Experience: Asian Families’ Perspectives – Grant Reference: R000239671). The article focuses on an aspect of the young people’s school experienc...
In the context of widening participation policies, polarisation of types of university recruitment and a seemingly related high drop‐out rate amongst first generation, working class students, we focus on the provision offered by the universities to their students. We discuss how middle class and working class student experiences compare across four...
At a time when the public sector and state education (in the United Kingdom) is under threat from the encroaching marketisation policy and private finance initiatives, our research reveals white middle‐class parents who in spite of having the financial opportunity to turn their backs on the state system are choosing to assert their commitment to th...
Recent research on social class and whiteness points to disquieting and exclusive aspects of white middle class identities. This paper focuses on whether 'alternative' middle class identities might work against, and disrupt, normative views of what it means to be 'middle class' at the beginning of the 21 st Century. Drawing on data from those middl...
ABSTRACT
Drawing on data from interviews with 63 London-based families, this article argues that there are difficult and uncomfortable issues around whiteness in multi- ethnic contexts. Even those parents, such as the ones in our sample, who actively choose ethnically diverse comprehensive schools appear to remain trapped in white privilege despite...
In the authors' research with Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage parents, some teachers, head teachers and other educational professionals referred to the South Asian parents as ‘hard to reach’. Whilst it was clear from the parents that they were not very, and in some cases not at all, involved in their children's schools and knew little about the...
This paper looks beyond an individualised type of parental involvement and discusses the role of the extended family in relation to school. We draw on the different social capital theories to explain its implications and also to discuss its efficacy. Our focus is on the Bangladeshi community and the Pakistani community in two towns in the North Eas...
This paper focuses on the educational experiences of a group of African Caribbean and mixed ‘race’ young people from the perspectives of their parents. The discussion is set within a national context where children of African Caribbean origin are one of the lowest achieving minority ethnic groups in the UK and are disproportionately one of the high...
Researching black parents has thrown into sharper relief the issue of the usefulness of research and that of objectivity versus subjectivity. These debates are hardly new but in research regarding participatory democracy it would be incorrect and indeed impossible to ignore them. Drawing on research with black parents, mainly mothers, and their vie...
The blanket assumption that all parents are the same, with the same needs, and that their children can be treated in the same way continues to prevail in parental involvement policy and discourse. With respect to ethnic minority parents, specifically, such an approach obfuscates the importance of tackling the nature and consequences of structural r...
Whilst there is now clearly an expectation upon parents to become more involved in schools and to take a greater part in their children's education, there is still little attempt to address the constraints upon achieving such aims. These constraints have been shown to include social class factors, gender relations, ethnicity and power relationships...
The notion of parental involvement tends to be regarded as a unified concept and accepted unproblematically as desirable by all concerned. This article begins to question both of these assumptions. By considering the different viewpoints and experiences of the main protagonists: the teachers, the parents and the school students, the question of 'wh...
The Labour Government came into office committed to raising educational standards for ‘all’. With such a commitment it was hoped that their White Paper ‘Excellence in Schools’ and the new criteria for teacher training ‘Teaching: High Status, High Standards, Requirements for Courses of Initial Teacher Training’ (Circular 10/97), would amongst other...
This paper argues that ‘partnership’ is an essential part of the marketization of education. Whilst the market fragments and promotes individualism, ‘partnership’ promotes involvement, commitment and responsibility. It is, though, an involvement, commitment and responsibility based on individual vested interest; a necessary prerequisite to protect...
This paper focuses on parents’ involvement with their child's schooling and the possible influences upon this. At a time when parental involvement is regarded as being highly important to a child's school achievement and given the Government's promotion of the role of parents in education, the conditions should be particularly conducive to involvin...
This paper presents a case study of the experiences of a group of black parents in relation to their children's schools. The parents in the case study are said to have ‘educational knowledge and awareness’, which is defined as an understanding of the educational process, of the education system and parental rights and of pedagogical issues. Such ed...
