Capital accumulation: working-class students learning how to learn in HE

Abstract

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 processes and explore how these enabled or constrained the working-class students to engage with the means to succeed. We employ Bernstein's concepts of classification and framing and the other elements of his pedagogic device to interrogate the learning frameworks that impact on the students' academic progress. The paper draws on qualitative case-study data from an extensive Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (RES-139-25-0208) funded study.

Keywords:

• social class
• Bernstein
• higher education
• teaching and learning