Seeing classes: toward a broadened research agenda for critical qualitative researchers

Abstract

This paper proposes a research agenda that foregrounds social class in US public schooling. The author suggests that the relative invisibility of social class in academic discourse on schooling limits the value of research in at least three ways: (1) middle‐class academics’ propensity to speak on behalf of the poor and working class limits analysis of class and schooling; (2) the class and gender constraints on the work of teachers has been inadequately theorized, while simultaneously the work of teachers ha been invoked as proxy for deeper social and structural inequalities; and (3) researchers have declined to ‘study up’ power structures within which the work of schools is embedded, limiting our understanding of relationships between schooling and the economy. It is suggested that researchers’ work will make deeper contributions to the reform of schools to the extent that they acknowledge how norms of scholarship sustain their own middle‐class privilege.