Research in the Teaching of English Aug 2025

Mourning Working-Class Identities through Young Adult Literature in an English Education Classroom

Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides Westfield State University

Abstract

Research underscores how working-class individuals “disidentify” (Skeggs, 1997) from working-class identities because of the impact of degrading, victim-blaming views of poverty in dominant discourses and in teacher thinking (Gorski, 2016). Contrastingly, a subset of working-class students in this preservice, young adult literature (YAL) course for English language arts (ELA) teachers took up the social class literacy curriculum that featured a sociocultural understanding of social class foregrounding the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs of living as classed subjects under capitalism and embraced their working-class identities. Through the vocabulary of the social class literacy curriculum, analysis of social class in two working-class YA texts, and writing and talking about their classed lives, three working-class students utilized the curriculum to mourn working-class identities previously not discussed in public contexts. Findings from the study reinforce the significance of “mirrors” (Bishop, 1990, ix) in textual selections that feature working-class lives in dignified ways, perhaps as opportunities for working-class students to not only see themselves but also to identify their experiences as valid and to mourn losses of cherished identities.

Journal
Research in the Teaching of English
Published
2025-08-01
DOI
10.58680/rte202560124
CompPile
Open Access
Closed
Topics
Export
BibTeX RIS

Citation context

Cited by in this index (0)

No articles in this index cite this work.

References (50) · 1 in this index

  1. Appleman (2023)
    Critical encounters in secondary English: Teaching literary theory to adolescents
  2. Bettie (2014)
    Women without class: Girls, race, and identity
     ↗
  3. Bishop (1990)
    Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors
    Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom
  4. Blackburn (2021)
    Pedagogy and pleasure: Trans and gender transgressive students in an LGBTQ-themed literat…
    Pedagogy, Culture & Society  ↗
  5. Blackburn (2010)
    Handbook of research on children’s and young adult literature
Show all 50 →
  1. Bourdieu (1986)
    Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education
  2. Braden (2018)
    The benefits of being an octopus
  3. Brantlinger (2007)
    Late to class: Social class and schooling in the new economy
  4. DeLuca (2022)
    Using writing to explore social class
    English Journal  ↗
  5. Desmond (2023)
    Poverty, by America
  6. Eng (2000)
    Melancholia in the late twentieth century
    Signs  ↗
  7. Eng (2003)
    Loss: The politics of mourning
  8. Freud (1957)
    The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (19…
  9. Gorski (2012)
    Perceiving the problem of poverty and schooling: Deconstructing the class stereotypes tha…
    Equity & Excellence in Education  ↗
  10. Gorski (2016)
    Poverty and the ideological imperative: A call to unhook from deficit and grit ideology a…
    Journal of Education for Teaching  ↗
  11. Grinage (2019)
    Reopening racial wounds: Whiteness, melancholia, and affect in the English classroom
    English Education  ↗
  12. Hicks (2005)
    Class readings: Story and discourse among girls in working-poor America
    Anthropology & Education Quarterly  ↗
  13. (2000)
    Where we stand: Class matters
  14. (2009)
    The critical pedagogy reader
  15. Howard (2010)
    Elite visions: Privileged perceptions of self and others
    Teachers College Record  ↗
  16. Jones (2004)
    Living poverty and literacy learning: Sanctioning topics of students’ lives
    Language Arts  ↗
  17. Jones (2006a)
    Language with an attitude: White girls performing class
    Language Arts  ↗
  18. Jones (2006b)
    Lessons from Dorothy Allison: Teacher education, social class and critical literacy
    Changing English  ↗
  19. Jones (2008)
    Grass houses
    Journal of Language & Literacy Education
  20. Jones (2013)
    Living contradictions and working for change: Toward a theory of social class-sensitive p…
    Educational Researcher  ↗
  21. Laub (1992)
    Testimony: Crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history
  22. Lindquist (2004)
    Class Affects, Classroom Affectations: Working through the Paradoxes of Strateg…
    College English
  23. Muhammad (2023)
    Unearthing joy: A guide to culturally and historically responsive curriculum and instruction
  24. Ogle (2019)
    Free lunch
  25. Parton (2023)
    “Bet you can’t wait to get out”: Complicating narratives of leaving in rural young adult …
    Journal of Literacy Research  ↗
  26. Reay (2005)
    Beyond consciousness? The psychic landscape of social class
    Sociology  ↗
  27. Reay (2006)
    The zombie stalking English schools: Social class and educational inequality
    British Journal of Educational Studies  ↗
  28. Reay (2008)
    Psychosocial aspects of White middle-class identities: Desiring and defending against the…
    Sociology  ↗
  29. Rubin (2014)
    “I am working-class”: Subjective self-definition as a missing measure of social class and…
    Educational Researcher  ↗
  30. Saldaña (2021)
    The coding manual for qualitative researchers
  31. Sarigianides (2017)
    “Coerced loss and ambivalent preservation”: Racial melancholia in American born Chinese
    Educational Theory  ↗
  32. Sarigianides (2024)
    Affecting social class literacy: Classed emotions in preservice teachers’ lives, literatu…
    English Education  ↗
  33. Savage (2001)
    Ordinary, ambivalent and defensive: Class identities in the northwest of England
    Sociology  ↗
  34. Sciurba (2024)
    Reading and relevance reimagined: Celebrating the literacy lives of young men of color
  35. Skeggs (1997)
    Formations of class and gender
  36. Skerrett (2011)
    English teachers’ racial literacy knowledge and practice
    Race Ethnicity and Education  ↗
  37. Smarsh (2019)
    Heartland: A memoir of working hard and being broke in the richest country on Earth
  38. Stake (1995)
    The art of case study research
  39. Stillwaggon (2017)
    “A fantasy of untouchable fullness”: Melancholia and resistance to educational transformation
    Educational Theory  ↗
  40. Stubbs (2024)
    The 6 pillars of a brave space
  41. Thein (2012)
    Exploring the significance of social class identity performance in the English classroom:…
    English Education  ↗
  42. Thier (2020)
    A people’s guide to capitalism: An introduction to Marxist economics
  43. Toliver (2018)
    Imagining new hopescapes: Expanding Black girls’ windows and mirrors
    Research on Diversity in Youth Literature  ↗
  44. Vagle (2012)
    The precarious nature of social class-sensitivity in literacy: A social, autobiographic, …
    Curriculum Inquiry  ↗
  45. Watson (2018)
    Piecing me together
CrossRef global citation count: 2 View in citation network → Build reading path →

Related articles

  1. Written Communication Jul 2026
    Meaning Across Modes: Social Purpose and Intermodality in Children’s School Writing and Drawing ↗
    Sofia Hort; Oscar Björk
    discourse analysis writing pedagogy teacher development multimodality literacy studies
  2. Journal of Response to Writing Apr 2026
    Feedback Menus: Expanding Student Choice in Response to Writing ↗
    Testa, Andrew
    first-year composition writing pedagogy teacher development revision professional writing literacy studies editorial matter
  3. The Peer Review Sep 2025
    The Writing Center as a Rebel Space: Stories of Tutoring and Writing with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder ↗
    Ghada Seifeddine
    discourse analysis teacher development writing centers peer tutoring empirical research multimodality literacy studies race and writing disability studies editorial matter
  4. Written Communication Jul 2025
    Synthesizing Professional Knowledge and Racial Literacy Content Through Explicit Composing Instruction: A Discourse Synthesis Study ↗
    Jenifer Jasinski Schneider; James R. King; Gretchen Dodson
    discourse analysis writing pedagogy teacher development argument assessment literacy studies race and writing
  5. Research in the Teaching of English Feb 2025
    Differentiating Appreciation of Characterization in Print, Graphic Novel, and Movie Versions of Children’s Literature: Multimodal Analyses to Develop Students’ Interpretive Stance ↗
    Thu Ngo; Len Unsworth
    discourse analysis teacher development multimodality literacy studies