ABSTRACT
Inequality in Australian education is a repeated tale, made weary in the telling by those whose lives are burdened by necessities of living. More often than not discussions and reports on working class experiences of education are depersonalised and disconnected from the lives of those who flourish—or not—on the margins of a schooling system that has been made for a compliant and comfortable middle. There have been notable exceptions in exploring the ways that the ideals of mass schooling have failed to overcome working class realities and social inequalities. But for the most part within the sphere of education research those of the working-class are participants, they are data; they are not agentic actors with their own voices and inherent dignity.
By drawing on bibliographic vignettes and auto-ethnography this chapter explores the ways in which education, schooling and social class intersected the lives of three generations of working class women; the author, her mother, and her grandmother. This work identifies dominant narratives of working class experiences of school and interrogates whether those narratives need rewriting to better understand the complexities of working class girls in schools today.
