ABSTRACT
In 1989, London interviewed 15 working-class students who experienced the challenging process of ‘breaking away’ from their families and examined how they attempted to reconcile their home communities with their university settings. The study of those from first-in-family backgrounds is new. While research has documented the ways working-class men in Australia come to university later in life, young men completing their final year of compulsory schooling are the least likely to go on to attend university in Australia. The transition to university can be a time of substantial identity work, especially for students from working-class backgrounds. The experiences of the young men discussed in this book are significantly influenced by a dramatic restructuring of university life, with what Blackmore calls ‘lean-and-mean’ pedagogies of fewer contact hours with teaching staff and large class sizes. The study of masculinity in Australia has also highlighted that many men suffer from poor mental health and are ‘prone to protracted and serious episodes of loneliness’.
