This issue of "Bank Street Occasional Papers" explores the value of time outside of school. Educators have given relatively little scholarly attention to young people's nonschool lives. Ignored or valorized, nonschool spaces show up in educational research only as a backdrop, implying that school learning is the yardstick by which to…

This paper discusses an ongoing research-based collaboration between an academic literacies researcher and a lecturer in the field of Social Work aimed at exploring the nature of everyday writing in social work. The paper outlines the key principles of the methodology adopted--a text-oriented ethnography--and discusses the extent to which this…

Major sociocultural contexts of learning such as families, communities and schools are imbued with power, and power favours some more than others. Given that schools are important sites of social and cultural reproduction, one of their major tasks is to teach learners to be literate. However, literacy is often viewed only as schooled literacy in…

My journey to write autoethnography report started with inclination to learn cultural and social phenomena in Finland. This was my realm of learning through experiential learning. The ontological philosophy was perceived through objectivistic and subjectivistic approaches. The lifelong experiential learning realm was a benchmark for me to perceive…

The purpose of this study was to explore the collaboration of co-teachers in a secondary inclusive setting through an autoethnographic approach. "In terms of labels, autoethnography is derived from 'ethnography,' a research method primarily concerned with studying the other" (Starr, 2010, p. 3). Additionally, this research approach embraces…

Although many states mandate college preparatory curricula for all high school students, there is no conclusive evidence regarding the benefits of this effort. Furthermore, we know little about how schools interpret and implement such policies. This extended ethnographic case study included a 4 year examination of 1 Michigan high school's response…

Using data drawn from autoethnographic work on social justice leadership and a qualitative study on the lives of antiracist teachers, the authors seek to reveal the need for coalition building between and among teachers and principals. These stories illustrate the common thread of isolation and intimidation felt by those working for social justice…

Psychologists, philosophers, and educators have traditionally interpreted the phenomenon of insight learning as the result of the sudden comprehension of abstract/conceptual ideas. The present article shows that such phenomenon may also follow and emerge from the kinetic movements of the human body; that is, we conceptualize insight learning as a…

This article describes the use of social work field placements in a private practice setting to prepare MSW students for clinical work. The authors used "autoethnography", which is personal narrative that explores the writer's experience of life, to describe interpersonal and contextual characteristics, as well as procedures implemented to conduct…

"Engagement" is the second of six top priorities in Australia's most recent Indigenous education strategy to "close the gap" in schooling outcomes. Drawing on findings from a three-year ethnographic analysis of school engagement issues in the north of Australia, this article situates engagement within the history of Indigenous…

Research traditions serve as a blueprint or guide for a variety of design decisions throughout qualitative inquiry. This article presents 6 qualitative research traditions: grounded theory, phenomenology, consensual qualitative research, ethnography, narratology, and participatory action research. For each tradition, the authors describe its…

This article explores language ideologies underlying two language programs implemented in one secondary school in Madrid (Spain). The Spanish for newcomers immersion program ("Aula de Enlace") is aimed at immigrant origin students who do not know or have a poor command of Spanish; and the Spanish-English bilingual program targets…

This introduction provides the framework for the special issue by describing the social inclusion agenda of neoliberal market democracies. While the social inclusion agenda has been widely adopted, social inclusion policies are often blind to the ways in which language proficiency and language ideologies mediate social inclusion in linguistically…

In this article, the author argues that storytelling is centrally important to education research. The proliferation of narrative methodologies, albeit significant and innovative in the evolution of qualitative studies in education, has, nonetheless, not been accompanied by a theoretical body that has captured the complexities--ethical and…

Within inclusive education research, the call to foster participation stems from a generalized vision for promoting democratic practices within classrooms, prompting the concern for eliciting student "voices." In this ethnographic study, I explore the utility of "voice" as a workable construct in securing participation within inclusive classrooms.…