This paper begins with a discussion of some of the key insights of recent sociocultural research that consider bilingual children and learning to read and culminates in a discussion of Syncretic Literacy Studies (SLS). It then presents data from an ethnographic study that focused on the learning experiences of a small group of Year Three…

Background: In the UK those paid to support adults with intellectual disabilities must manage two potentially conflicting duties that are set out in policy documents as being vital to their role: protecting service users (their duty of care) and recognising service users' autonomy. This study focuses specifically on the support of people with the…

How do persons with a stigmatized identity learn potential responses to discrimination and harassment? Drawing on three and a half years of ethnographic data, this paper demonstrates how members of a group of Muslim American youth are socialized in locally dominant stigma management strategies through stigma management rehearsals. Stigma…

The aim of the article is to outline key elements of the street children subculture in Makeevka, Ukraine, with an emphasis on the functions of a subculture and its manifestations of collectivity. The research was based on qualitative and quantitative data and was conducted from 2000 to 2009. Data analysis suggests that collectivity functions on…

Based on an ethnographic study in a rural middle school in Northwest China, the author explores how the transition of the rural countryside, specifically townization, has challenged the urban-rural dichotomy being reproduced in and by formal schooling. Rural students express criticism of the chaos, pollution, and corruption they have experienced…

Little work in the social sciences or in the field of education has fully explored the methodological issues related to the study of race and racism, yet qualitative researchers acknowledge that race plays (and should play) a role in the research process. Indeed, race frames and informs the context, practices and perspectives of everyday lived…

Providing basic education for all children by 2015 is one of the world's major educational objectives and teachers are crucial to achieving this. This article argues that not enough attention has been paid to the specific training needs of teachers in rural areas. Focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa it argues (i) that large-scale statistical data…

Critiques of child participation within aid programming suggest that it is superficial and insubstantive for the fulfilment of children's rights. By employing former child research participants as youth research assistants, the collaborative research design developed for my research project on the survival strategies of African orphans and…

The notion of raising the aspirations of socially disadvantaged students is a key policy strategy in for enhancing such students' participation in higher education. However, this strategy runs the risk of being simplistic and ineffective unless it is informed by research on the links between aspirations and such students' changing life experiences…

Our cultural lenses can blind us not only to other cultures but also to what we take for granted in our own culture. Thus, we are often unaware of how and why our cultural background can easily lead to a biased interpretation of others, and we are also often unaware of how even a high level of competence in a foreign language might fail to…

A professional family is an organizational form of institutional care which is used mainly in residential children's homes. By considering the psychological development of the child and by providing a supportive environment, the professional family provides systematic, purposeful and professional care and education for the child. It attempts to…

In this article, the authors capture the complexity of being a marginalized individual with institutional authority who encourages students to question all levels of power; simultaneously, they are acutely aware of the social implications of students challenging their authority, their intellectual aptitude, and their critical orientation. They…

This ethnographic case study was designed to investigate a successful professional development model, perceived effective professional learning and process for determining professional development for teachers. With eighty years of research on professional development, limited research was available on the process for determining professional…

In this study, the author explores the roles of family, culture, language as these shape both the articulated identities of Korean American elementary students, and their literacy practices at school. Using data from an academic year of ethnographic study at a public elementary school, located outside a northeastern metropolitan city, the author…

A key challenge of the learning sciences is moving research results into practice. Educators on the front lines perceive little value in the outputs of education research and demand more "usable knowledge". This work explores the potential instead of usable artifacts to translate knowledge into practice, adding scientists as stakeholders…