There has been a significant decline in the amount of priests and brothers who live and work at Jesuit secondary schools in the United States. The presence of Jesuits in the schools shaped the Ignatian identity of the schools' cultures. The Jesuit order, the Jesuit Secondary Education Association (JSEA), and the high schools have recognized that…

I conducted a two-year case study of a cohort of two middle school mainstream teachers, one a mathematics and science teacher and the other a language arts teacher, and one elementary teacher involved in the LSciMAct ("Transforming Literacy, Math and Science Through Participatory Action Research") professional development project. The…

Nursing homes, assisted living facilities and home-care organizations, use web sites to describe their services to potential consumers. This virtual ethnographic study developed models representing how potential consumers may understand this information using data from web sites of 69 long-term-care providers. The content of long-term-care web…

For many teachers of middle school and high school, the greatest challenge they face in trying to help struggling readers improve their skills can be students' self-perception. When young people do not see themselves as members of the "literacy club," it is not just a simple matter of persuading them that becoming a fluent reader is…

Institutional ethnography seeks to uncover how things happen--how institutional discourse compels and shapes practice(s) and how norms of practice speak to, for, and over individuals. The Faculty and Staff Standpoints project is shaped by this methodology, as it explores writing center staff and faculty relationships to their work. (Contains 10…

Drawing upon the notion of hyperglobalism and critical perspectives on English as an international language, this study examines the ways in which English language teaching via volunteer tourism (i.e. English-language voluntourism) is represented and legitimated as an altruistic practice among organizational sponsors and in the talk of current and…

In this paper we look at the ways in which the experience of the natural environment was made available to the pupils and the types of activities provided for specific engagement with the local natural environment. It draws upon research undertaken for the Well-being and Outdoor Pedagogies project and previous PhD research. These projects explored…

This paper provides an analysis of international literature and focus group data arising from a three-year critical ethnographic study with 795 young people, educators and parents speaking about transitions through public education in Canada. It fills fissures in qualitative and process-based sociological work on youth transitions and redresses…

This monograph builds upon our cumulative efforts to investigate personal storytelling as a medium of socialization in two disparate cultural worlds. Drawing upon interdisciplinary fields of study that take a discourse-centered approach to socialization, we combined ethnography, longitudinal home observations, and microlevel analysis of everyday…

This article aims to report a single case study of how an Islamic boarding school ("pesantren") in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, prepared students for a multicultural Indonesia. Despite negative portrayal by the Western media about increasing Islamic radicalism in some "pesantren", many "pesantren" are in fact transforming…

This study used an ethnographic research design to explore the perceptions of 27 families with preschool children whose parents or guardians designated themselves as culturally diverse. Multiple data sources were collected over 9 months in the field, including transcripts of focus group meetings and individual parental interviews, preschool…

This paper analyses data from a longitudinal study which foregrounds the category of "place" to ask: How do new teachers learn to do their work, and how do they learn about the places and communities in which they begin teaching? Surveys and ethnographic interviews were carried out with 35 new teachers over a three-year period in a…

Especially in research on the "classed practice" of educational decision-making, it is striking how the Bourdieuian concepts of habitus and capital have dominated. With a tendency to focus on the middle-classes' ability to accumulate and deploy cultural capital, less attention has been given to the role of the educational institution and…

The essentialist view that new technological innovations (especially Social Media) disrupt higher education delivery ride on educators' risk averse attitudes toward full scale adoption of unproven technologies. However, this unsubstantiated logic forecloses possibilities for embracing the constructive dimensions of disruptions, and grasping the…

Based on fieldwork at a weekend Japanese language school in the USA in 2007-2009, this article illustrates the ways in which different regimes of government arise from an activity depending on meanings individuals invest in it. We examine how two students in the same classroom experienced two different regimes of government: one of a low-track…