University educators are charged with preparing pre- and in-service teachers for today's school populations; however, university faculty may assume the role of fostering and evaluating their students' dispositions toward diversity without having first examined their dispositions toward their own students. In this critical autoethnographic…

In this article, I examine French language instruction in an elementary classroom serving primarily children of Afro-French immigrants in Paris. I show that a prevalent French language ideology privileges written over oral expression and associates full mastery of written French with rational thought and full inclusion in the French polity. This…

This article presents a case study that examined the ways in which the boundaries of what it meant to be a "reader" were constructed and what counted as reading in a 9th-grade English classroom. Through the examination of 2 literacy practices (i.e., teacher-led shared reading and the reading of school texts outside of school), I explore…

Concerns about social work students' writing are well documented, but the cost of specialized writing programs leaves budget-stressed programs confronting a problem they may feel they have few means to address. However, a valuable resource is already available: faculty expertise in social work writing. The challenge is helping faculty realize…

To explore the content of communication about sexuality between parents and children with autism spectrum disorders, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 parents of children ages 6-13. Content analysis and ethnographic summary were used to interpret the data. Findings suggest that parent's perceptions of a child's behaviors and…

Although middle school is a critical time in adolescents' development, little is known about how that development is affected by public single-sex classes even though recent federal policy decisions have led more schools to provide these offerings. This case study used ethnographic methods to explore ways teachers, students, and courses in one…

Over a 13-month period, the Schome Park Programme operated the first "closed" (i.e. protected) Teen Second Life project in Europe. The project organised diverse educational events that centred on use of a virtual world and an associated asynchronous forum and wiki. Students and staff together exploited the affordances of the environment…

Preschoolers may be novices in the area of writing but, as this article highlights, they are indeed writers. In a year-long ethnography of preschoolers during structured writing time the teacher/researcher explored how students adapted to a writing workshop format. Students participated in daily journal writing and sharing, and weekly conference…

This ethnographic research was conducted over a three-year period, and documents the efforts of a committed group of parents and community members who through community-based research sought to address the disproportionate underachievement of African American students within their city's public school system. Specifically, the parents and…

Purpose: Because of high drop-out rates among the students entering vocational education in Denmark retention of students has become pivotal to Danish educational policy. Thus vocational educational training (VET) colleges have been asked to work on implementing different kinds of retention initiatives and as a result, most colleges have…

Our aim in this article is to analyse the impact of the standardised test on classroom practices in grade 5 in a compulsory school in western Sweden. In our analysis, the use of the concept of the pedagogical device (Bernstein 1996) provides a framework for understanding how high-stakes, standardised testing regulates classroom discourse and…

The current crisis in American schools has been more than fifty years in the making. The present assumption that "accountability" equals "testing" and that "education" equals "measurable objectives" has occurred in a brief lifetime. How has this happened? Quantz attempts to answer this question in this fascinating study. It is not a history of the…

We get our fixed--or malleable--notions of sexuality and gender from a variety of sources: family expectations, a hypersexualizing media gaze, and through the dictates of those great monoliths, Faith and Obedience within a/the Church. However, gender is also being formed in the well-worn halls and the ordered environment of classrooms: schools are…

This qualitative ethnographic Linguistic Landscape (LL) study collected and analyzed ten individual "walking tour" interviews with residents of Memphis, Tennessee, exploring the personal thoughts and feelings about linguistic changes in the communities triggered by the LL. The researcher focused the participants' attention on…

This book presents an ethnographic study of the experiences of teenage boys in an Australian high school. It follows a group of thirteen to fifteen year olds over a period of more than two years, and seeks to understand why so many boys say they hate school yet enjoy being with one another in their daily confrontations with the formal school. The…