This article identifies and discusses ethical dilemmas inherent when undertaking research with children or other vulnerable populations: power relations, risks and benefits, and informed consent and confidentiality (Maguire, 2005). Ethical dilemmas often arise when researchers attempt to merge the interests of their research and the interests of…

This article presents a micro-ethnographic study that took place during a summer research course for six undergraduate and four graduate students majoring in the disciplines of architecture, art education, geography, landscape architecture and an integrative arts program. The research sought to implement ethnographic, visual methods as a means to…

The authors describe teacher professional identity as lived experience in the context of educational change. Adopting activity theory and its genesis in cultural historical theory (Stetsenko & Arievitch, 2004) as a framework, the article discusses the way teachers see themselves as professionals and how they compose their identities in…

Are the academic and social experiences of Chinese Malaysian students as much an outcome of the selective acculturation strategy of their parents as the linguistic assimilation policy of the government? Driven by economic necessity on one hand and pressured by cultural preservation on the other, Chinese parents first send their sons and daughters…

Drawing on a year and a half of ethnographic research in three New York City small high schools, this study examines the role of the school in managing school choice and asks what social processes are associated with principals' disparate approaches. Although district policy did not allow principals to select students based on their performance,…

As a political and economic philosophy, neoliberalism has been used to reshape schools and universities, making them far more responsive to the pressures of the market. The principles associated with neoliberalism have also extended to programmes for urban economic development, particularly with respect to the large-scale gentrification of…

Ongoing transformations of the university--from changing working conditions to issues of affordability and access, increasing "accountability" measures and commodification of academic production--are increasingly referred to as university corporatisation and are unfolding within and concomitant to neoliberal globalisation. In this paper…

This article examines how adult learners were socialized by one another in the context of content materials in conjunction with the teacher's participation. Based on the premise that second language learning is experiential and emergent and using discourse analysis of students' asynchronous electronic postings and writing assignments together with…

This article investigates the development of agency in science among low-income urban youth aged 10 to 14 as they participated in a voluntary year-round program on green energy technologies conducted at a local community club in a midwestern city. Focusing on how youth engaged a summer unit on understanding and modeling the relationship between…

Over the last decade it is young women who have come to be widely understood as the bearers of educational qualifications. It is girls who are now seen to have "the world at their feet" and to be able to attain the glittering prizes of academic success associated with elite universities and top occupations. And it is upper-middle-class…

Reading multimodal (popularized) scientific texts is studied predominantly in terms of said-to-be-required technical decoding skills. In this article I suggest that there are other interesting approaches to studying the reading of multimodal (popularized) scientific texts, approaches that are grounded in social psychological concerns. These…

This ethnographic case study of a male Hmong refugee, Vue Lang, is situated against a backdrop that is characterized by a burgeoning immigrant population in the United States and a growing need to provide them with English language instruction. The Bourdieusian concepts of "capital", "habitus", and "field" (Bourdieu, 1991) are used to explicate…

This article examines the work of three urban youths as they designed and taught a social justice class at an urban continuation high school in California, USA. Drawing from a two-year ethnographic study of the project, it shows that youth participants constructed a set of imagined binaries to frame teachers, schoolwork and coercion "in…

This study describes the resources and strategies middle school teachers, urban fellows, and a district science staff developer coactivated to resist the marginalization of science in a high-poverty, low-performing urban school. Through critical narrative inquiry, I document factors that marginalized science in three teachers' classrooms. The…

Concern about poor school attendance and participation, particularly of Indigenous children, is a key issue in Australian education; however, strategies to address this issue have been piecemeal and have met with limited success. While much has been written about the issue of school attendance, little attention has been given to absenteeism in…