Background/purpose: Teacher recruitment and retention is a major issue for sustaining and growing an educational system. Nurturing and supporting teachers through all stages of their career in the form of mentoring is recognized as an important factor in retaining teachers in the profession. The current English Government's "golden…

Our article employs a feminist perspective to interpret ethnographic data on soft skills programmes (SSPs) for female staff in Higher Education (HE). We use the story of Arachne as a metaphor for how, under neoliberalism, women are instructed to create local 'nets of power,' only to find themselves tangled in a web of conflicting expectations. Our…

Engaging in ethnographic sibling research, my brother and I intended to contribute to the knowledge of a multilingual learner's literacy practices via Zoom. We discuss agency and negotiated interaction between the ethnographer and sibling-participant. We examine data from field notes, interviews, and participant artifacts using a social semiotic…

This article documents a collaborative inquiry between four parent-child dyads. Adopting an approach of duoethnography, the collaborative explored the question, "What happens when parents and children co-construct meaning regarding the challenges and opportunities in using digital technologies?" By positioning youth as co-researchers,…

I write as an ethnographer of childhoods and literacies to share a critical methodological lesson I have learned: simply observing children in educational settings will not yield rich understandings of the inequities arising from the interplay of societal constructs of race, class, and gender. Such understandings require ethnographic digs,…

This study explores how fieldwork can contribute to the development of ecological literacy and draws on actor-network theory and science studies which imply an understanding of agency as being distributed. The aim is to explore the consequences of the human-nonhuman encounters in fieldwork practice for the growth of ecological literacy. The…

Contextualized in the debate on the (mis)use of habitus in educational research, the present study addresses two research questions: (a) What are the different functions that habitus (i.e., the dispositions underpinning cultural capital that are accumulated through socialization and that guide individuals' daily practices) serves in students'…

March 2020 changed the lives of many as the SARS-CoV-2 virus which was responsible for what became known as the COVID-19 pandemic, caused communities to isolate indoors and shift the workforce to mostly online or virtual, including higher education. This critical ethnographic study looked at the experience of the higher education teacher through…

Studies of play often involve face-to-face research with children in settings such as homes, schools, and playgrounds. The COVID-19 pandemic affected children's play in many significant ways; yet, traditional in-person research methods were not possible due to restrictions such as lockdowns, school closures, and social distancing. "A National…

In this three-paper dissertation project, I explore how 'English' becomes a recognizable object within the context of adult ESOL education. Building on scholarship on named languages (Garcia, 2019; Makoni & Pennycook, 2006), the historical construction of languages (Bonfiglio, 2010; Irvine & Gal, 2000), and raciolinguistic ideologies…

This article examines international student mobility (ISM) as a process of "aspiration on the go" for African students in China--a burgeoning yet under-researched international student flow. Drawing on 15 months of fieldwork at a Chinese university, we present ethnographic case studies of African students that unveil their varied…

ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence language model introduced in November 2022, is potentially applicable in many contexts, including higher education. Although academics are already using it to draft papers or develop search queries for systematic reviews, its use as a tool aiding the learning process has not been examined. To address this…

This study explores the technical and vocational education and training (TVET) teachers' pedagogical practices and how such practices can help the teachers' use of relevant guiding pedagogical principles in practice in Nigerian TVET system to facilitate quality learning. Employing a three-tiered ethnographic case study approach, we learned how 24…

Efforts to desegregate schools have consistently been undermined by privileged parents finding ways to avoid undesirable schools. In some contexts, a more complex picture is emerging, where 'progressive' privileged parents choose 'diverse' schools but still reproduce segregation. We demonstrate how the desegregation aims of an Indian education…

This article analyzes a learning experience in Brazil that combined traditional lectures and experiential learning inspired by ethnographic research. It innovates by applying the experiential learning cycle to the theme of street-level bureaucracy (SLB) in a highly unequal context. The main objectives are to discuss the challenges of teaching SLB,…