Despite its image as an all-American city, downtown Peoria, Illinois, home of Bradley University, is also a place of strip clubs and violent crime. For undergraduates, it's a risky environment in which to conduct field research. Edward Lamoureux, an associate professor in Bradley's multimedia program, saw a better place in the virtual world Second…

One of the prevalent concerns in educational leadership practices in urban schools in the United States relates to diversity issues, especially the disengagement among students of certain ethnic groups with regard to succeeding in school. In this ethnographic study, educators who once served in U.S. public schools were invited to reflect on this…

This study focused on the actions and relationships among educators, which promoted an environment of failure or success for African American students. The researchers examined the perspectives of teachers and administrators as related to pedagogy and practice in a Midwestern urban middle school. Specifically, the study employed ethnographic…

This study addressed the following research questions: (1) Will there be a statistically significant difference between the reading achievement scores of eleventh-grade students who received instruction implementing popular culture as an advance organizer for literature and the scores of the students who did not? (2) What are the perceptions of…

The qualitative ethnographic study involved exploring the educational, background, and professional experiences of senior-level African American administrators in higher education. The following research question guided the exploration of the experiences and perceptions of African American administrators in higher education from the Mid-Atlantic…

Establishing rapport between researcher and participants when conducting ethnography is essential to the successful outcome of the research. However, when participants are unwilling to engage, a different approach must be adopted. This article is an examination of the appropriation of a situated learning model during fieldwork with a group of…

This article describes the results of a six-month ethnographic case study of a French immigrant of Senegalese descent and how he recreates the culture of an American company's speech community. Data were collected through interviews, field notes, and shadowing the participant at his place of employment. The transcribed interviews and field notes…

This article focuses on the author's applied anthropological work with the Ingham County Health Department between 1998 and 2001. Government administrators were reflexively aware that nobody had ever stepped back to assess the area's overall environmental health and rank the issues according to some criteria, such as by the "most urgent…

This article explores how organizational cultures shape workplace learning for those learning to be educational leaders. The discussion is illustrated with the data from an ethnographic case study which explored the workplace learning of five school leaders. The findings suggest that workplace boundaries were constructed in response to perceptions…

A growing set of research projects in science education are working from the assumption that science literacy can be constituted as being centrally focused on issues of social justice for the youth and for communities involved in such work (Calabrese Barton, 2003). Despite well-established links among race, class, and exposure to environmental…

The Answers in Genesis Creation Museum opened in May of 2007. During the opening day, a loosely affiliated group of scientists joined in a Rally for Reason as they termed it to protest the museum's potential effect on science in the United States. This paper discusses ethnographic data collected before and during the rally. Scientist narratives…

In this article, I offer a review of the ethnographic research that reports the effects of current accountability policies on minority youth. Included in this article are qualitative investigations that have significant field-based components, most especially direct observations at the classroom level. In this article, I demonstrate both the power…

While attempting to investigate modes of musical transmission among the Yolnu People in Northeast Arnhem Land Australia, questions regarding the meaning of the word "research" led to the decisive abandonment of data collection. Specifically, the processes of observation, recording, and other typical Western means of generating data…

This article approaches reading as an ideologically grounded and institutionally organized activity. It examines children's clandestine practice of interactional reading in an educational context where individual silent involvement with text is the teachers' prescribed way of reading. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in second- and…

This paper reflexively explores an initiatory period of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in a UK secondary school by a first-time researcher. Concern is expressed over the tendency to memorialise early encounters, the impression being given that reflexive accounts should be "saved" for later in the academic career, when previously…