This paper qualitatively documents and analyses the attitudes and identities of female students from the urban disadvantaged social class towards English and Hindi in the city of New Delhi. These attitudes include not only instrumental views of English but also the impression that it creates a new personality for an individual. English is part of…

Drawing largely from the realm of performance theory, critical race theory, and Asian American studies, the author examines the ways in which performance, performativity, and the cooptation of aesthetic forms constitute and disrupt racial identity categories. In this article, the author focuses on the growing contemporary artistic practice of…

Within a theoretical framework drawn from sociologists of education Bourdieu and Bernstein, this paper will examine some of the findings of an ethnographic case study conducted with a secondary school music teacher and one class of her pupils in Wales. This teacher attracted 25% of Year 10 (14-year-old) pupils to study music as an optional subject…

This review sought to locate key themes in the literature on teaching and learning thinking and practices, by examining areas of influence and mapping ideas about the themes of practice, transfer and communities in higher education or related contexts. The findings indicate that issues of pedagogical stance, disjunction, learning spaces, agency,…

A detailed model syllabus is presented for a general introduction to literacy studies from linguistic and sociocultural perspectives. Topics included the relationship between oral and written language, acquisition of literacy, biliteracy, the relationship between literacy and socioeconomic/sociopolitical factors, and the impact of societal…

The purpose of this study was to compare and contrast significant features of the multiple layers of policy statements and objectives comprising the intended curriculum of a chemistry class. Levels of this curriculum include state, district, and local school science curriculum policies as well as those of curriculum developers and teacher. An…

John J. Gumperz' interactional analysis goes beyond traditional work in discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and ethnography and may, ultimately, lead to the development of new sociolinguistic theory regarding problematic interaction. The likelihood of the development of theory will be significantly impacted by Gumperz' ability to: (1)…

An ethnographic study of the "Literacy in the Community" project examined what ordinary people read and write in their everyday lives, how they make sense of literacy, and how it fits into the rest of their daily activities, focusing on literacy in the home. Subjects, 20 adults from Lancashire, England, between the ages of 20 and 30…

This essay is a history of the process of completing an ethnographic study in a child care setting. It presents reflections on entering the field site, keeping field notes, and analyzing data. An exploratory study of a group of preschool children led to the selection of qualitative methods and clarified the theoretical basis for research. In…

A study explored whether ethnographic research is appropriate and feasible for Hispanic consumer research. Subjects, 41 Hispanic advertising executives (out of an original group of 80) in advertising agencies listed in the Standard Directory of Advertising Agencies from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and San Antonio, answered a 23-item…

Recent developments in cognitive anthropology, in particular the development of ethnographic semantics, make ethnographic methods more systematic. The goal is to replace intuition with an operationally explicit methodology for discerning how people construe their world of experience from the way they talk about it. The first part of this paper…

This study draws a relationship between curriculum documents and classroom daily occurrences by describing how the curriculum document is enacted in the instructional context. The setting for the study centered on the daily life of two classrooms. Two inductee teachers were paired with mentor teachers as part of a collaborative project between a…

The purpose of this study was exploration of the role shift from participant to observer in educational research and evaluation. Examples and counter-examples of graduate students who were experiencing the role shift were explored. Generalizations were made in order to abstract the data, and draw the conclusion that ethnographic approaches…

This article serves to introduce the papers from a colloquium on ethnography and education (1978). It points up the major themes that emerged from the conference and traces their evolution in the research efforts during the 3 years between the colloquium and the present. Four themes in particular are discussed: (1) the discontinuity between school…

The problems addressed, and solutions devised, by educational ethnographers in selection of and sampling from phenomena for internal representativeness external comparison are examined. The process of sampling is designated as a specialized form of the more general process of focusing and choosing in research, which is called selection. Common…