This essay discusses the scholarly ethos in schools of education, the social milieu within which educational research is generated, taught and/or ignored. Ethos is defined as the central character of an institution, i.e., the modal characteristics and norms of the teacher education subculture. What students learn about research is far more a…

This paper describes the incorporation of feature films into an introductory anthropology course for college undergraduates. The films are used to reinforce anthropological concepts and theories learned from the assigned readings and the lectures. Anthropology of law is used to illustrate this teaching strategy. Suggested feature films to express…

This paper discusses ways to think about the dynamics between oral productions and technologies for recording texts. It addresses the special problems of collecting, interpreting, and transcribing literature of North American Indians. Many of the original transcriptions of these works were done with an Indian translator for whom English was not…

The development of behaviorally-anchored rating scales (BARS) will permit researchers measuring the effectiveness of school administrators to utilize sound, ethnographic methods instead of relying on traditional, theory-based rating systems. In this document the author describes his own modified process for developing BARS and explains the…

A transactional investigation of reading considers comprehension to be more than the duplication of the author's message. Rather, it entails the readers' interpretation of the textual representation that he or she has constructed. Thus, researchers must ask how the reader duplicated the author's creative role. The goal, in other words, is to…

This is a bibliography on the Hmong of Laos who are part of a larger group of people commonly referred to in the literature as the Miao. The bibliography is divided into eight sections: (1) background material and volumes which include references to the Hmong; (2) items which specifically refer to Hmong culture and history; (3) ethnographic works…

Questions about students' competence in classrooms are addressed in three parts: the suitability of ethnography as a research strategy, a summary of research that examines the social organization of classroom events, and the consequences of this organization for students' performance in the classroom. The discussion of methodology leads to the…

An attempt is made to demonstrate that major theories of children's outdoor play reveal the social class biases of their originators. Most modern play theory is enclosed in the individualism of Western philosophy; its emphasis on the voluntary, the solitary, and the creative are seen as indications of its cultural relevance to people of higher…

Kenneth Burke's concepts of rhetoric, dramatism, terministic screens (perceptual filters), and identification are used in this paper to justify and direct intercultural communication research. Three intercultural methodologies--cultural variable analysis, componential analysis, and ethnomethodology--are examined in the paper using these concepts.…

The paper reports on the Vanguard Program, (Houston, Texas), an interdisciplinary, multilevel instructional program for gifted and creative children. The program, one component of Houston's Magnet school approach designed to comply with desegregation rulings, developed broadened criteria for identifying gifted minority students. Vanguard has…

A study was conducted to examine three fundamental aspects of the process of responding to a literary work of art: the nature of the reader's response to literature, the processes of response to literature, and the relationship of a reader's personal construct system to the way in which the reader responds to a literary work of art. The subjects…

An ethnographic study of children's response to literature at a range of developmental levels and in a variety of natural classroom contexts involved comprehensive classroom observations of 90 children aged five to eleven years representing a range of abilities. Data were collected during a four-month period on daily log sheets, then later…

The debate between proponents of ethnographic and quantitative methodology in classroom observation is reviewed, and the respective strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches are discussed. These methodologies are directly compared in a study that conducted simultaneous ethnographic and quantitative observations on nine classrooms. It is…

This paper concerns my own reflections on ethnographic research with Indigenous students studying at university. I began the research by using the methodology of interpretive ethnography to discover what constitutes success for Indigenous students studying at university. But after some unflattering critiques of my initial interpretation of the…

Reviews the status of educational anthropology. Argues that (1) anthropology's strength lies in understanding groups; (2) the complexity of the gap between a school and its community must be better understood; (3) anthropological research offers theoretical paradigms for understanding educational problems holistically; and (4) without significant…