This article examines how the interdistrict transfer of White students from a majority-Latino school to a majority-White school increased school segregation in a small California town. The article argues that White parents' decisions to transfer their children, coupled with the sending school district's decision to allow the transfers, constituted…

While increasing attention from academics and the media focuses on the lives of Muslim communities in the west, little attention has so far been given to insiders' own perceptions of their social lives. This paper, borne out of broader research on their perceptions of crime, aims to analyse some internal discourses on moral education. The…

Background/Context: Theorists of civil society often view civil society as a site for democratic education. Civil society is supposed to assist democratic practice by offering people contexts in which they practice promoting the common good. This article, following Nina Eliasoph's intervention, takes this to be a claim requiring ethnographic…

In this paper, we draw on a cross-cultural ethnographic study conducted in two secondary schools in Helsinki (Finland), and two in London (UK). In our analysis of everyday life in schools, space is not merely a backdrop to activities that take place, it also shapes processes and activities, and spatial relations are simultaneously temporal. Here,…

Ethnography is used sparingly in audits, giving "richness" to phenomena which are preferably measured rather than interrogated. This paper considers the development of qualitative tools for equality audits in education settings, drawing upon an equal status review conducted in Ireland during 2005-2006 with dual interests in…

A powerful tool for creating culture while, at the same time, a cognitively rigorous exercise, Indigenous-language immersion could be a key for producing both language fluency and academic success in culture-based schools. Drawing on seven years of critical ethnographic research at Ojibwe schools in Minnesota and Wisconsin, this researcher…

This article describes an ethnographic study of the process of collecting, transcribing, translating, retelling, and adapting of a traditional Yup'ik story for a children's bilingual picture book, which is part of a culturally based math curriculum project, Math in a Cultural Context (MCC). The article opens with an overview of MCC and the role…

Civic responsibility as an ideal of higher education is rarely considered through a cultural and theoretical lens. Swidler's (1986, "American Sociological Review", 51: 273-286) framework linking ideology, culture and action was used in this ethnographic study of a research university (a) to understand dominant institutional beliefs about civic…

PBL is described as small-group collaborative learning; however, literature on how collaboration is enacted in PBL contexts is limited. A two-year ethnographic study examined the experiences and responses of Asian students to the obligations of PBL in a Western context. Participant-observation, videotape data, and video-stimulated recall…

Objective: To assess student retention, readiness, support and outcomes among students completing the Professional Practice Program in Nutrition (PPPN). Design: Qualitative evaluation using semistructured, in-depth interviews conducted with PPPN graduates. Course grades, grade point averages, and comprehensive exam results compared 10 PPPN…

This conceptual essay critiques current understandings of children's motivation for literacy learning, and argues for a reconceptualization of motivation that centers on the learner as agent in the social construction of meaning. The essay is illustrated with vignettes and examples drawn from two ethnographic studies conducted in whole-language…

This paper shows that constructing or writing a case study is a dialogic process, one that requires the researcher to define and redefine his or her research boundaries. The paper elaborates, first, on the process of constructing a case and, second, on the particular process of constructing cases of children learning written language. It…

Depiction of the problem of children living in the streets in third world countries emphasizes the extent to which they are victims (as statistics have shown them as numbers on the streets or killed by "death squads") or victimizers who affect an economy (e.g., by robbing tourists). Both descriptions suggest that one-dimensional portrait…

Those interested in critical, feminist, and anti-racist pedagogy are on a search for means to counter dominant ways of speaking about stigmatized groups. Some see promise in popular theater, which starts from the experience of those on the margins. This ethnographic study followed 12 teen mothers, a highly stereotyped group, as they wrote and…

A year-long naturalistic case study investigated teacher-initiated change efforts in language arts by examining the experiences and influences of a single sixth-grade teacher. The teacher was observed in multiple contexts (both in and out of her school), interacting with varying groups of individuals, not all of which were located within the…