It is suggested that the prevailing form of technology adoption and stabilization through the "handing-off" of technologies across multiple, discontinuous worlds relies on articulation work that is largely invisible. In this article, I discuss the possibilities of opening the black box, that is, finding out how the "invisible"…

Recent research demonstrates that videogames enhance literacy, attention, reaction time, and higher-level thinking. Several scholars have suggested that massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) such as "Everquest" and "Second Life" have educational potential, but we have little data about what happens when such tools are introduced in the…

This article describes how a group of black women read culture, class, and other social relations, analyzing the process and skill of reading linguistic and paralinguistic cues in allowing individuals to navigate across multiple discourses. I draw from one ethnographic study of talk in a Midwestern hair salon. Such research seeks to strengthen…

This paper aims to study the various forms of education to be found amongst the Kisongo Maasai, a pastoral population in Tanzania, both in their own right and in terms of what their encounter with one another implies. The late and rather limited development of schooling in that remote area and educational policies, as well as the pastoral way of…

Education restructuring is often based on the claim that markets have been shown to efficiently distribute goods to individuals who need and desire them, and that services should therefore be altered so that "the market" can also become the ultimate arbiter of what is included in them as well. However, restructuring has also been said to…

As part of an ongoing ethnographic study, this paper aims to consider the practice of poetry, "sher-o-shayari", as naturalistic peer learning among a group of heroin addicts in Yamuna Bazaar, New Delhi. By examining meanings given to "sher-o-shayari" and experiences of participating in the practice, this article makes the claim…

The article takes as its starting point my recent ethnography of the Welsh National Opera Company, and the forthcoming monograph "Everyday Arias: making opera work". In the course of that work I revisited the theme of performance: the ethnography of performance and the performance of ethnography. I discuss briefly the everyday work of…

This article presents the findings from a review of ethnographic approaches to child care research. Ethnographic research has enhanced researcher and practitioner understandings of the child care environment by providing entry into the child care center as an important site not only of development and education, but also of social reproduction and…

This article addresses the problem of small nonprobability samples in research in the education of the deaf and hard of hearing in the face of a current and increasing emphasis on "scientifically based research" as required by recent No Child Left Behind (NCLB) federal legislation. The authors examine the gains and losses in information…

Instructional communication researchers, by focusing attention on "how-to" matters and forays into conventional areas of study (i.e., immediacy, apprehension), neglect a nuanced treatment of student and teacher identity. Such a perspective is relatively disembodied and fails to engage actual classroom interactions. By engaging in autoethnographic…

This article examines ethnographic data that show Belgian adolescents of Moroccan descent stylizing Standard Dutch. Analysis addresses the importance of this variety in Belgian-Flemish society and in the school these boys attended, and shows how in interviews with Moroccan boys the hegemonic status of this variety is generally accepted. In…

This volume of transformed research utilizes an activist approach to examine the notion that nothing is apolitical. Research projects themselves are critically examined for power orientations, even as they are used to address curricular problems and educational or societal issues. Philosophical perspectives that have facilitated an understanding…

Through a single case study and from the interpretive paradigm, the author described a first-grade student?s self-efficacy beliefs about learning English in various English language learning tasks and across school-based and home-based contexts. The student came from China and had been living in a Chinese community in the United States for one…

This paper is an ethnographic record of an ongoing journey during which I have tried to understand the kinds of language ideologies that my students and I have constructed about the Korean language. My students are mainly Korean-American university students who have never successfully achieved native fluency in their heritage language, although…

Based on ethnographic, participatory research in two Salvadoran villages, this article analyzes how features of the sociocultural setting bred discord and mistrust among the participants in an adult literacy program and other community residents, thereby undermining the program's goal of equipping "campesinos" to work together to improve…