This ethnographic study explores the contradictory literacy practices of 10 high school students of Mexican background from the rural Midwest. The author uses the term "Mexican background" to encompass both settled Mexican Americans and recent-immigrant Mexicanos. Literacy is investigated through English and Spanish in a sociocultural…

In this ethnographic study, I investigate the ways in which students of Mexican descent who are designated as limited English proficient are "acquired" by particular social positions in a northern California high school. Focusing on two interrelated and reflexive phenomena in the high school--standardized testing for assessing English…

In this essay, the author theorizes and illustrates how engaging students in reflective talk can help them change their minds. The essay specifically addresses how patterns for reflective talk can support both the sustained, nonevaluative exploration of difficult material and the self-scrutiny necessary for acknowledging the implication in…

This article presents elements of an ethnographic study of gendered identities among boys and girls in the early years of primary schooling. Foregrounding group work in mathematics as a key arena for the production of young masculine identities, this article goes some way to addressing what is absent from sociological portrayals of young children,…

This paper examines the implications of "social difference" for schooling in African contexts. It highlights theoretical and philosophical engagements with "difference" that could help explore and search for viable educational options in Africa. The paper engages voices of university students interviewed in a longitudinal…

John Ogbu's work on "minority education" has spawned a number of interesting and useful debates in the US. Having been both an early admirer and critic of Ogbu's work, I reviewed his work in an "Anthropology and Education Quarterly" article. The present article reflects upon Ogbu's work and upon my scholarly engagement with that corpus over the…

This narrative recounts the disruption of my graduate research project by persistent, self-reflexive questioning of the process of doing independent research for the first time, and draws its texts from the resulting master's thesis. In this story, the ethnographic method I chose initially to study the experience of women returning to school to…

This paper examines the spread of English as a medium of higher education in the Arab world, addressing questions about the relationship between higher education, language shift and cultural (re)production through such post-colonial educational bilingualism. Drawing on exploratory ethnographic research, it documents how both Arabic and English…

An ethnographic case study of issues related to research performance and promotion of research was conducted within the Creative and Performing Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS) disciplines of a regional university. The purpose of the study was to explore a variety of ways in which the research work of those disciplines could be made…

This ethnomethodological case study analysis explored and described how The Student Learning Imperative (American College Personnel Association, 1994), Principles of Good Practice for Student Affairs (American College Personnel Association & National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, 1996), and Good Practice in Student Affairs…

Tamang and Brahman Nepali children have culturally specific emotion scripts that may reflect different emotion socialization experiences. To study emotion socialization, the child-adult interactions of 119 children (3-5 years old) were observed and 14 village elders were interviewed about child competence in Tamang and Brahman villages. Tamang…

In this autoethnographic, institutional narrative, we describe the evolution of a Studio program at an open-access, regional campus of a state university. The Studio, first conceptualized by Grego and Thompson, is a one-credit writing workshop taken by students concurrently enrolled in a composition course. Developing this program necessitated…

Increasing numbers of music education researchers have begun to use qualitative methods to examine research topics using interviews, observations, documents, and archival data. In this article, I review qualitative research methodology and its origins and methods, discuss topics that have been studied by music education researchers using…

This ethnographic study obtains first-hand information on spousal abuse from Ethiopian immigrants in Israel. Data include 23 interviews with male and female immigrants of various ages and 10 professionals who worked with this community as well as observations and documents. The findings, verified by participants, show that during cultural…

This ethnographic study expands educational anthropologists' knowledge of the relationship between higher education and personal and social change in so-called traditional societies. It describes transitions in the status of Druze women in Israel brought about by the first women from the community to obtain higher education, granting new insights…