This paper uses case studies to introduce a method by which educators in a graduate course transformed the ways in which they saw the students with whom they worked as they situated themselves within the context of "at-riskness." Four white women, all of whom worked with at-risk youth, took a graduate course on the educational challenges of youth…

This book focuses on what it feels like and what it means to spend substantial portions of one's everyday life in the chat rooms, support groups, and virtual communities of cyberspace. Interviewing heavy users online, and becoming one herself, the author creates and ethnographic site for inquiring into the meanings of life online, a place where…

This participant observation study describes how one beginning, bi-lingual, Puerto Rican, elementary art teacher instructs a class of Puerto Rican, inner-city children. The study concentrates on the types and frequency of teaching behaviors that occur for a beginning teacher; cultural perspectives that affect instruction, content selection, and…

This catalog contains over 200 entries listing books, booklets, newspapers, magazines, reference materials, videos, and other multi-media resources about Alaska Natives. The catalog was designed for use by secondary school social studies teachers, but many entries could be useful in other academic disciplines and in classes ranging from elementary…

This study evaluated the teaching methods of 11 day care teachers and caregivers at a university-sponsored center to determine if: (1) the teachers used different strategies for same-age and mixed-age groups of children; (2) there are differences in strategies used by less- and more-experienced teachers; and (3) teachers used specific strategies…

An ethnographic study was conducted with the goal of evaluating the botanical concepts of sixth-grade students. One aspect of the study involved examination of the levels of abstraction students use for naming plants. Nine sixth-grade students were interviewed individually. Each was asked to identify the plants seen in a set of 64 slides and…

As part of a larger study of teacher-student conferences, a study examined naturally occurring one-to-one writing conference conversations between a ninth-grade English teacher (recommended as an excellent writing teacher) and three markedly different students. The study examined students' grapplings with the structure as well as the content of…

While language switching among multilinguals has been studied in a wide variety of contexts, few attempts have been made to generalize or to integrate findings into useful communication theory. Since language switching is an important part of personal as well as group identity and since issues surrounding language identity are often a focal point…

The symposium from which these papers are gathered was one component of the Assessment of Bilingual Persons Project to pursue research on the nature of language proficiency and to keep teachers informed of related assessment issues for classroom assessment improvement. The papers include: "A Sociolinguistic/Discourse Approach to the…

An ethnographic study was made of a student-led speech event in an ethnically mixed combined first- and second-grade classroom. In an activity called "Sharing Time," general rules governed appropriate ways of behaving, but no teacher rules governed ways of speaking, topic, or amount of time at talk. Collected over a 5-month period, data…

This paper proposes examining cooperative learning from an anthropological perspective and presents a theoretical framework for doing so. The paper first briefly reviews the psychological theory and research underlying cooperative learning. The paper uses data from a pilot ethnographic study of cooperative learning in a fourth-grade classroom to…

Effective rural education depends on active community involvement. This ethnographic case study examines three models of community organization as an explanation of how community action occurs. The three models are: (1) individuals interacting in formal and informal groups; (2) networks of "weak ties" effective for diffusing information and…

This bibliography is designed: (1) to bring information together on research on family roles in literacy acquisition and on parent involvement programs; and (2) to present a range of models, resources, and approaches that English family literacy program designers, curriculum developers, and teachers can use in developing their own programs. The…

The purpose of this report is to outline how a combined ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of an exemplary bilingual education program in the Navajo community of Rock Point may help rationally explain how community people have determined what they want from a bilingual program and what sort of issues they face to achieve these goals. After an…

An ethnographic study examined the sense of the social world as a natural order produced by the organizational members of one sales team at a New York media representation firm. Communication was observed and recorded over a ten-week period, and members of the sales team were interviewed during an additional two-week period. Results indicated that…