Teachers can and should use the insights of ethnographic research responsibly in their teaching. Ethnography is an attempt to understand cultures or parts of cultures from the point of view of those who participate in them. It is in the discontinuity between home and school uses of literacy that most ethnographers who study literacy locate the failure of children from lower socioeconomic communities. One critic of ethnographic research in education contends that cultural differences are replacing cultural deprivation as the fashionable excuse for school failure. Ethnographic studies do, however, acknowledge that even if the educational system does not hold students responsible for the ability to produce and understand the standard language, the workplace will. One noted ethnographer discusses the necessity of helping students link language choices to life chances, to help students exploit what they have learned in their communities about how to learn and how to use language in order to become speakers and writers of the standard language. Herein lie the greatest potential contributions and the worst possible hazards of ethnographic research. (An outline of this paper, a summary of results from one ethnographic literacy study, and a four page bibliography are included.) (HTH)