The purpose of this article is to investigate how to use a strengths-based lens that is highly contextualized, in an ecology (i.e., online graduate course) that shows the value of the socio-emotional interactions or climate. I used an autoethnographic approach to problematize myself so that I could ask contemplative questions as a result of…

In 2008, the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID) presented research on how to help doctoral students thrive and successfully transition into higher education roles. The CID reported that doctoral students often left programs that were using an expert-apprentice model, where students are expected to strictly follow the methods and style of…

Colleges face growing pressures to maintain or enhance the quality of what they offer while being challenged to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse range of students. Staff in higher education face the challenge of supporting students to feel they belong and are valued. The co-creation of teaching and learning is one model in which we may be…

As calls increase to give public affairs doctoral students more agency in their learning, we report on the effects of implementing professional development, self-reflection, and original research into a first-year, first-semester introductory doctoral seminar. Using Scott et al.'s framework, we purposively integrated elements of socialization and…

There is limited scholarship on school boards and even less on the identity and experiences of those who serve on these citizen governance bodies. Through autoethnographic narrative inquiry, this study examines my experiences as a Black school board member in a predominately white school district in Kansas during the racial unrest of the early…

Ethnopoetics involves in the conducting of translation experiments on oral poems of native ethnic groups, converting its relevant oral texts into written forms. The theory of ethnographic poetry begins in the 1970s and was translated and introduced to China in the early 21st century. However, most ethnic minorities in China do not have textual…

This paper explores ethnographic fieldwork as moral laboratories. Drawing upon two episodes in my field encounters in Southwest China, I illustrate the nature of our method as a form of moral striving and experimentation. Fieldwork is a stage where practical actions become vulnerable ethical dramas in search for the situated good. Fieldwork…

The article explores the role that subjective evidence of causality and associated counterfactuals and counterpotentials might play in the social sciences where comparative cases are scarce. This scarcity rules out statistical inference based upon frequencies and usually invites in-depth ethnographic studies. Thus, if causality is to be preserved…

Using rhetorical genre theory, the authors theorize the engineering design process as a type of embodied genre enacted through typified performances of bodies engaged with discourses, texts, and objects in genre-rich spaces of design activity. The authors illustrate this through an analysis of ethnographic data from an engineering design course to…

Consistent with their treatment of individual participants, educational researchers regularly use pseudonyms to reference their study sites. The rationales, strategies, and implications of masking places may differ from those for masking people. However, both practices are so pervasive as to have become unexamined defaults, and they are assumed as…

Resistance to simple narratives in education research comes from the stance that they render findings useless for the political work of understanding contexts of education as they exist today. This paper interrogates three stories of masking choices from a four year postcritical ethnographic study in the rural rustbelt Midwestern United States.…

Here, authors provide a snapshot of their manuscript, and which readers often overlook, causing some authors to repeat the abstract in the main body of their texts. Like foot- and endnotes, abstracts are shadow texts. In these shadows, we as trans feminine people keep some of the more painful moments of our existence, not wanting to feed nontrans…

This article examines how sound--as a medium, method, and modality--attunes educational ethnographers to writing the "field" in new ways. In particular, the authors ask: How might cultivating practices of writing the field recording reorient the field note as an ethnographic object of inquiry? Examining the field recording as a…

Music therapy has acquired over the years a gradual process of medicalization generated by the need to provide evidence-based results in the treatment and rehabilitation of Autism Spectrum Disorders. Otherwise, the goal of music as therapy should not be to propose music as a kind of remedy or cure, but to promote relationships between individuals,…

This article examines the activism of student protesters in a rural Rust Belt community's Black Lives Matter protest, challenging prevailing stereotypes about civic engagement, literacies, and youth involvement in rural settings. Utilizing critical ethnography and nexus analysis to examine disruptions of discourses in place and interview student…