There is a 240-year tradition of compulsory school attendance in the Czech Republic. To many, compulsory school attendance is synonymous with the right to be educated. After the collapse of communism in 1989, along with the democratization of the government, the education system was slowly opened to alternatives, including the right to educate…

Informed by Goffman's influential essay on "The neglected situation" this paper examines the contextual and interactive dimensions of performance in large-scale educational assessments. The paper applies Goffman's participation framework and associated theory in linguistic anthropology to examine how testing situations are framed and…

This article takes the naming of the Anthropocene as a moment of pedagogical opportunity in which we might decentre the human as the sole learning subject and explore the possibilities of interspecies learning. Picking up on current Anthropocene debates within the feminist environmental humanities, it considers how educators might pedagogically…

In 1959, C. Wright Mills coined the phrase "the sociological imagination" to offer a critical assessment of a discipline he saw descending into a technical or abstract empiricist practice that he feared would ultimately deepen human alienation and oppression. Mills positioned the sociologist as a careful, critical scholar working in the…

In an ethnomathematics-based program there exists the need for teachers to identify pedagogical actions in the form of teaching-learning practices. In this theoretical paper we outline a curriculum proposal based on D'Ambrosio's "Trivium," composed of "literacy," "matheracy," and "technoracy." The Trivium…

In this ethnographic study, I will show that students at Czech university departments employ copying strategies as part of the dominant educational practices centred on the "replication" of authoritative knowledge. In the teaching/learning situations that we observed, teachers "transmit" knowledge to students, who are expected…

This ethnographic study explores the educational practice of interpretive naturalists in a Midwestern US state park. The construction of affective memories and direct experiences is examined from the perspectives of a group of naturalists to understand how they teach about a specific place. Enlisting phenomenological insights of lived experience…

This paper explores an enactment of public pedagogy through the ethnographic study of one museum creative writing class. It questions a theory of creativity that insists it is the properties of objects on display that inspire individuals. On the contrary, I argue that the flows of agency identified by the subjects themselves suggest creativity is…

This study begins with the belief that the ways in which teachers see and attend to educational encounters matter for their actions in classrooms. Using microethnography as a framework, this dissertation explores the relationship between teacher candidate attention, problem formulation, and action. Through analysis of the M.Ed. inquiry reports of…

Purpose: This research is situated at a metropolitan university in Melbourne (Australia) where the authors work in initial teacher education programs within the same faculty. The purpose of this study is to raise awareness that collegial, collaborative and "co-caring" environments can foster an improved sense of belonging, acceptance and…

Drawing on two multi-site ethnographic projects in Beijing and Shanghai, we explore how teachers in both public schools and schools for migrant children have responded to state policies that restrict educational opportunities for migrant students. We argue the importance of political context in re-conceptualising empowerment by raising the…

This paper focuses on teacher agency in creating a 'translanguaging space' in Nepal's multilingual public schools. Drawing on the ethnographic data from two public schools, we discuss how teachers can resist a monolingual ideology of an English as a medium of instruction policy to ensure students' participation in classroom activities. The…

This dissertation explores the professionalization of students enrolled in second language teacher education (SLTE) and their perceptions of the characteristics and obligations of a professional second language teacher (SLT). The sociocognitive approach forms the theoretical foundation, which sees humans as life-long learners and teachers, who…

Safaliba is an Indigenous Ghanaian language spoken by 7-9,000 Ghanaians in a nation-state of 29 million people with 73 indigenous languages, none of which are spoken by a majority of Ghanaians. Government schools in Safaliba towns and villages are mandated to utilize Gonja and English instructional reading materials from the Ghana Education…

Drawing on ethnographic data collected in Azerbaijan, this article examines the civics education program that existed in Azerbaijan in the 1990s and the early 2000s, prior to its incorporation into a newly created "life skills" ("h[schwa]yat bilgisi" in Azerbaijani) course. It is argued that a disconnect between curriculum…