Two education professors conducting research on the curriculum planning at a high school near Boise (Idaho) found that their status as observer and/or participant in discussions among teachers, administrators and parents made things more difficult. Usually in ethnography it is assumed that the hard part is to achieve insider status--to be accepted…

A composition scholar conducted a study of peer response groups in a freshmen composition course to determine what leads to conflict among students in these groups. In the course of her study, however, she found herself deeply perplexed by conflicting roles she had to play as a participant/observer. The ethnographer as a participant/observer is,…

At Utica College, Anthropology 101 seeks to help students begin to detect ethnocentrism in themselves and others, to get an understanding of the varieties of cultural systems, and to see their own society as simply one example of shapes a society can take. An "ethnography project" is a useful device in advancing these goals. Students are…

The lures and the risks of using personal stories in research and pedagogy are considerable. One danger of using experience as evidence is that "an experience" becomes the foundation for the construction of an essentialized identity: for example, a woman's experience becomes woman's experience. Despite the risks, however, telling stories…

Three adult males met 2 hours a week for 26 weeks in a non-academic setting to explore writing. Adult One (A-1) and Adult Two (A-2) were limestone miners and close friends. Adult Three (A-3) had some limited academic writing experience, so A-1 and A-2 thought that he knew more about what made writing effective. A-3 observed the others' writing…

By adopting some of the methods used by ethnographic researchers, performance artists/researchers can "step out of" their own culture, providing the necessary distance for the reporting of the event under investigation. Dwight Conquergood uses ethnographic research to be able to "step into" the culture under investigation and…

A step-by-step primer is presented that introduces the reader to ethnography and its practical applications, then guides the reader through each stage of the ethnographic inquiry process (initial steps, observation, interviews, data analysis, leaving the site, and reporting the findings). The concrete guidelines and suggestions help the reader…

The relevance of ethnographic research to evaluation of educational programs is discussed. The author focuses on evaluation questions that deal with finding out what is happening in a program and if what is happening is desirable. Ethnography suits the purposes of evaluators who answer such questions because they want to know how something works…

Observation of a kinship and social network among Mexican Americans in a Chicago neighborhood, part of an ethnographic study, revealed a pattern of self-education in literacy among the men in the group who came from one rancho, while the literate men from another rancho were primarily school-educated. Economic forces caused one group to attend…

Patchwork quilting is an original folk art in the United States. Pilgrims first used worn out scraps of cloth to make bed covers in an age of scarcity. Featured here are stories on East Texas Quilts, their origins, the love and hard work which goes into the making of a quilt (Ira Barr and others). The techniques needed to construct a quilt are…

Erving Goffman has made significant, sustained contributions to the understanding of human behavior. Goffman studied the minute details of human interaction and how social arrangements protect and promote those interactions. Central to Goffman's study of human interaction was the concept of "self." Goffman believed that the self has two…

Using ethnographic research tools, this study explored the role that the symbolic action of administrators played in the the social construction of reality. Case study data were provided to illustrate meaning management at the school district level. Framing this analysis is the application of the categories of critical theory to the study of…

The intersection of the ethnographer's method of participant observation and the historian's central concern with chronology provides a potentially useful approach for construction of a historical ethnography of childhood through oral history. The first stage of ethnographic activity, fieldwork centered in participant observation, is not unlike…

A review of the literature concerning ethnographic studies of writing reveals a number of reasons for the writing that people do. Some studies of writing in the schools found that what is considered "writing" is not really writing at all and that the majority of students consider the teacher to be their sole audience. Other studies…

The author discusses the role that ethnography can play in understanding interaction processes in physical education classrooms, with the aim being improvement of instructional techniques. The characteristics of ethnography are described as: (1) dealing solely with action-watching and analyzing the things people say and do; (2) dealing with action…