The paper draws on ethnographic data on children's game-playing in Khwezi Park outside Cape Town. This unsupervised, child-choreographed play is seen as a site of meaning-making and identity work where children draw on a range of resources and influences to take and make meaning. These resources for semiosis and interaction are multilingual and…

This study explores the meaning of the death of a companion animal through autoethnographic poetry in conjunction with narrative reflections. This method expands the depth and scope of poetry in qualitative research by transforming expressive works into both the subject and product of inquiry.

Most students experience higher education as a solo performance. In relative isolation from their peers, they spend each term selecting from a menu of individual courses that also operate in relative isolation from each other. Cohort programs have, for decades, attempted to break the separation between students and between courses. In this…

This study reports the findings of a qualitative study of competitive West Coast Swing dancers that incorporated both ethnographic and phenomenological techniques. A modern variation of the original Lindy Hop, West Coast Swing is typically learned in dance studios and non-profit clubs. The West Coast Swing community can be considered a community…

Background: Although coping with autism has been examined in a number of papers, virtually no research exists on how families cope over time. This paper reports the results of a longitudinal study of parents coping with autism over a period of approximately a decade. Methods: The research method for the study was based on ethnographic methods that…

This article examines the use of testimony in the making of a new history in South Africa, situating this phenomenon in the context of public construction of memory and identifying history teachers as critical to the process. Through an ethnographic study of 16 schools that illuminates the use of teacher testimony in Cape Town history classrooms,…

This manuscript uses a case study of a faith-based student organization to explore the interrelationship between student involvement and mobilization in student organizations. The authors explore the types of co-curricular offerings students perceive to be especially meaningful and document ways effective organizations mobilize students to enact…

This study examines children's uses of reading resources in neighborhood public libraries that have been transformed to "level the playing field." Through foundation funding (US$20 million), the public library system of Philadelphia converted neighborhood branch libraries into a technologized modern urban library system, hoping to…

This article draws on 3 ethnographic and participant observation studies of African American parents and adults from 3 northern California communities. Although studies have shown that African American parents hold the same folk theories about mathematics as other parents, stressing it as an important school subject, few studies have sought to…

For many years, university based educational research has been blamed for being dominated by positivistic research tradition at the near exclusion of field based ethnographic work. Several findings have also portrayed this domination among the major explanations for practitioners' lack of interest in educational research literature. With the…

The author examines the discourses and practices of two Black women educators regarding the spiritual education of their daughters. Their daughters attended an independent African-centered community school in a large Midwestern city. Semi-structured interviews were conducted as part of a larger ethnographic study exploring the education of Black…

Based on the ethnography conducted by Magrini in three midwestern United Methodist congregations, this article examines the development of "ethnographic intertextual voicing," which describes multiple contexts and the ways in which these contexts influence representation of the participants and in turn, create in a community of learning.…

Given the current popularity of ethnographic methods of researching teaching and teachers, many investigators commonly confront the task of analyzing interview transcripts in order to uncover speakers' meaning systems and the embedded perspectives on knowledge and practice upon which those meaning systems rely. Others have written about conducting…

Recent research demonstrates that videogames enhance literacy, attention, reaction time, and higher-level thinking. Several scholars have suggested that massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) such as "Everquest" and "Second Life" have educational potential, but we have little data about what happens when such tools are introduced in the…

This paper aims to study the various forms of education to be found amongst the Kisongo Maasai, a pastoral population in Tanzania, both in their own right and in terms of what their encounter with one another implies. The late and rather limited development of schooling in that remote area and educational policies, as well as the pastoral way of…