The participation of four first-year students as investigators in an ethnographic study of the environment for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students influenced their perceptions, self-awareness, and behavior, supporting and extending theories of sexual identity development, attitude change, and social justice ally development. We offer…

Many young children with disabilities have unique personal/social needs in addition to academic issues related to their disability. Current research suggests a number of personal/social difficulties that come with a diagnosis of a physical disability, emotional disorder, or learning disability. This article presents the results of an ethnographic…

That researchers should give anonymity to research sites and to the individuals involved in research is usually taken as an ethical norm. Such a norm is embodied internationally in most of the ethical guidelines and codes of practice of the various educational, sociological and psychological research associations and societies. This paper…

Previous ethnographic pedagogical approaches in basic writing classrooms emphasized students' acculturation into academic discourse; however, teachers' critical reflection should also consider how exposure to students' experiences intervenes in and informs pedagogical practices. In this article, I argue that teachers should listen to their…

As the variety of state education agency (SEA) responses to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 demonstrates, different SEAs interpret the same federal educational policy differently. Nonetheless, little research has depicted how federal policies are changed by SEA-based policy intermediaries. Using an "ethnography of educational policy"…

This article draws from the insights offered by discourse analysis and the study of gesture to examine imagination as a product of, and resource for, social action. Using data collected during ethnographic fieldwork at an architecture firm, the article explores how imagining can emerge from a group of interactants who use many semiotic media,…

Literacy in the home is often judged as an inferior version of school literacy. In multilingual contexts, family literacy practices tend to be characterised as traditional and more reliant on oral than literate practices, with the children being seen as disadvantaged by the lack of parental literacy support. This paper argues that literacy…

The restructuring of adult education in Goteborg was first initiated experimentally with respect only to SFI education (an education in beginning Swedish for ethnic minorities living in Sweden). This was done on the basis of decisions in the Goteborg Municipal Council in 1999. But restructuring came into full force for all municipal adult…

The working relationship of two novice songwriters is examined in this ethnographic study, which highlights the importance of common goals and values in a songwriting collaboration. Stemming from this core there are a number of sub-themes: the pair saw a popular song as consisting of melody, harmony, and lyrics; they played on the strengths and…

This article argues that traveling and working as a writer in Vietnam yielded metaphors that changed the author's pedagogy as well. The article first describes how the experience of crossing the street taught her to move on the terms dictated by local conditions. The metaphor of "moving in traffic" that grew out of this experience…

I offer an autoethnographic exploration of my experience with the culture of a marriage and family therapist (MFT) in training. As a beginning therapist I assumed that success would be determined primarily by how well I mastered different theoretical models. This belief shifted during an instance in which I was planning to begin differentiating…

This ethnographic study is an investigation of the environment that students create when making music that is meaningful to them. The initial purpose of the study was to describe a developing "rock group", and the factors that contributed to its creation. The significance of the study may be in the discovery of ways to "counter mechanisms of…

Engaging students in a course in the Sociology of Religion can be a challenge, particularly when working with student populations in a homogeneous region of the country who have limited experience with religious diversity. We approached the course from a sociological/anthropological perspective, requiring each student to complete an in-depth…

The study presented here discusses rules and agreements in a preschool group from the viewpoint of the development of a community of learners. What kinds of rules and agreements exist in the preschool group, how they are articulated and how they are adopted at the beginning of the preschool year were the questions addressed in this small-scale…

This is the last of three papers based on a 20-month study of teaching and learning in a diverse classroom in a downtown community school in Toronto, Canada. The purpose of the research was to describe the details of teaching and learning in a multicultural classroom and to document successful strategies in working with immigrant and minority…