Presents research that demonstrates how local institutional practices can preclude benefits of portfolio evaluation. Finds that communal portfolio assessment shifts the primary site of authority negotiation for new composition teachers (teaching assistants) from their relationships with students to their relationships with their more experienced…

An ethnographic case study focuses on the pragmatics of higher-stakes social communications. Illustrates how, through exposure to social interactions and assistance from more competent peers, an immigrant woman came to internalize target language and cultural norms and develop communicative competence in English as a Second Language in the…

Describes and analyzes how context acts as a resource for and a constraint upon the personal experience narratives of educators. Examines a teacher's story told in a support group for democratic educators. Illustrates the role that context has on storytelling, how teacher-narrators interpret/act upon context, and how context constrains a story.…

Draws on quotes and ethnographic material from many studies to illustrate some of the parenting strategies that help inner-city African American youth overcome risks and achieve success. Groups strategies that are: (1) youth-monitoring; (2) resource-seeking; and (3) in-home learning. (SLD)

Discusses the ethnographic interview as a strategy in foreign language teacher development. Excerpts from preservice teachers' reports on an ethnographic interview assignment provide evidence that the process of conducting the interview facilitates the development of the requisite understanding and awareness. (Author/VWL)

This article describes the use of family stories and parent professional co-instruction in a graduate early intervention program at West Virginia University. Ethnographic methods were used to capture student responses that demonstrated the diversity of student beliefs about families. Implications for use of family stories in preservice early…

Investigates how second-generation Korean-American students form and transform their senses of ethnicity through their participation in Korean language classes. An ethnographic study was carried out at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where most Korean language courses were populated by second- and 1.5-generation Korean Americans.…

Maintains that public policy discourse with narrow views of morality and character are at the center of contemporary definitions and marketing of services for violent/troubled youth. Uses descriptive and ethnographic data on violence in urban and black schools/communities to argue that, left undisturbed, moral entrepreneurs pose as much risk as…

Explores practices in a Yamaha Music School to determine in what ways these practices were congruent or incongruent with the National Association for the Education of Young Children Developmentally Appropriate Practice guidelines. Includes children, ages four to six, their teachers, and parents in the setting. (CMK)

Assessment methods adapted from qualitative research including ethnographic interviewing and journal writing were applied to the case of an adult with aphasia. By analyzing reports of the client and significant others over the course of treatment, changes in social participation and psychosocial well being were documented. These descriptive data…

Project-based curricula have the potential to engage students' interests. But how do students become interested in the goals of a project? This article documents how a group of 8th-grade students participated in an architectural design project called the Antarctica Project. The project is based on the imaginary premise that students need to design…

The organisation of students into groups (or communities) for learning purposes is an established pedagogic method in higher education. Teachers are now using group methods in networked e-learning contexts, albeit without a full understanding of the dynamics of group work in these settings. This is a new and evolving arena in higher education. In…

This paper adopts a sociocultural perspective on learning (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986) to explore connections between the concept of voicing (Bakhtin 1981, 1986) and a Year four student's second language learning in Australia. Results are drawn from a qualitative study conducted in the Australian outback, through ethnographic research strategies, which…

This article is based on a doctoral study of educational change in the School of Education (SOE) of the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa. It is an exploration of "a moment in time" that bore witness to institutional and human transformation in South African higher education. This transformation involved a development from…

In this article, the role of young children's emotional practices in science learning is described and analyzed. From the standpoint of performativity theory and social-constructionist theory of emotion, it is argued that emotion is performative and the expression of emotion in the classroom has its basis in social relationships. Arising from…