An ethnographic, case-study complement to a statewide survey in New York State attempted to shed light on the interwoven personal, social, economic, and program factors underlying secondary vocational education students' reports of improved attitudes. The survey assessed whether the state's two-year, half-day, separate-facility vocational programs…

This report summarizes findings from an ethnographic study of the Child and Family Resource Program (CFRP), a Head Start demonstration program providing child development and family support services to low-income families with young children. Designed to describe program operations from the perspective of staff and client families, the study was…

The words cooperation and collaboration are often used interchangeably in describing the efforts of two institutions working together. The basic issue of whether or not collaboration is different from cooperation was confronted in a project in which a national education research center attempted to work with a large school district in a…

This paper describes data gathering and analytic procedures, and then presents examples regarding how each fits into the naturalistic research model. From the interactionist perspective, called symbolic interactionism, meaning is of central importance. Naturalistic inquiry is a way of doing social science research which provides the methodological…

Metaphorically, going places without a map was a significant shift for me. Experiencing a sense of disconnection both professionally and personally became a catalyst to undertake a journey of re-connection. This coincided with an experience of displacement and what transpired was the making of new meanings around being an educator and around…

This annotated bibliography focuses on the fields of cognitive anthropology and sociolinguistics. Topics covered include: (1) classroom ethnographies; (2) conversational and discourse analysis; (3) ecological and sociological approaches to the study of education and schooling; (4) ethnomethodology; (5) communication and speech act theory; (6)…

A study was carried on for 2 years in a predominantly Italian-American suburb near Boston. During the period of data-collection, the researchers observed both classroom interaction in a kindergarten/first grade and the interactions of two members of that class at home with their families. The analysis is an attempt to discover what factors in…

Macrocosmic and microcosmic perspectives are employed in this ethnographic study of a La Leche League mothering/breastfeeding group in Buffalo, New York, in order to place the group in its historical perspective and cultural context and to describe its structure as a small cultural system. The first section provides an historical overview of…

The central concept underlying the approach and strategies offered here is culture as process, that is, the knowledge people use in their everyday life situations. A presupposition is that all human knowledge is cultural. Conceptual patterns are identified within the learner's cognitive framework which will be of importance in teacher-learner…

This paper discusses community psychology programs which serve members of alternate cultures and are based on the premises that: (1) individuals may possess desirable behaviors that are suppressed by their environmental context; (2) conventional behavioristic methods are inadequate for assessment; and (3) an interdisciplinary approach is needed to…

Traditional methods of ethnographic data collection and analysis can be adapted to conducting summative evaluations of educational programs, particularly those for American Indians. Such evaluations can be approached from a micro-ethnographic standpoint (in which the school alone is studied as a subculture) or a macro-ethnographic standpoint (in…

This study is a controlled longitudinal analysis of the impact and meaning of television among Algonkian Indians of central Canada which incorporates eight years of extensive participant observation field work and objective social and psychological testing in the pre- and post-television periods. The impact of television is discussed in terms of…

A research team approach was selected for an ethnographic project to identify those variables that influenced the adult beginning readers' acquisition of reading strategies and their effect on reading achievement. Weekly staff meetings focused on (1) identifying initial conceptualization and emerging foci reflected in the data, and (2) continually…

Underlying the current use of ethnography in the study of teaching and learning is the assumption of an analogy between the school or classroom and culture. The claim of educational ethnography is that it discovers and describes the ways that members of the school community create and share meaning. Ethnographers aim to discover the operating…

Using an ethnographic approach, three Parent Education Programs were studied to describe the social setting in which they took place and to document their impact upon parents. The programs were conceptualized as social service organizations designed to change the parental roles of participants. Each program was observed, interviews were conducted…