This thesis explores how a group of senior educators in Samoa undertook their educational journeys. It also traces my cultural and research learning journeys and the pathways I followed as a "palagi" (white person) undertaking cross-cultural research. A holistic and collaborative approach entailed consultation with the community…

This article examines the role of two African American-owned and -operated bookstores in the literacy practices and education of their participants. Part of a larger ethnographic study of Participatory Literacy Communities (PLCs), this study shows how featured authors and audience participants considered these bookstores as both alternative and…

"Here I am Now!" is the title a multi-ethnic group of immigrant and refugee undergraduate students and neighboring urban Vietnamese and Cambodian refugee youth gave to their participatory photography installation. The exhibit was the culmination of undergraduate students' participation in a series of Community Service-Learning (CSL) courses…

Judith Butler is perhaps best known for her take-up of the debate between Derrida and Austin over the function of the performative and her subsequent suggestion that the subject be understood as performatively constituted. Another important but less often noted move within Butler's consideration of the processes through which the subject is…

In the United States and Mexico, public schooling, as a government institution, has attempted to reinforce cultural and national values explicitly through civics lessons and implicitly through attitudes and classroom management. This study shows how schools on each side of the U.S.-Mexico border attempt to teach distinct national and cultural…

This article revisits the debate between cultural and critical literacy through ethnography challenging popular academic views in education and literacy. Set in a preschool classroom at the inception of the "No Child Left Behind" initiative, this essay focuses on teaching assistant Marylou Anderson. Her experiences growing up in…

Based on the theoretical perspectives of socio-constructivism and language socialization, this study reports two Chinese Canadian first grader's experiences of language and literacy learning in and out of school in a unique sociocultural setting where they were "the mainstream." The article examines the students' reading and writing…

This essay responds to the question of what it might mean to educate "world teachers" for cosmopolitan classrooms and schools through an examination of an ethnographic play entitled "Satellite Kids". The author begins with the idea that teachers need to develop or build up "intercultural capital", that is, knowledge…

Leadership is a concept that has always been a major component of Colleges of Agriculture. Undergraduate students have numerous opportunities to develop their leadership skills and abilities though formal coursework, collegiate organizations, and personal leadership activities. This ethnographic qualitative research study investigated the…

This article presents data from two yearlong ethnographic studies of the biliteracy instruction and development of young Latina/o children in two counter-hegemonic English immersion classes in the English-only milieu established by California's Proposition 227. The author first describes the struggle that the teachers engaged in as they sought to…

This ethnographic study of high school students' classroom practices and perceptions about participation reveals the extent to which students' perceptions determine their understandings of practice, even when these understandings conflict with researcher observations and the bulk of the literature on gender and participation. This study shows,…

Ethnographic research was carried out in 1997-98 to identify factors that determined school attendance among Nepali women in the Kathmandu Valley a generation ago. Findings indicate that gender, caste, poverty, cultural prejudice, and rural residence prevented a majority from going to school. Of those who went, most, regardless of academic talent,…

This article reports on one phase of a three-year ethnographic study of 20 bilingual paraeducators, drawing on photographic analysis and narrative inquiry. Enrolled in a credential program, paraeducators photographed "what your life is like as a bilingual paraeducator preparing to become a certified teacher." Participants later…

Three teachers implemented a modified Reggio Emilia approach in their multiage, looped, early childhood, setting. This study examined how teachers articulated their work and how they deconstructed social studies through enacting tenets of the approach. Through processes of research, the teachers found that the primary students described themselves…

The year-long study that was the context for this article explored the complicated relationship among the shaping of ESOL as a school construct, the historical legacy of colonialism, and the contemporary influence of globalizing forces on the teaching of English worldwide and the lives of multilingual students enrolled in ESOL. In the context of a…