This study examined an institution that is in the process of developing programs and organizations to meet the new challenges faced by higher education. It reviewed the evolution of a new, boundary-spanning organization at a major research university from the perspective of the persons involved. The study looked at the experiences of the people…

Drawing upon arguments from the sociology of work and from debates about literacy, this paper explores the connection between schooling, work, and language through an ethnographic analysis of school and community in a rural, northeastern United States setting. The paper presents evidence of a disjunction between schooling and adult work and…

This paper summarizes a 22-month ethnographic study of rural Shandon (California), a community that demonstrates the social and demographic changes resulting from agricultural intensification in rural California. Changes in the Shandon area's agricultural production have produced a demographic shift from the homogeneous Anglo-American farming and…

This paper reports on a qualitative ethnographic research study on the inclusion of children with severe disabilities into a Montessori preschool program in Lawrence, Kansas. The program has served 20 children with disabilities since its inception in 1986. The program's emergent model involves a split program (utilizing a special education…

This paper discusses the visual organizers and graphic interfaces used to manage and report the findings from a 10-month ethnographic study of student participation and interaction in computer mediated communication (CMC) activities within the classrooms of both a freshman writing class and a plant science lab. The study focuses on social…

In the course of an ethnographic case study of a rural, Appalachian Head Start program, the researcher became increasingly aware of the bias she brought to the project in favor of the universal applicability of developmentally appropriate practice. The study was an extension of Sally Lubeck's "Sandbox Society" (1985), and focused on…

Qualitative approaches in educational research are challenging traditional postivistic, psychometric paradigms by emphasizing: (1) close contact over detachment; (2) multiple techniques in obtaining data; (3) bottom-up inductive frameworks; and (4) phenomenological approaches. Section 1, "Ethnographic Investigations into High Schools," includes…

An ethnographic study examined the personal and professional life experiences that contributed to a science teacher's beliefs about science and science teaching, and how these experiences interacted to affect the teacher's decisions about content literacy strategies. The teacher in question was a veteran of 16 years of teaching chemistry and…

This paper uses case studies to introduce a method by which educators in a graduate course transformed the ways in which they saw the students with whom they worked as they situated themselves within the context of "at-riskness." Four white women, all of whom worked with at-risk youth, took a graduate course on the educational challenges of youth…

This book focuses on what it feels like and what it means to spend substantial portions of one's everyday life in the chat rooms, support groups, and virtual communities of cyberspace. Interviewing heavy users online, and becoming one herself, the author creates and ethnographic site for inquiring into the meanings of life online, a place where…

This participant observation study describes how one beginning, bi-lingual, Puerto Rican, elementary art teacher instructs a class of Puerto Rican, inner-city children. The study concentrates on the types and frequency of teaching behaviors that occur for a beginning teacher; cultural perspectives that affect instruction, content selection, and…

This catalog contains over 200 entries listing books, booklets, newspapers, magazines, reference materials, videos, and other multi-media resources about Alaska Natives. The catalog was designed for use by secondary school social studies teachers, but many entries could be useful in other academic disciplines and in classes ranging from elementary…

This study evaluated the teaching methods of 11 day care teachers and caregivers at a university-sponsored center to determine if: (1) the teachers used different strategies for same-age and mixed-age groups of children; (2) there are differences in strategies used by less- and more-experienced teachers; and (3) teachers used specific strategies…

An ethnographic study was conducted with the goal of evaluating the botanical concepts of sixth-grade students. One aspect of the study involved examination of the levels of abstraction students use for naming plants. Nine sixth-grade students were interviewed individually. Each was asked to identify the plants seen in a set of 64 slides and…

As part of a larger study of teacher-student conferences, a study examined naturally occurring one-to-one writing conference conversations between a ninth-grade English teacher (recommended as an excellent writing teacher) and three markedly different students. The study examined students' grapplings with the structure as well as the content of…