In this article, I offer a new interpretation of non-Maori parents' claim that a Maori/English bilingual school unit in Aotearoa/New Zealand is separatist. I show that while some use such a claim to defend monoculturalism and white hegemony, others use it to come to terms with Aotearoa/New Zealand's postcolonial nationhood, globalization, and a…

On the basis of an ethnographic analysis of an Imam-Hatip vocational religious secondary school in Turkey, I examine teachers' and parents' expectations and the process of students' identity formation. Although the students attending the Imam-Hatip school were expected to accept a reality infused with an Islamic worldview, their schooling…

The objective of the study was to examine the effectiveness of an intervention based on attribution retraining with regards to student misconduct and coercive teacher behavior. An intervention would lead to a sustained decrease in misbehavior and coercive discipline without using any external control systems. In this case study, a male, veteran…

Interactional ethnography with a social constructionist perspective was used as an orienting theoretical framework to investigate how a community of learners was constructed in a postsecondary distance education class. The question guiding this research was: How do the interactions of the participants in an on-line classroom construct the social…

In this ethnographic study, I contrast the educational experiences of two Central American immigrant women in an English as a second language (ESL) family literacy program in the San Francisco Bay area in 2002. Based on life-history interviews and classroom observations, I argue that these learners' second language and literacy development can…

This book offers an in-depth understanding of the unique challenges and contributions of urban primary schools. The authors set urban education in the wider social context of structural disadvantage, poverty, oppression and exclusion, and reassert some critical urban educational concerns. Recognizing that practice needs to be informed by theory,…

This article demonstrates how literacy practices in an 11th grade, urban, English classroom in the United States worked to delineate and patrol gender borders between acceptable masculine and feminine social practices. Drawing upon Blackburn's (2005) and Thorne's (1993) studies of the gendered boundaries that are created and questioned in literacy…

This paper reports on a short-term ethnographic participatory action research project that engaged urban Canadian, street-involved "queer and questioning" youth in a multi-media enabled inquiry into peer housing and support needs. The "Pridehouse Project" (http://www.sfu.ca/pridehouse) was initiated by, and accountable to, a…

Through a year-long critical feminist ethnography, this article examines the challenges faced by beginning K-12 ESOL teachers in the United States as they grappled with the significance of their own racial identities in the process of negotiating the inherent racialization of ESOL in their language teaching contexts. I foreground the significance…

This paper presents findings of an ethnographic study of a school district's Staff Development, Supervision, and Evaluation Program (SDSEP). Data were gathered through interviews, observations, participant observation, analysis of kinesics and proxemics, semiotic analysis of discourse, unobtrusive measures, and analysis of official documents. The…

The model minority image of Asian Americans authorizes the flat denial of racism and structures of racial dominance and silences those who are not economically successful. This book explores how young people incorporate, interpret, and make meaning of the "model minority" stereotype in the context of their lived experience in school and…

In 1989, the Kentucky Supreme Court determined that the state's public school system was unconstitutional and called for the General Assembly to "recreate and re-establish a new system of common schools." A new system of accountability in language arts departments required portfolio assessment that was both objective and strictly…

This book reports on the 3-year ethnographic study of seven beginning elementary teachers in Toyko and four beginning elementary teachers in the United States during 1989-1991. The volume offers insights into the professional similarities and cultural differences that affect the teacher induction process in these two very dissimilar nations. The…

Around the world, schools are central to the social and cultural shaping of the young. They inculcate the skills, subjectivities, and disciplines that undergird the modern nation-state. The case studies in this volume demonstrate a new direction for critical educational research as they demonstrate social reproduction and cultural production and…

This digest presents recommendations for a staff development program for a multilingual multicultural teaching staff that has been tested and shown to be effective. Effective instruction in bilingual and multicultural schools requires that teachers combine a sophisticated knowledge of subject matter with a wide repertoire of teaching strategies…