This paper addresses aspects of alternative proposals taking place in the public education system, based on an anthropological, ethnographic, comparative study of alternative schools and educational projects in Catalonia. More specifically, it first explores educational change in Catalonia through time and on the present, with a special focus on…

This qualitative study seeks to create a better understanding of the work of school superintendents. This study was conducted using ethnographic techniques as a way to describe the practice of a Latino superintendent in a borderland community in south Texas. Guiding questions for this study were: What goes on in the workday life of a…

This article explores the way that discourses of smartness and whiteness are produced and reproduced in schooling. Using an approach grounded in narrative research, I explore the convergences and contradictions between my own educational autobiography and the representations of schooling found in my school pictures and yearbooks. In my analysis, I…

This paper explores the profound connection between race, gender, and culture in post-apartheid education at a public Afrikaans dual-language school in South Africa. Illustrating how the residues and remnants of apartheid legacies propagate arcane constructions of whiteness through interwoven racial and gendered stereotypes, this research maps the…

An essentialist, "traditional", Maasai gender ideology that poorly reflects the day-to-day gender realities of residents is being reproduced and dominating in the modern schooling setting of a Maasai community in Southern Kenya. Through an ethnographic analysis based on long-term fieldwork and mixed-method approaches, this paper explores…

The perplexing numbers of Somali children withdrawn from schools in Norway and sent to Somalia is the concern of this study. These students are often brought back and re-enroll later as adolescents with concomitant educational challenges. The findings are critically analyzed employing John Ogbu's cultural ecology of minorities and a CHAT-based…

The author is concerned with the education available for the Orang Asli, an indigenous minority community in Malaysia. Literature written about Orang Asli and education mostly assumes a deficit perspective where the lack of educational achievement among the Orang Asli children is often attributed to their culture and community. Therefore, rather…

This article describes the work of Oscar Lewis, Paul Willis, and John U. Ogbu, who used the concept of culture to explain the difficulties some children had in schools. Although Lewis, Willis, and Ogbu were well trained as ethnographers and their work influenced educators, critics complained that their explanations did not fit their evidence. The…

The main goals of this article are twofold. The first is to explore whether the General Education Development (GED) program has the potential to meet the academic requirements cited by the scholarship in the area of mathematics for First Nations upgrading programs. Secondly, this paper explores how the GED program influences identity in students…

This paper discusses the complexities of investigating the experiences of participants in hybrid (online/offline) learning communities through educational ethnography. In these communities, people construct small cultures in the liminal spaces or "border crossings" between the virtually real and "actually" real, using computer-mediated and…

Through this performance ethnography the authors present the stories of emerging scholars who in their research identify an interest in equity issues in the field of mathematics education. The article is based on life-story interviews with 26 participants. Six composite characters were developed to represent the voices of the participants.…

From an ethnographic case study of a state-funded residential school for the Deaf, the authors employed Critical Discourse Analysis to identify competing discourses in the talk of educators. These discourses are embedded in the historical oppression and labeling of deaf people as disabled and the development of Deaf culture as a counter-discourse.…

This review essay of "Producing Success: The Culture of Personal Advancement in an American High School" by Peter Demerath focuses on the theory of cultural dysfunction. It places the book within a theoretical tradition of social reproduction and status attainment using other ethnographies by Varenne and McDermott, Lareau, and Howard. It argues…

Temporal and spatial configurations that constitute learning and identity work across practices have been little explored in studies of science literacy development. Grounded in multi-sited ethnography, this paper explores diverse girls' engagement with and identity work in science locally, inside a newsletter activity in an afterschool programme…

This study examined the effects of Sharing the Environment (STE), a situated professional development pilot program that uses an inquiry-based approach to teaching Environmental Education (EE) to elementary students in the US and Trinidad. Inquiry is difficult to incorporate in both cultures because proficient performance on national tests is a…