This article explores how researchers adapt to disruptions that cost them access to their field sites, advancing a uniquely sociological perspective on the dynamics of flexibility and adaptation in qualitative methods. Through interviews with 31 ethnographers whose access was preempted or eliminated, I find that adaptation varied systematically…

International comparative ethnographic studies of ECEC (Early Childhood Education and Care) are difficult to conduct but worth the effort. Comparative studies featuring thick description and polysemic interpretations can challenge taken-for-granted assumptions, expand the menu of the possible, expose the provincialism of national approaches, and…

This paper uses examples from research conducted in preschools in Japan, China, and the United States to illustrate the features and virtues of return interviews with informants with whom ethnographers have long research engagements. Return interviews and long research engagements are powerful research strategies that help the ethnographers ask…

This book brings an international group of writers together to offer an authoritative state-of-the-art review of, and critical reflection on, educational ethnography as it is being theorized and practiced today--from rural and remote settings to virtual and visual posts. It provides a definitive reference point and academic resource for those…

Literacy studies approaches have tended to adopt a position which enables ethnographic explorations of a wide range of "literacies". An important issue arising is the new challenge required for researchers to capture, manage, and analyse data that highlight the unique character of practices around texts in digital environments. Such…

This paper moves from the data collected during an ethnographic research conducted in Second Life, which focuses on the observation of different technological difficulties in educational experiences. The main research interests focused on the social dynamics of educational experiences in Second Life and the opportunity to develop a proper research…

Joseph Tobin made an impact on the field of comparative education in 2009 when he used a unique form of ethnography to illuminate the effects of world-wide forces, such as modernization, on schools in specific countries. Earlier, in 1989, he published "Preschool in Three Cultures" with co-authors David Wu and Dana Davidson. The…

Most qualitative studies in international education take place in a single site in a single nation. When studies are of more than one country, they most often use more quantitative than qualitative approaches. Beatrice and John Whiting conducted the most systematic of comparative cross-cultural studies of child rearing in their "Six…

Over a 13-month period, the Schome Park Programme operated the first "closed" (i.e. protected) Teen Second Life project in Europe. The project organised diverse educational events that centred on use of a virtual world and an associated asynchronous forum and wiki. Students and staff together exploited the affordances of the environment…

The Children Crossing Borders (CCB) study is a polyvocal, multi-sited project on immigration and early childhood education and care in five countries: Italy, Germany, France, England and the USA. The complicated nature of the data pushed us as a group to expand our methodological resources to not only organize the data but also to make it…

The intent of this paper is to show that while ethnographic research for decades has helped to challenge one-dimensional, deficit-oriented perspectives about Black males, this work has also helped to reproduce essentialised racial motifs. I define a racial motif as a central theme or story used to make sense of the social and educational…

Using several approaches of data collection over a period of 10 months, the author combines participant observations, conversational interviews, photo-elicitations, and various other serendipitous types of information gathering in performative spaces of actions and re-actions, demonstrating the contestatory negotiations of two transnational female…

The objective of this study was to identify the methodological approaches employed in a sample of Brazilian distance education scientific literature and compare with similar publications in the United States. Brazilian sample articles (N = 983) published in several journals and meetings were compared with a sample of articles published in…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to offer a comparison of how human expertise is perceived by human resource development (HRD) scholars across several Western European countries and in the USA. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative, exploratory approach using electronic mail was used for this study. In total, 36 leading HRD scholars from…

When "Preschool in Three Cultures" was published in 1989, it attracted great attention, as a result of the insights into the three cultures explored as well as the methodology that anchored the research. What made the book so intriguing to many scholars, regardless of their geographical areas of interest, however, was the unique…