In this reflection, I contextualize my own experiences conducting educational ethnography in a synchronous online kindergarten classroom during the COVID-19 pandemic. I highlight how conducting research in online classrooms transforms ethnographic research methodologies and concepts such as the field site. I offer four suggestions, derived from my…

Outside of education, many academic disciplines developed and promulgated checklists to evaluate the quality of qualitative studies. This article used an embedded mixed methods approach in three stages: development of a conceptual framework reviewing 62 guidelines; a content analysis of key areas of the guidelines; and review of dissertations to…

Reflexivity is a practice through which researchers engage themselves fully in their studies. It opens up different aspects of research that can shed light on important accounts that may otherwise be dismissed. It was through reflexivity that I observed ethical concerns emerge during my fieldwork in Korea. Despite academic ethics being discussed…

The notion of the ethnographer as participant observer, as an active agent rather than passive observer, is well established within conversations about method and methodology. Less well explored is the extent to which the inherent curiosity and inquisitiveness of the ethnographer might be reciprocated: how might this be established and how might…

This article is written with the recognition that, as higher education studies evolve as a multidisciplinary area of inquiry, there is a need to reflect on the theoretical and practical concerns emerging from conducting higher education research. This is especially the case for early-career researchers who enter this relatively new field of study.…

Based on year-long fieldwork on activist-educators' work in South Korea, I reflect on how my research complicates the ontological shift in institutional ethnography: that is, the shift that emphasizes how ruling relations are coordinated through the very actions of people. I discuss two facets of reflective pauses. First, I discuss how the ruling…

In this "Reflections from the Field," we describe and interrogate our ongoing engagements with designing, conducting, and documenting multimodal field research as early-career ethnographic education researchers. Our Multimodal Scholarship Working Group engages with content across media and multimodal methods to promote collaboration and…

In field-based research, masking practices, as well as the general practice of relegating historical context to abstracted 'site descriptions' in a paper's methodology section, can produce a tacit inattention to historical specificity. By juxtaposing two case studies of schools, this article examines the ways school sites are haunted by…

The COVID-19 pandemic influenced academia in many ways, impacting learners and teachers. This article is authored by six sustainable urban development doctoral researchers from various backgrounds and stages of their journey, and an academic advisor. The article is an outcome of remote collaboration through a substantial period during the…

Trust is often treated as a binary where research participants either trust researchers or not, whereas in reality trust is multi-layered. Drawing on 10 months of fieldwork working with internally displaced persons and their non-displaced neighbours in rural Colombia, this article provides a more nuanced discussion of trust in research. It…

This article contributes to the growing debate within art and design education research about the role, legitimacy and accountability of artefacts in the creation and generation of knowledge. I present an artefact-based approach to visually documenting and disseminating my doctoral practice-based fieldwork that protected the anonymity of the…

Ethnography as a methodological approach presents the fieldworker with many ethical crossroads throughout the research process. This is because of the unique position that ethnographers find themselves in, the environments that they research and the relationships which are formed. This paper presents four confessional vignettes from a broader…

In thinking about their experiences as community college advocates, Erin Doran and Kayla Lucht found that they both came to community colleges as adjuncts to supplement their incomes--but that a deep admiration and love for their students kept them there. Like so many others in higher education, they fell into their roles as community college…

In qualitative methods, there are various approaches that can be used to answer particular social questions, for example ethnography and case study. Two studies conducted by different researchers in China and Australia using these approaches were described and analysed in order to find out their similarities and differences in terms of…

In this paper, I consider not only issues associated with the positionality of the researcher in international and comparative education fieldwork, but also how the researcher's gender intercedes and intersects with position. Using heuristic research methods, specifically (self-)dialogue and the collection of research manuscripts, I explored how…