This article explores the ethical dilemmas encountered by two ethnographers in adult education research in a context where neoliberalism impacts on education settings, policies, and social justice. Everyday ethical dilemmas arise in thorny situations in which the general ethical principles ethnographers are regulated by cannot help them react or…

Familiarity and distance is an issue that is much discussed in ethnographic fieldwork. This paper focuses on the topic of balancing familiarity and distance when the researcher is directly or indirectly part of the field, which in the study consists of an adult education context of two different teacher-training courses for upper secondary…

This paper considers how governors in the English "Further Education and Skills" (FE) sector examined their practice as ethnographers. The paper locates both FE governance and ethnography within the challenges of the performative and Panoptic environments facing English education. In doing so, the paper explores how the informants'…

This article reports on a study of apprentices in England and Germany designed to explore young people's learner identities over time and in relation to particular learning environments. The research adopts a multi-method ethnographic approach, combining biographical interviews with multi-site participant observation. The article problematises the…

This paper analyses the conceptual significance of different methods of researching learning. Based largely upon our own experiences, we briefly compare the use of mini-ethnography, life history, cross-sectional surveys and existing panel survey data. We argue that there are strong affinities between each of these methods and significantly…

This empirical study uses auto-ethnography to describe a higher education pedagogical process that facilitated largely doctoral students in preparing their candidacy proposals through the use of specific adult learning principles. Students' experiences and points of view of such a learning environment were explored, including: (1) how they…

Focuses on different ways participants in a research project may understand the research and use it themselves by describing how 20 adult students and 14 community members, participants in a recent ethnographic study of adult literacy in England, responded to the invitation to collaborate with researchers in interpreting interview data. (SLD)

A non-Native researcher describes undertaking an ethnography of perceptions about Native control of education among staff and students at a Native adult educational institution in British Columbia and discusses concerns about her role in the power struggle and the legitimacy and adequacy of such research. Contains 40 references. (SV)

This book is a critical ethnography of the Native Education Centre (NEC) in Vancouver, British Columbia. It presents an intimate view of the center, focusing on the people that work there--First Nations students, board members, teachers--and revealing their beliefs about First Nations control of education and how they put those beliefs into…