The ethnographer's embodied action during research is a complex of habit, belief, social and institutional positioning, and intention. This article examines what urban anthropologist Wacqaunt calls 'carnal sociology' and considers its implications for ethnographers of religious educational spaces. Contemporary ethnographers of education have…

Digital technologies open new windows for ethnographic explorations of cultural experiences. In this paper, we examine text messaging among academically talented teenage girls of colour at three US urban high schools. Texting introduced a new communication modality into the girls' lives and created a space for new discourses mediating their…

This article explores the disjuncture between refugee's pre-migratory educational aspirations and their everyday encounters with urban public schools. This study engages with two main questions: How do refugee youth's experiences with their urban public schools act as barriers to their educational aspirations? How do these experiences inform their…

This is a narrative inquiry into the role of professional development in the construction of teaching practice by an exemplary urban high school science teacher. I collected data during 3 years of ethnographic participant observation in Marie Gonzalez's classroom. Marie told stories about her experiences in ten years of professional development…

This study explores the impetus for and impact of four urban teachers' extracurricular investments. Framing teacher investment as work voluntarily undertaken with an eye toward bringing about a highly desired, yet highly uncertain, end, we argue that the outcome of these often-hidden investments have identity and career implications for teachers.…

Purpose: Food practices, including associated routines, rituals, and habits, are an unexplored area in school health promotion. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap through exploring how food rituals act as vehicles for young people to establish, maintain, and strengthen social relationships. Design/methodology/approach: Through an…

This article sheds light on the educational trajectories of undocumented youth who engage in forms of organizing through a community-school partnership in an urban public school in Chicago. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study in an urban public high school, readers learn that undocumented youth gain a positive sense of identity and…

Using ethnographic methods, this article looks closely at how a team of first-grade teachers and digital media artists in an urban elementary school used video in innovative ways during professional development over the course of one year. Extending a body of literature that primarily documents how video can be used as a tool in professional…

Social scientists have begun to document the stratifying effects of over a decade of unprecedented charter growth in urban districts. An exodus of students from traditional neighborhood schools to charter schools has attended this growth, creating troubling numbers of vacant seats in neighborhood schools as well as concentrating larger percentages…

This paper critically engages observations from a school that was aligned with a resistance movement in Lebanon during a post-war period of sustained political violence (2006-2007). Focusing on the pedagogical practices at one community-centered and community-led Shi'a Islamic urban school, the paper draws on extensive ethnographic data to…

Multiliteracies pedagogy has played an important role in the way classrooms worldwide conceptualize literacy learning. And yet, some argue, its orientation toward literacy by design, with an ultimate focus on the production of transformed texts, may narrow the very possibility of opening students' social futures that it seeks to promote. Recent…

Research points to sections of the middle-class repopulating the "ordinary" urban public school and whilst there are key differences in how they are navigating public school choices, from "seeking a critical mass" to resisting traditional methods of choice and going "against-the-grain", or collectively campaigning for…

This study was designed to build on the existing research on teaching and learning in community college contexts and the literature of college writing in two-year schools. The work of Pierre Bourdieu formed the primary theoretical framework and composition theory was used to position this study in the literature of the college writing discipline.…

Tracing the nature of critical engagement and agency among youth in a participatory action research (PAR) collective, the study attends to the manner in which critical engagement and agency developed over time for the youth researchers. The focus of the project was to conduct a survey among ninth grade students concerning their early high school…

The neoliberal turn in public education positions the parent as a consumer within an expanding educational marketplace. This shift is premised on the notion that the free market is best suited to promote equity. Critics of this claim highlight how a larger choice arena creates additional opportunities for privileged parents to mobilize their…