About 20 years ago, a number of Yukon schools took a different approach to outdoor education and outdoor pursuits. During the 1970s and 1980s, most Yukon high schools and junior high schools offered a course called Outdoor Education. These courses fit into the conventional blocks in a school timetable. Outdoor activities longer than these blocks…

Scholars of educational change agree that leaders need to develop a vision, build capacity and ensure ownership of change by staff. We argue that understanding the actual work that leaders must do in order to convert these categories into action, requires a social practice approach. Taking the notion of sense-making as a social practice, drawn…

Ever since the first ethnographic studies, the question about how people learn in different contexts was an essential element of research. Studies in anthropology of education have increasingly focused on schooling. Nowadays, however, the traditional topic of learning in out-of-school contexts recovers its relevance because the development of…

The sociology of education provides the most effective means to look into in the dynamics of education and the changes it produces in the individual. This research uses in-depth field interviews to study the social change experienced by a group of college students at a private higher learning institution in Malaysia. The results reveal that there…

This paper reports on a completed field study that examined the usability and effectiveness of learning objects designed for Australian and New Zealand primary and secondary schools. It focuses on student engagement by observing the ways students interacted with learning objects and by listening to what they said about them. Questions that guided…

The purpose of this paper is to document smallholder experiences during a participatory experimental initiative and draw useful lessons for field practitioners. The main methods used to collect data were participant observation, in-depth interviews among 40 farmers, and analyses of notes taken during participatory monitoring and evaluation. These…

In this article, the author draws on the experiences of doing an ethnography of mas' making practices in Trinidad Carnival mas' camps to explore and dialogue with her perception of self as a becoming native ethnographer and her valuing of the perceptions of a member of the community's view of her role as another colonizer. She addresses the…

Introduction: This study examined the everyday work of eight teachers of students with visual impairments at governmental primary and secondary schools in Queensland, Australia. The small-scale study aimed to capture the scope and complexity of the activities of these teachers and the regular challenges they face in their expected everyday roles.…

Students undertaking field-based learning, in which they work with Indigenous people in Northern Australia, describe a profound learning experience redolent with emotion. Inspired, challenged and transformed, the students are compelled in ways that require them to interrogate their own selves and taken-for-granted beliefs. In this paper, we draw…

In 2 quasi-experimental field studies in a real-life physical education (PE) setting, the authors investigated whether the interest-enjoyment and vitality of Greek pupils (age range, 10-12 years) varied from class to class as a function of the class-to-class variation in the manipulated motivational environment (Studies 1 and 2) and pupils'…

The apparent simplicity of ethnographic methods--studying people in their normal life setting, going beyond what might be said in surveys and interviews to observe everyday practices--is deceptive. Anthropological knowledge is gained through fieldwork and through pursuing a reflexive flexible approach. This study carried out in a non-government…

The Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) has been a successful and popular initial teacher education (ITE) programme since the 1950s, with the masters level PGCE being successfully embedded within universities in England since 2007 and having high levels of student satisfaction. Recent White Papers, policy and reviews have undermined the…

This contribution documents the author's lived experiences in his fieldwork for his PhD research in the field of English as a second/foreign language in a familiar social setting in Bangladesh. The account suggests that insider researchers can helpfully draw on their tacit knowledge of local social and cultural norms and values to understand their…

Between 1963 and 2009, there have been 13 published studies offering empirical evidence on biology fieldwork in schools and colleges in the UK. This paper considers the evidence from these studies relating to work with 16-19 year old students undertaking academic study beyond the compulsory years of schooling; advanced ("A") level. It…

Much pedagogic research undertaken in geography and other disciplines relies on post-hoc methods such as surveys or interviews to investigate the student experience of higher education (often based on self-reports of behaviour). However, observation of students provides a far more direct route to obtain information about their behaviour, and there…