This qualitative study examines how notions of sociopolitical membership and belonging are constructed in conversations about cultural difference. Drawing upon nine months of participant observation, informal conversation, and interviews with transnational youth at two U.S. high schools during the 2013-2014 academic year, my analysis highlights…

Background/Context: The current educational market nestled in neoliberal and market-based reform efforts has shifted the nature of public education. Community-based educational spaces are also shaped within this context. As such, given the political and educational climate youth workers are situated in, their role as advocates, cultural workers,…

This study examines changes to Jewish day school students' narratives of the history of Israel after a two-and-a-half-week trip there. Seventeen students were interviewed about the history of Israel before and after the trip. Before the trip, most students' accounts lacked logical connections among the different events. The observations on the…

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 article examines how the actors of a Chilean public high school navigated the political scenario produced when its students decided to occupy their school to protest a national Educational Reform. Using ethnographic data and interviews with high school students, it proposes to understand this process in the context of a figured world directly…

The purpose of the study was to explore how a group of at-risk youth in a South Florida alternative high school experienced a freehand visual arts drawing lesson as a learning portal to the teaching of the basic principles of geometry. These young people were completely devoid of interest in and failed to understand basic geometrical concepts.…

This paper explores the implementation of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) at a rural, alternative high school in Alabama. Students at the school were atypical from those usually described in the YPAR literature in that they were predominately white, working and middle class, and lived in rural neighborhoods that were geographically…

This article utilizes the idea of hospitality to explore how educative practices contribute to the making of citizens at Light Falls High School (LHS), a suburban American secondary school that professes a strong commitment to racial equity and global awareness. The data are derived from an ethnographic case study which took place in 2013-2014. I…

Parents' involvement in their children's education is widely understood as a key component of educational success. However, schools typically expect parents to engage with the school system in ways consistent with White, middle-class parenting and behavioral norms and in ways that are deferential to the school's agenda. In this article, we report…

Multilayered disciplinary policies including sophisticated surveillance mechanisms and harsh punitive practices increasingly characterize schools in the United States. Researchers contend that these modalities funnel students into prisons and produce "prison-like" conditions and/or militarized spaces. Most studies have examined the…

This case study focused on the addition of a therapy dog in an Art I level class at a public high school level that included students with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The purpose of this study is to determine how Animal Assisted Therapy may benefit autism support students in the art classroom. The students participated in lessons that focused on…

What happens when a team of university education researchers initiates a social justice learning project in a local high school, and--despite the overall project's considerable successes in cultivating students' critical political "voice"--is confounded by the periodic, apparent "silences" of some of its young female students?…

This article highlights the experiences of students and educators from a larger sociocultural study of participation and engagement at a senior alternative high school programme in British Columbia, Canada. Drawing on participant observation, active interviews and document analysis, school attendance was remediated as a meaningful social practice…

This paper explores the evolving perceptions of community sentiments, for three teachers and 36 AS-level students on a week-long residential fieldtrip. For this in-depth study I adopted an ethnographic methodology in which I participated in, observed and recounted some of the complex and fluid spatial arrangements and processes, analysing their…