Drawing on a year of participant observation in an untracked, diversifying middle school, I examine how sixth graders positioned themselves and were positioned by others as "smart" or "not smart." I focus on peer interactions during cooperative small group instruction, identifying the material, relational, and ideational…

Educators are continuously exploring ways to enhance the academic potential of students while fostering a positive social atmosphere within classrooms. To meet these various curricular and interpersonal objectives, teachers are increasingly utilising educational storification in order to engage students and positively support their social…

In this article, we describe the purpose and the process of video-cued ethnography. Using examples primarily from the Children Crossing Borders study, we outline six basic elements of video-cued ethnography including site selection, participant-observation, filming, editing, focus group interviews, and comparative analysis. We detail some of the…

This research note offers a critical reflection of the process of conducting qualitative research in the Irish primary school setting. The research discussed took place during the school year 2016-2017. It explored primary school children's understandings of citizenship and, the kinds of collective social actions they participated in as citizens…

In this article, I revisit the concept of activist educational research to consider a wider array of methodological approaches that support the documentation and transformation of systems of oppression, from youth participatory action research projects to 'studying up.' Although activist researchers often turn to participatory methods, I examine…

Teacher agency is often depicted in terms of autonomy, empowerment, and participation. This article examines how those democratic visions of teacher agency are (re)constructed during the post-World War Two period when social scientists were eager to find organized procedural reasons. To explain this, I historicize the shifted teachers' role from a…

Teachers are effective agents who can introduce and support students' self-regulated learning (SRL) in classrooms. This qualitative study presents an integrative, ecological model of SRL-in-context from the teachers' perspectives. Data were obtained from in-depth interviews, participant observations and informal conversations gathered from the…

Despite being a staple of academic life (or perhaps because it is so taken-for-granted), the academic conference has been generally under-utilised as a site for academic research. Using participant observation as its methodology, this article draws on a long career of conference attendance to present two iron laws of conferences which address the…

The last few decades abound in studies concerned with what teachers, students, parents, and other participants in the educational process believe about a wide variety of issues. Most of these studies follow methodological procedures based on reports that people make about their own beliefs. We argue that this strategy is seriously flawed under…

In the mid-1990s with the birth of internet-based web technologies, ePortfolios emerged as a powerful tool in the institution of education. They are positioned within the online activities of courses and programs of universities, which are a subset of internet learning spaces. These interactions are located virtually on the internet and foster the…

Anchor movements rest on the premise that people- and place-based initiatives can be mutually reinforcing. The community development movement, however, has been haunted for years by the people-place dilemma -- the idea that efforts to help people harm efforts to uplift places and vice versa. Most of the literature on the anchor strategy has…

The purpose of this paper is to further examine 'place-reflexivity' as a methodological tool for engaging in site-seeing in qualitative research. Qualitative research often involves a site or field. Yet, the 'where' of qualitative research has often been overlooked in methodological discussions. This approach is akin to sightseeing where sites are…

Observational research has a long history in many disciplines, such as education and organizational studies, yet has had slow uptake in the scholarship of work-integrated learning (WIL). Observational research enables the researcher to journey inside workplace or community sites where actions and conversations unfold, to unpack the complexities of…

Performance ethnography is a form of performed research that creates a theatrical representation of ethnographic inquiry. Walford (2009) proposes that frequently performance ethnographers neglect traditional ethnographic practices such as participant observation and substantial time in the field. This paper draws on research which investigated the…

Reflecting on data from a longitudinal connective ethnographic study exploring how six lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youths mobilized digital literacies to write against injustice, this article uses autoethnographic methods to trace desire as a co-constructed text in qualitative research. More specifically, it complicates…