This article focuses on teachers' identity construction in the context of a "failing" inner-city high school. Framing teachers' student stories as narrative resources for solving both the practical and identity problems that confront them in an underresourced, inner-city school, the article argues that these stories can serve…

Through ethnographic examples of students' engagement with American universities in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, I argue that branch campuses have a particularly important relationship with emerging forms of racial consciousness, identity, and politicization among students, both citizen and foreign resident. This entry point is one…

This article describes how early childhood teachers engaged in a public preK professional development program. We examine how developing teacher identities mediated engagement with the discourses of developmentally appropriate practice, early mathematics, and funds of knowledge and how they connected present practice to an imagined future. We…

This article explores how Confucius Institute teachers and U.S. students use language to index qualities of Chinese people and culture. The study draws on the model of "linguistic fact" to argue that students' and teachers' contextualized use of language occurs in relation to their different yet naturalized assumptions about a…

Drawing on 15 months of fieldwork in Taiwan, this article analyzes circulating discourses and practices across heterogeneous scales that conflate Taiwanese minority-language elders with foreign brides as nonmodern and childlike. The assiduous production and reproduction of historically and geographically displaced linguistic Others is part and…

We examine how counselors, teachers, and other professionals at a secondary school in Madrid (Spain) understand cultural diversity and work with immigrant students' educational circumstances. Our analysis suggests that cultural diversity is largely construed as a problem and the explanation of educational difficulties is organized around an…

How can scholars trace the global production and circulation of educational policies? The vertical case study incorporates three elements: "vertical" attention across micro-, meso-, and macro-levels, or scales; a "horizontal" comparison of how policies unfold in distinct locations; and a "transversal," processual…

Tamil Nadu has gained international recognition for reforming its government school classrooms into active, child-centered learning environments. Our exploration of the history of the Activity Based Learning movement suggests that this reform was achieved by social movement actors serving in and through the state's administration.…

Based on my fieldwork with Burmese teachers in Thailand, I describe the drawbacks of using IRB-mandated written consent procedures in my cross-cultural collaborative ethnographic research on education. Drawing on theories of intersubjectivity (Mikhail Bakhtin), ethics (Emmanuel Levinas), and translation (Naoki Sakai), I describe face-to-face…

This article explores the possibility of anthropology as Bildung, or self-cultivation. As an educational mode, Bildung is focused on the moral education of students, encouraging them to broaden themselves in their encounters with others. I will discuss this process in terms of a lesson I learned from the highland Maya about being a good neighbor…

This article examines the symbolic boundary work that is carried out at a school whose student population is heterogeneous in terms of ethnicity and class. Based on ethnography, the article demonstrates how the school's staff seeks to neutralize ethnic boundaries and their accompanying discourse, while the pupils try to bring ethnic…

Based on a four-year ethnography, I draw on critical race theory and Bourdieuian theory of language to analyze why a Chinese Immigrant couple regarded their 1.5-Generation Chinese Canadian leaders at an evangelical Christian church as "Westerners," and how the leaders differentiated themselves from "Westerners" and…

This article ethnographically analyzes the practices of deaf young adults in Bangalore, India. As sign language is not used by families, schools, or other institutions, the church is a crucial educational space. Churchgoing provides deaf young adults with opportunities to orient themselves toward other deaf young adults, to develop new ideas of…

This article traces the ways in which notions of diversity inhered in educational policies and practices to mediate the everyday schooling realities of immigrant youth in a Catalonian public secondary school. Diversity, even as it was celebrated and shrouded in liberal appeals to tolerance and cosmopolitanism, was also something requiring…

This study uses an ecological framework to map one Japanese child's transition between elementary school life in the United States and Japan. I privilege the child's perspective while weaving in parent and teacher views, as well as observation and document data. Implicit and explicit expectations in the focal student's classrooms…