This article draws on an ongoing ethnography of distributed medical education (DME) provision in Canada in order to explore the methodological choices of the researchers as well as the wider pluralisation of ethnographic frameworks that is reflected within current research literature. The article begins with a consideration of the technologically…

Much has been written about the style of lecturing that is adopted by lecturers in institutions of further and higher education. However, little has been written about interactions that take place in the informal settings of college and university campuses. Using an ethnographic approach, this paper presents an exploration of how students at the…

This paper is an ethnographic study of weekly intercultural meetings held at an alternative community space run by a large private university in Tokyo, Japan. Through a "team ethnography", the two authors of this paper illuminate ways in which alternative modes of learning were promoted and institutional boundaries were transgressed and…

In this article I describe how a multiple perspectives framework drawn from the field of social work informed my analysis of interview data obtained from Australian preservice teachers who had gone on an international study trip. One incident recounted differently by three separate interviewees meant that the sometimes-similar and…

This paper analyses the role that forms of documentation play in faculty members' experiences of tenure and promotion. Taking an institutional ethnography approach, it examines inconsistencies and ambiguities in documents and connects them to the experiences of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) faculty at one institution…

This paper intends to problematise understandings of the ethnographer's presence in investigating contemporary forms of technologised learning. The ubiquity of new educational technologies raises questions concerning the spaces of education and learning, and challenges, at the same time, the sense of "being there" in terms of the face-to-face…

This article proposes a three-part conceptualisation of the use of Facebook in ethnographic research: as a tool, as data and as context. Longitudinal research with young adults at a time of significant change provides many challenges for the ethnographic researcher, such as maintaining channels of communication and high rates of participant…

This article provides an account of my experience of immersion as a third-level teacher into the three-dimensional multi-user virtual world Second Life for research purposes. An ethnographic methodology was employed. Three stages in this journey are identified: separation, transition and transformation. In presenting this journey of immersion, it…

Selecting, gaining access to and attending college (or university) in the United States involve markers of legitimacy and prestige as understood through symbolic capital. An entire complex of fine differentiations operate to distinguish such capital in both students and the institutions they attend. Drawing on works of Bourdieu, this article…

This paper discusses the complexities of investigating the experiences of participants in hybrid (online/offline) learning communities through educational ethnography. In these communities, people construct small cultures in the liminal spaces or "border crossings" between the virtually real and "actually" real, using computer-mediated and…

Although methodological discussions abound in qualitative research, little time is devoted to access, arguably one of the most important methodological components of social research. Access has often been treated as a side issue by scholarly sources, receiving only cursory attention, generally in a way that reduces it to a mere strategy and severs…

Evolution education in the US is conducted unevenly, or in cases is absent. Showing the strength of ethnography as a means of deeper explication in science education, this article explores the interactions of policy and practice in evolution education. Discussing vignettes from a larger ethnographic study, Creationist rationales and practices…

Despite science's central role in European culture, public perception of, and participation with, science is characterised by contradictions and conflicting agenda. School curriculum reform, for example by Scottish Government, promotes "science for citizenship", yet teachers' understandings of the nature of science and its relationship with…

This paper is concerned with the experiences of Muslim students attending secondary schools and an elite university in England. The research explores how Muslim young men's identities are defined by their social and cultural locations. It is argued that identity is multi-dimensional. It intersects and overlaps with several categories of difference…

This article draws from data produced during subject theory lectures and in conversional interviews with students from an ongoing ethnographic study of mathematics teacher education at a Swedish University. Using Bernsteins' language of description of the pedagogic device the article describes how the aims of teacher education to re-contextualise…