Though music has a long and successful history within education, it is often one of the first sacrificial lambs when school budgets tighten. Over the course of an academic year, a documentary film sought to tell the story of an American middle school drum ensemble. The context of this group provided an ideal way to examine the nature of student…

Ethnography has the capacity to interrogate and unravel what Geertz called "webs of significance" in respect of difficult and perplexing cultural issues. One arena that is especially troubling at the moment lies in the need to pose questions and explore more robust explanations as to how it is that some teachers of young adolescents seem to be…

Based on an ethnographic case study done in an all-white, rural middle school, this article examines the students' experience with and interpretation of an international education program implemented with a hope of providing more global/international contents to the curriculum. The study shows that these students interpreted other cultures…