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…

This paper is a re-engagement with some ethnographic data, originally analysed using a sociocultural approach. It makes use of a recent proposal that Lacan's "mirror stage" when applied to an analysis of classroom settings and interactions can offer a fruitful way of explaining and understanding classroom lives, identities and…

To identify the possibilities for collaborative professional development; a research-driven model was adopted to assist an English First Additional Language teacher to appreciate how he could teach effectively by using an approach that takes into account the students' culture. Using critical observation and stimulated recall discussion, this…

This article reveals how test-based performativity pressures interfere with the pedagogical approaches preferred by teachers of second-language learners. Our findings derive from ethnographic research conducted in two non-mainstream high schools: one in a US city and other one in a Swedish city. Both schools serve immigrant students who speak…

Netnography is an approach to studying online communities and cultures to arrive at an ethnographic understanding. Drawing on our own experiences and methodological choices in a netnography of a multi-site online community of practice of English language teachers, known as Webheads in Action, this article illustrates how ethnographic fieldwork…

This article reports on a study of secondary English teachers' perceptions of and implementation of the New English Curriculum Reform in China initiated in 2009. Ethnography and triangulated data collection methods were employed to gather information about three senior secondary English teachers' interpretations of the New Curriculum and their…

This article provides an ethnographic account of an "international preschool" in Japan, describing how ideologies of "English" and "internationalism" are produced and consumed among the parents, teachers and directors, in their common goal of socialising an "international" child. (Contains 6 notes.)

The ethnography reported here reports on the findings of a practitioner ethnography conducted in a feminised and casualised workforce over four years (1997-2001) in a New Zealand polytechnic. It examines the competing allegiances of teachers and students in a combined community and workplace English oriented programme, in contexts where…

This paper explores what it means to engage as an ethical researcher in the conduct of critical ethnography. During the years in which this critical ethnography of new language learners in a midwestern high school, the ethnographer actively participated in the life of the site. This paper poses the question of what such active involvement means…

The purpose of this study is to examine a refugee boy's experiences with literacy in and out of school in the US. Within these contexts, I explore this youth's literacy development in light of his identity as a poor Yezidi Kurdish refugee from Iraq. Central to the article are two main themes. The first, life as a scorpion sting, explicates the…

Utilizing a framework which employs symbolic capital and post-colonial analysis, this paper examines the cultural meanings of English-language education at Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay, India. The central question this article seeks to address is how power is replicated through education and, more specifically, the ways in which…

This paper represents part of an ethnographic study conducted in a small college town in the northern United States. Based on Fairclough's conceptualization of language as a site of social meaning construction and power struggle, I conduct critical discourse analyses on data collected at broad, mid, and micro level contexts. I demonstrate how…