This paper considers the educational and theoretical implications of an analysis into the artistic movement of poetry slam. Slam is a successful and growing global phenomenon, which both directly and indirectly sets itself against the dominant literary world. As such, it could be viewed as presenting a challenge to dominant literary conventions…

This study focuses on a group of highly skilled female migrants who were carers to the elderly, and the roles of education, literacy, and learning in their social networks and mobility in Cumbria, England. Over a one-year period, interviews were conducted with care training specialists, carers, clients, and employers across England, including…

In 1985 Falmer Press published my first book, a classroom ethnography entitled "Initial Encounters in a Secondary School," which helped establish me as an academic. However, it has long concerned me that the decade-long Victoria Road Lower School Project (as it came to be called) contained two resounding "silences": (1) "Silence 1" concerned the…

In children's lives the start of school is a turning point: compulsory education is their first encounter with civil duties. This important step in the process of becoming individual citizens is permeated with strong emotions and ambivalent expectations. However, the representations of school are created, established and negotiated in educational…

The Swedish educational system states that work in schools should depict and mediate equality. One way of achieving this is through fiction, which according to the syllabus provides students with knowledge about the living conditions of women and men during different epochs and places. The present paper examines gender in a Swedish school,…

Creativity is part of a current global policy paradigm in education. The present article examines aspects of one national version of this policy in practice, by looking at the ways student preferences for different types of classroom teaching in different subjects with different "spaces for creativity and self-realisation" are socially constructed…

We can note a varied use and attitudes to song and music in Islam. In the classroom of Sana--a primary school teacher of Islamic religious education (IRE) in a Muslim school in Sweden--music is an important but not uncontested part of IRE. The music not only supports themes discussed in the classroom but also gives variation to the education. A…

This article illustrates how an ethnographic perspective can provide a descriptive methodological approach to parent-research as a process of inquiry within the field of education. By juxtaposing data and illuminating reflexive accounts from a longitudinal parent-research study, I suggest that such a perspective provides critical insights into the…

The structure of the teaching profession leaves teachers professionally and personally isolated from other adults. This article will discuss the results of an ethnography focused on the rare informal social interaction that occurs among teachers in a United States' school, with a particular focus on the lunch hour. Specifically, this article…

In this article we used an orienting framework of interactional ethnography to make visible classrooms acting as cultures. We examined the interactional patterns from two different classrooms as participants jointly negotiated and constructed meaning. We first demonstrated how participants began to construct a classroom culture in the first weeks…

Many schools in Hong Kong are concerned with the growing number of enrolments of students from Mainland China. This article examines the immigrant students' constructs of their cross-cultural identities. It reveals how these students experience a journey of transformation in language, culture and identity. Qualitative data were collected from…

The apparent simplicity of ethnographic methods--studying people in their normal life setting, going beyond what might be said in surveys and interviews to observe everyday practices--is deceptive. Anthropological knowledge is gained through fieldwork and through pursuing a reflexive flexible approach. This study carried out in a non-government…

Parental involvement has been increasingly gaining support among education theorists and policymakers across many countries (Kelley-Laine 1998) as an effective way to improve student academic performance. However, the cultural assumptions underlying calls for parental involvement have received little attention (De Carvalho 2001; Lareau 1987).…

The notion of site is critical to ethnography and provides a sense of spatial stability--somewhere the researcher enters in order to research what is contained within. Using contemporary understandings of space, the author reflects on two studies to explore the (im)possibility of poststructuralist ethnography. The first study was undertaken in a…

This paper presents findings from an innovative school-based youth radio project for Mexican immigrant students. We draw on ethnographic and discourse data collected over an academic year, including multiple data representations from video and audio recordings, radio production artefacts, interviews, and still images. We begin our discussion with…