This study examined the extent to which students fully embrace sloyd activities. Sloyd is a form of adventurous education in Sweden where school students take more control of the content and methods of learning as part of their weekly education. Hands on activities are often part of the adventure and it sometimes takes place outdoors. The study…

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…

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…

Several societies throughout the global North and South are now witnessing unprecedented patterns of marginally higher female academic performance and educational attainment. But the processes that have generated such patterns and responses to their development have not been uniform across or within these societies. In multiracial Fiji, statistics…

The study uses ethnographic research from four classes in secondary school as well as from two groups in upper secondary school, to examine everyday racism as an element of the daily institutional lives of students and teachers. The study is based on long-term participant observation and 89 interviews. These were all audio-recorded and…

By treating the household as a primary unit of analysis and social production, this article considers the mutually influential ways in which migrant families shape the educational pathways and experiences of Brazilian children living in Japan. Through an ethnographic exploration of relations between parents, children and their working siblings I…

The Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, where images of magical splendor obscure its challenges, provides a viewpoint from which to understand the contradictions that emerging economies face as they move towards mass education. Isolated from the outside world in every sense except for the mythologies that surround it, Bhutan is attempting to move from a…

This paper presents findings from a qualitative UK study exploring the social practices of schoolchildren visiting an interactive science discovery centre. It is promoted as a place for "learning through doing", but the multi-modal, ethnographic methods adopted suggest that children were primarily engaged in (1) sensory pleasure-taking…

The feminist post-structuralist emphasis on social location has yielded crucial insights within debates about power and reflexivity in educational research; however, spatial location is also at play in the formation of educational ethnographies. Reflecting upon various aspects of a research project with rural students in Ontario, Canada, this…

From a sociological perspective, the topic of emotion in schools has been a rather neglected issue. In this article, we present two types of "emotion work", namely degradation work and rectification work. We describe how teachers in a special education programme called Time-out class employ feelings to get the work done efficiently.…

The paper presents a microethnographic examination of an operatic masterclass, based on a transcribed video recording of just one such class. It is a companion piece to a more generalised ethnographic account of such masterclasses as pedagogic events. The detailed analysis demonstrates the close relationship between spoken and unspoken actions in…

Based on research conducted in an English secondary school, this paper explores computer-mediated moderation as a performative tool. The Module Assessment Meeting (MAM) was the moderation approach under investigation. I mobilise ethnographic data generated by a key informant, and triangulated with that from other actors in the setting, in order to…

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…

This study is based on an ethnography that was carried out in the Transport Programme (TP) in a Swedish upper secondary school (in this paper referred to as Rockmeadows High). The research is part of a larger project focusing on discourses on Intelligence in Swedish upper secondary school, and how these are produced and used in different…