UK Government policy states that all young people aged 14-19 are entitled to a broad and balanced curriculum, with access to "personalised" education and training pathways. With boys currently leading the statistics on exclusion, girls' educational and social needs are often sidelined in alternative education provision, as the majority of…

This article offers a narrative account of a research enquiry focused on children's play in one London primary school playground. The central question addressed by the article is that of how to determine what meanings the children give to their play activities. The initial sketch of the methods used in the research is followed by a series of…

This article is based on a field study in two boy-dominated classes in a vocational programme in a Swedish upper secondary school. The focus of the article is the boys' perspective on their cheating activities during lessons and tests within academic subjects. Since the boys often regarded these subjects as boring and useless in relation to their…

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…

This paper explores disciplinary technologies and pupil redisposition through school and teacher focus on school equipment and homework diaries. During our field research in two contrasting secondary schools, we experienced the importance of missing school equipment to teacher and school control. We also concluded that forgotten or missing school…

This paper gives a history of the Oxford Ethnography Conference. Over more than three decades, a regular conference of sociologists of education and ethnographers has met and produced a series of academic writings. The paper describes some of the interrelationships between developments that occurred within the conference and external changes to…

This article, based on an ethnographic study of five Filipino-born daughters of Filipina migrant workers in Japan, discusses how these young women construct understandings of home as they navigate the borderlands between the Philippines, Japan and the US. The study reveals the ways in which these young women negotiate the possibilities and…

This paper reports on an ethnographic study of administrators, faculty, parents and community members in one remote Michigan school district. The purpose of the study is to describe and explain how Michigan's educational reform perspective--arguably similar to the education reform perspectives of many states--encountered the educational…

This article considers how one may integrate ethnographic data generation with research questions and an analytic framework that are strongly theoretically informed by Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). Generating data through participant observation of school-based, student teacher education activity and interviewing all those involved…

This article explores the approaches to risk that some teachers adopt when they are involved in facilitating outdoor activities. The research was carried out at a residential outdoor centre as part of a PhD study and a follow-up pilot project. The participants were primary school pupils, their teachers and the centre staff. For the purpose of this…

This article reports on a study of apprentices in England and Germany designed to explore young people's learner identities over time and in relation to particular learning environments. The research adopts a multi-method ethnographic approach, combining biographical interviews with multi-site participant observation. The article problematises the…

Drawing on findings from an ethnographic study of Romani Gypsy groups in England (1996-2000), along with data from follow-up work involving original and additional participants (2005-ongoing), this paper explores several ethical issues that arose. It traces developing relationships across a 13-year period, identifying the problems of attempting to…

This article shows how primary school children in a province of Buenos Aires, Argentina were used as co-researchers and how this provided an important tool for my learning alongside them. Including children's viewpoints in my ethnographical research was vital to understanding aspects of school politicisation that would otherwise have remained…

The research sought to find out how international students came to terms with cultural differences and positioned themselves in a complex environment such as a boarding school. This article considers how a researcher's insider position can enrich the understanding in a multicultural school setting while identifying the hidden dilemmas. The…

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…