In this article, the author describes how the methodological approach of autoethnography enabled her to interrogate the philosophical underpinnings of the learning and teaching practices that she espoused as a university academic. This critical questioning was provoked through her interactions with postgraduate students from a range of contexts…

This article explores the use of autoethnography to investigate and exemplify work as a Pakeha (read European) teacher educator working with undergraduate physical education students in the context of the indigenous Maori culture in Aotearoa New Zealand. To show the author's world and understanding of it, she brings the reader into contact…

This article is based on research in an ongoing ethnographic investigation of schooling in a multiethnic, multiracial school on the outskirts of a major Swedish conurbation in an area of multidimensional poverty. First, it analyses the use of an individuating, visible pedagogy, which contains a large number of routines that are designed and…

This article concerns issues of classroom management in heterogeneous classrooms. Although research in the field of learning styles has yielded mixed results, there is a call for information about how they could be used to individualize instruction, especially in primary schools. This article is part of an ethnographic study aiming to examine…

The influence of policy texts upon learners depends largely on how much influence such texts wield. Policy discourses are one of the main means whereby policy texts, in the settings in which they operate, influence the value, the implementation and the inscribing of those texts on learners. The Economic and Social Research Council-based research…

This article reviews excerpts from a body of ethnographic data examining some young people's disaffection from, and refusal of, the education project as a whole in a UK coalfield area. Key examples are used to illustrate intergenerational continuities and disjunctions in attitudes to formal education in these exceptional and sometimes…

This article is about the understanding of how children, using different conceptions of literacy as means to construct their social reality and their social roles in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms, are enabled to enact agency in terms of their strategic making and remaking of selves. The research approach is informed by a…

School communities find themselves within an overall ideological and epistemological controversy with regard to a drive for goal-oriented and "evidence-based" practices on the one hand and emancipative bottom-up developmental strategies on the other, treating empirical data as information to be analysed according to context, with potential meaning…

Whilst the notion of children's rights and an entitlement to express their views and participate as global citizens is threaded throughout the international policy field, children's perspectives on the near ubiquitous practice of homework, and its effects on their daily lives and learner subjectivities, remain under-researched. Drawing on the…

This article presents first results of an ethnographic research project in a Luxembourgish primary school that accompanied the development of a school project by children from the fifth grade. Analysing the data children themselves collected with Kodak Zi8 cameras in order to document their project activities, it investigates their possibilities…

The articles in this collection are about the development, possibility, exercise and possible frustration of human agency within educational exchanges. They are also all based on ethnography, which is now a common approach to educational research. Ethnography is not a seamless, neutral observational practice but is instead variable in relation to…

Drawing on a study in three Swedish lower secondary schools, this article examines how students engaged in the democratic processes involved in the formation of an action group intended to influence their school by making it more environmentally friendly. The aim is to acquire greater understanding of influential processes in relation to gender…

The education system in Sweden has taken a strong neo-liberal turn over the past 15 years. This article uses ethnographic research from an Individual Programme (IP) in a Swedish upper secondary school to explore how alliances, collective actions and resistance can be materialised within the changed system. According to the author, the teachers in…

This article is based on ethnographic studies in the context of vocational education: two in Sweden and one in Finland. The Swedish data originate from the Vehicle programme and the Child and Recreation programme; the Finnish data originate from the social and health-care sector. In this sense, the authors' perspective is cross-cultural. The…

This article deals with the negotiation process deciding the institutional organization of vocational special needs education and training in Finland. Traditionally, the state has been a strong actor in organizing vocational special needs education in Finland. At the beginning of 2009, however, all five state-maintained vocational special schools…