The paper examines school meetings held in a small democratic school in Poland in order to explore how school communities are formed. Drawing on Foucault's concept of power, the authors analyse fieldnotes and interview excerpts to reveal how voice and scripted bodily expressions accompanying verbal utterances are privileged in these school…

Theory-practice gap has been a long-standing challenge in teacher education, however, there has been scarce attention to student teachers' theory learning experiences. This ethnographic study aimed to examine Chinese EFL (English as a foreign language) M.E.d. student teachers' perceptions of the value of theory and their experiences of theory…

This article investigates the rules of schooling which might be new to recently immigrated adolescents with few prior experiences of school-based learning. The purpose was to study how the 'external grammar' (Gee 2005)--i.e. the thoughts, beliefs, values, actions and social interactions--associated with a classroom was negotiated in a language…

This paper explores educational trade fairs as part of the contemporary networked governance of public sector education. The focus is on the forms and functions of network governance in educational trade fairs and how different powers of private and public networking actors and ideas are played out, including the wider implications for education.…

The newly arrived Roma Slovak community in a large urban city in the north of England has been widely perceived as having a myriad of social problems and there is a conflict with the wider community. This paper presents the results of a project to explore barriers and possibilities for the social and educational integration of newly arrived Roma…

In this article, inspired by the idea of using data to think "with" theory [Jackson, A., and L. Mazzei. 2012. "Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives." London: Routledge], we explore how our ethnographic visual data will be 'thought', 'theorised' and verbalised using concepts…

Today parents are faced with increasing expectations to attend to their young children's learning and cognitive development. South Korea and Singapore are well-known for their competitive education systems and for consistently topping international student assessment tests. They also share an inflated private tuition industry, fuelled by the…

This paper gives an ethnographic account of a contemplative class at an elite university in the US. The contemplative class, which incorporates mindfulness-based practices, took on the function of unravelling time, and of challenging the credit-oriented culture of the university. The opening up of time and credits allows for a safe communal space…

This article addresses the fact that local school practices in Sweden today seem to be under constant change as a consequence of the ongoing and forceful neoliberalisation of society that has been going on for about three decades. The pressure on teachers and school leaders has increased due to school rankings and quality assessment has become an…

All over the world, there are schools that represent a different educational system and a different curriculum than the country these schools are situated in. Swedish Schools in turn are located in different parts of the world. The main purpose of this study is to describe and analyse some aspects of the social life at one of these schools, as…

This article reports on an ethnographic study to understand the practices of sexuality education (SE) in relation to what young girls want to learn in a primary school Ethiopia. This is done by means of school observations, FGD with female students and interviews with SE teachers. The study shows the observed SE focuses mainly on issues of…

This paper discusses the potential of participant art-making as an ethnographic analytic method for materialising otherwise invisible experiences in the everyday lives of people. To describe this methodology, I share examples from a two year project conducted in a photography classroom in the northeastern United States. Teenage participants made…

This paper presents an ethnography study that explores the formulation of interculturality from the unique experiences of sail trainees who were bound by space and time during a sailing voyage across the North Sea. The author immersed herself as a mentor-researcher into a 107-year-old tall ship's expedition, sailing across 1000 nautical miles.…

In this article, we discuss how class and migrant background intersect when students discuss their studies in general upper secondary education and their aspirations in university admission. We focus on the discussed social inequalities in student admission to one of the elite fields, medicine, in eight ethnographic interviews with students and…

This article demonstrates how Bourdieu's field theory can be used to systematise ethnographic insights, establishing and validating connections between the micro-level of participants' experiences and macro-level contexts, whilst complementing and facilitating the reflexivity that has long been part of ethnographic traditions. Combining an…