Classroom Ethnography Research Articles

Children Reporting Online

This article describes an action-research project in which children ages 8 to 11 learn internet research skills in the context of producing a community newspaper. New technologies are made more relevant to working-class African American and Latino students by using them to report on their immediate community as well as to their own lives and their own neighborhood. What misconceptions arise when children try to evaluate the information they find on the web? How does the web push children’s interest away from local politics and toward a global entertainment culture? Through an ethnographic classroom study, the article discusses the ways children have both generated and discarded story ideas; how their stories reflect their conflicting and overlapping age, gender, and ethnic identities; and how their use of computers has challenged this author to reexamine the project’s goals and the meaning of the internet in children’s lives.

When students are failed: 'love' as an alternative education discourse?

This article explores how classist education practices are constituted through education systems and structures and through the habitus of key agents. This school and classroom ethnography focuses on the education practices and habitus of the head teacher of a girls' secondary school, who is also a key agent in the Maltese national education policy community. Though structured through the discourses and institutional practices of the highly selective national system, Ms Sicura's habitus is also a response to the challenges the present conjuncture poses to her. This includes the biographies of her low socio-economic status students and the complex needs they bring to school, as well as the increasingly contradictory demands placed by the decentralisation process of the selective education system. Overwhelmed by these and struggling to offer a valid school experience for her low-achieving students, Ms Sicura responds with a discourse of 'love'. However, this replaces a programme for educational progress. It reproduces the global and national classist education discourses, in which low socio-economic status students are contained by 'care', while middle-class students are offered quality education in competitive market.

Competing Interests between Researcher, Teacher and Student in the Ethics of Classroom Ethnography

This article discusses ethical dilemmas which confront ethnographic research in classrooms, using my own classroom ethnography in illustration. The very capacity of ethnography for capturing an in‐depth view of day to day classroom life creates its ethical difficulties. I demonstrate how students’ interests, as reflected in the research, may come into conflict with those of their teachers and how the researcher's responsibilities to the profession may conflict with their responsibilities to certain members of the researched. In seeking a way through these issues, I explore possible alternatives to traditional ethnography such as participatory action research which largely avoids the particular ethical problems of ethnography. I argue in support of the role played by critical and interpretive ethnography, taking into account the post‐structuralist critique and explore the potential of creative non‐fiction as a report genre for critical ethnography for alleviating my ethical dilemma. The conclusion reached is that there are no simple and easy solutions and that the answers lie largely in the nature of the relationship negotiated between teacher and researcher.

Competing Interests between Researcher, Teacher and Student in the Ethics of Classroom Ethnography

Competing Interests between Researcher, Teacher and Student in the Ethics of Classroom Ethnography

Participation Structure as Cultural Schema: Examples From a Navajo Preschool

This paper examines the relationship between micro and macro perspectives on the organization of participation structure, and considers how both perspectives can be useful to the ethnographer of interaction. It suggests that understandings of the organization of participation may be considered forms of tacit knowledge, or cultural schemas, which may differ cross-culturally. Examples are drawn from a study of Navajo preschool, and supported by a substantial body of classroom ethnography in other Native American communities. I argue that participation structure at the macro level of speech event is largely negotiated through and dependent upon cultural schemas for participation structure at the micro level of interaction.

Science Classroom Ethnography: An Analysis of the Teacher-Students Relations Mediated Resources

Science Classroom Ethnography: An Analysis of the Teacher-Students Relations Mediated Resources

Ethical Issues in the Conduct and Communication of Ethnographic Classroom Research

In this paper, I discuss two ethical issues central to the conduct of any ethnographic research: the representation of truth and confidentiality. The first issue relates to a fundamental assumption of the ethnographic paradigm, namely that truth and reality are perspectival, contextual, and multiple. Moreover, in the field of art education, areas of knowledge and expertise between researcher and researched often overlap. Observations, interpretations, and their articulation are shaped by the situated knowledge, beliefs, and commitments of the art researcher. The way we address this issue affects the very process of conducting ethnographic research-data collection and analysis-eventually shaping the voice and form of the product. The second issue of confidentiality concerns the product and its dissemination to members within and outside the researched setting. More than following a contract or a formula, ethical considerations are guided by a search for a deeper understanding, as well as a cultivation of a curious, compassionate frame of mind.

Gender and Ethnicity as Factors in the Development of Verbal Skills in Bilingual Mexican American Women

This study describes and analyzes differences in student output across ethnicity and gender in a mixed monolingual English and bilingual Spanish/English class in order to understand how L2 oral language skills are developed in a mixed classroom. Primary participants in the study included approximately 30 basic writing students ranging in age from 18 to 60. Fifty-five percent of the students were bilingual Mexican American, and the remainder were monolingual Anglo Americans. Participant observation, informal interviews, and audio-tape classroom and tutorial interaction provide the data for this classroom ethnography. Data were analyzed to discover patterns of student output in various interfactional contexts and to discover how the structure and content of interaction influenced these patterns. The analysis revealed that bilingual Mexican American students spoke significantly less in whole class interaction than monolingual Anglo American students. Moreover, an analysis by gender revealed that Mexican American men contributed four times the amount expected, whereas Mexican American women spoke half as much as expected. In other interfactional contexts, however, the bilingual women were quite verbal. The social status of Mexican American women as “double minorities” and negative attitudes toward Spanish/English bilingual help explain why the Mexican American women alone responded to whole class interaction with silence.

Book Reviews

British Educational Research JournalVolume 18, Issue 1 p. 87-96 Book Reviews First published: February 1992 https://doi.org/10.1080/0141192920180108Citations: 1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Book reviewed in this article: Fundamentals of Educational Research: G. ANDERSON Teacher Skills and Strategies: PETER WOODS The Happiest Days?: PETER WOODS Series: Science Processes and Concept Exploration: the ‘space’ research reports Sound: D. WATT & T. RUSSELL Growth: T. RUSSELL & D. WATT Evaporation and Condensation: T. RUSSELL & D. WATT Light: J. OSBORNE, P. BLACK, M. SMITH & J. MEADOWS Materials: T. RUSSELL, K. LONGDEN & L. MCGUIGAN Electricity: J. OSBORNE, P. BLACK, M. SMITH & J. MEADOWS Uneasy Transitions: J. CORBETT (Ed.) Teaching in Further Education: L. CURZON Education Limited: schooling and training and the New Right Classroom Ethnography: MARTYN HAMMERSLEY Qualitative Research: analysis types and software tools: RENATA TESCH Hearts and Minds: self-esteem and the schooling of girls: J. KENWAY & S. WILLIS (Eds) Citing Literature Volume18, Issue1February 1992Pages 87-96 RelatedInformation

Classroom Ethnography

Classroom Ethnography

Insiders and Outsiders: Cultural Membership and the Micropolitics of Education among the Zuni

This article outlines some of the power relationships that exist in the schools of a small-scale community (Zuni). It describes a complex set of insider-outsider relationships, analyzes their effects and in so doing provides support for McDermott's notion of collusion. It highlights the complexities of the task teachers face as they attempt to provide culturally responsive pedagogy in a small-scale, culturally different community. CULTURAL DIFFERENCES, NATIVE AMERICAN EDUCATION, COLLUSION, CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE PEDAGOGY, CLASSROOM ETHNOGRAPHY

Classroom observed: The hidden curriculum in Lagos, Nigeria

This paper discusses the hidden curriculum observed during 120 hours of ethnographic classroom observation in some Lagos primary schools. Since this is a method of research relatively unutilized in Nigeria, this paper therefore first focusses on the important concept of classroom strategies as defined and explored by Western researchers, before discussing findings from classrooms in Nigeria. More specifically, it discusses the teaching styles in the case study schools, the Nigerian formulae of assessment, the pupils' strategies, teachers' strategies, classroom labelling, hierarchies in the classrooms, patterns of interaction between pupils, classroom rules and definition of normality and deviance, teachers' definitions of the situation and the good pupils.

Culture and the bilingual classroom. Studies in classroom ethnography. Edited by Henry T. Trueba, Grace Pung Guthrie, and Kathryn Hu-Pei Au. Newbury House Publishers, Inc., Rowley, Mass., London, and Tokyo. 1981. Pp. 248.

Culture and the bilingual classroom. Studies in classroom ethnography. Edited by Henry T. Trueba, Grace Pung Guthrie, and Kathryn Hu-Pei Au. Newbury House Publishers, Inc., Rowley, Mass., London, and Tokyo. 1981. Pp. 248. - Volume 6 Issue 2

Culture and the bilingual classroom. Studies in classroom ethnography. Ed. by Henry T. Trueba, Grace Pung Guthrie and Kathryn Hu-Pei Au. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House, 1981. Pp. 248

Culture and the bilingual classroom. Studies in classroom ethnography. Ed. by Henry T. Trueba, Grace Pung Guthrie and Kathryn Hu-Pei Au. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House, 1981. Pp. 248

Culture and the Bilingual Classroom: Studies in Classroom Ethnography

Culture and the Bilingual Classroom: Studies in Classroom Ethnography