Innovations in Educational Ethnography

Ethnographies of higher education: introduction to the special issue

“…This is especially obvious in the case of ethnography of education, which in the USA developed primarily from the anthropologies of socialization and learning in 'primitive cultures' into the studies of schooling among Native and African Americans, but in the UK more from sociological studies of class dynamics in school settings. Furthermore, in East Central Europe it stems primarily from ethnological interest in the education of the Roma as the largest ethnic minority; and in Japan predominantly from psychology; and in many other countries a large part of ethnographers of education are not based in any of these disciplines but rather in the schools and departments of education (Anderson-Levitt 2011; Spindler and Hammond 2006;Walford 2008).…”

Zooming Out from the Struggling Individual Student: An Account of the Cultural Construction of Engineering Ability in an Undergraduate Programming Class

“…In line with cultural and interactional approaches, we draw on a perspective advocated by Ray McDermott and his collaborator Herv e Varenne (McDermott, 1993;McDermott & Varenne, 2006) to suggest and illustrate an alternative approach to research on educational problems. McDermott and Varenne call the approach cultural construction, or "turning away" from the struggling individual.…”

“…Having touched on the breadth of ways that research and institutional programming have tried to address the problem of struggling students in STEM, we now draw on McDermott (McDermott & Varenne, 2006) more directly to comment on each of these approaches and to introduce our approach. For McDermott, all educational problems are cultural and, thus, comprised of culturally constructed "facts" (Varenne & McDermott, 1999a).…”

“…This paper investigates the culture, the "water," shaping the production of the educational problem that "some students are not cut out for engineering." Drawing on the concept of cultural construction (McDermott & Varenne, 2006), this paper aims to make visible and to examine how the actions and interactions of many people as well as institutional policies and societal values work in concert to "produce" the fact that someone is "not cut out for" engineering. In doing so, we aim to suggest an explanation that locates the cause of such problems in broader cultural practices rather than in the individual students or their backgrounds.…”

Sonic Cartography: Mapping Space, Place, Race, and Identity in an Urban Middle School

“…What critical geography and interpretive studies of education share is their orientation towards the study of (a) the various intersections between the contexts that surround social actors and (b) the ways in which social actors work in conjunction, from micro to macro-interactions, to construct the sociocultural norms and values according which they conduct their daily lives. Critical geographies and interpretive studies of educational contexts can therefore be understood to be examinations of the enacted curriculum-the ways in which local actors in educational contexts negotiate meaning, the local understandings that emerge through such interactions, and the sociocultural contexts are revealed through local actors' face-to-face interactions (Page, 1991;Spindler & Hammond, 2006).…”