Multi-sited global ethnography and travel: gendered journeys in three registers

This paper joins a barely begun conversation about multi-sited and global ethnography in educational research; a conversation that is likely to intensify along with growing interest in the links between education, globalisation, internationalisation and transnationalism. Drawing on an ongoing multi-sited global ethnography of elite schools and globalisation, this paper explores the role of travel in multi-sited global ethnography and offers a feminist engagement with it. It considers the idea of fieldwork as a travel practice through three different travel registers; the traveller’s tale, critical travel studies and travel as exile. In so doing, it illustrates the reflexive affordances each register offers with regard to the directions of our feminist inquiries into elite schools and our feminist ethnographic practices.     

Cosmo girls: configurations of class and femininity in elite educational settings

In this paper we offer a unique contribution to understandings of schooling as a site for the production of social class difference. We bring together the rich body of work that has been conducted on middle-class educational identities, with explorations of the centrality of the feminine in representations of class difference from the field of critical girlhood studies. This is done in order to explore how young femininities mediate the representation of class difference in the environment of the private girls’ school. Drawing from our two research studies, located in private girls’ schools in Australia and the United Kingdom, we argue that the notion of ‘disgust’, commonly used in recent engagements around class, has only limited purchase in understanding the representation of class difference in these schools. It is the inconsistencies and complexities in how class and class relations are produced that we wish to illuminate.     

Researching elite education: affectively inferred belongings,desires and exclusions

This paper reflects on key moments occurring during the course of a three-year study of elite girls’ education, with a focus on the power relations that emerged between researchers and elites within the context in which the study was conducted. Central to our analysis is a focus on the affective dimensions of interaction between the researcher and study participants. Our experience gaining access to elite schools in the study illustrates how productive relationships may be fostered by a demonstrated alignment of interests; the desire for intellectual dialogue; and factors linked to the dynamics of the local education market. In our interviews with elite young women, we found that experiences of affinity, foreignness or awe within the interview process triggered different systems of affect. These moments are significant in shaping understandings of the social projects pursued by elite subjects.     

Muslim researcher researching Muslim youth: reflexive notes on critical ethnography,positionality and representation

As a Muslim researcher conducting a critical ethnography about/with/for Muslim youth and their school experiences, at this time of intensified Islamophobia and overwhelming discourses of hate against Muslims, the boundaries of the personal and the academic become blurry and confusing. This paper emerges from my subjective/academic experiences as a Muslim researcher, and my reflections on reflexivity, positionality and representation while conducting my ethnographic research in a high-school setting with Muslim youth. In this paper, I present a review of the different concepts of critical ethnography that are framing my research decisions and I highlight the complexity of the insider/outsider positionality for a Muslim researcher doing research with Muslim youth and the intersections of religion, gender, class, ethnicity and age in positioning her in the field. The paper presents different ethical dilemmas that I have encountered during the first six months of my fieldwork.     

Beyond records and representations: inbetween writing in educational ethnography

Ethnographers are particularly interested in writing. They have paid particular attention to the practices of making field notes and to the ways in which their public texts represent those that they have encountered and studied. To date there has been less attention paid to the kinds of writing that used to make sense of experiences in the field. We call this inbetween writing. By examining our own processes of inbetween writing, and drawing on the work of James Clifford, we have produced a nine-part heuristic of inbetween writing. We argue that the heuristic could be used in research methods education to highlight the importance of writing to ethnographic sense-making and knowledge production.     

Ethnographies across virtual and physical spaces: a reflexive commentary on a live Canadian/UK ethnography of distributed medical education

This article draws on an ongoing ethnography of distributed medical education (DME) provision in Canada in order to explore the methodological choices of the researchers as well as the wider pluralisation of ethnographic frameworks that is reflected within current research literature. The article begins with a consideration of the technologically mediated ways in which the researchers do their work, a way of work that is paralleled within the DME curriculum that forms the focus of the ethnography. The article goes on to problematise relationships amongst the researchers and between the researchers and the field of research, and to consider the ways in which methodological choices are mediated. In so doing, the article proposes an acceptance of methodological pluralism that is tempered by the need to acknowledge the sometimes-slight differences that distinguish ethnographic paradigms.     

Making sense of education: sensory ethnography and visual impairment

Education involves the engagement of the full range of the senses in the accomplishment of tasks and the learning of knowledge and skills. However both in pedagogical practices and in the process of educational research, there has been a tendency to privilege the visual. To explore these issues, detailed sensory ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in further education colleges, investigating the experiences of visually impaired students who use their non-visual senses and embodied actions to achieve their learning. The study found that the full sensory schemas of the students were not always appreciated or accessed by tutors, resulting in lost learning opportunities. Whilst particularly relevant for visually impaired students, these findings have implications for pedagogy for all students. Further the study highlighted the significance of sensory ethnography as a tool to explore the processes of teaching and learning.     

Choosing not choosing: the indirections of ethnography and educational research

This paper argues for the importance of ethnography in the conduct of educational research and the ways in which it can threaten, in a good sense, the certainties and dominance of performativity. The paper uses the poetry of Emily Dickinson to signal the importance of indirection in the conduct of ethnographic work and, more specifically, the ways in which she ‘chooses not to choose’ in her work. Her work is used to illustrate the complexities of meaning in what we see and hear in the conduct of research, the impossibility of mapping (in any ultimate sense) experience and identity and the indeterminacy we need to ‘hold’ in the stories we tell. The intention of the paper is to underline our necessary obsession with language in the processes of educational inquiry. The paper deliberately tries to echo its ‘message’ in refusing to ‘spell things out’ too closely for the reader.     

On disruption and integration: two views of digital media technologies in K-12 schools

In this review essay, Earl Aguilera compares two recent contributions to the growing body of literature on technology in education, Christo Sims’ Disruptive Fixation and Antero Garcia’s Good Reception, to examine the conceptual and practical contributions of each text, along with points of divergence through which readers might glean additional insights. Sims and Garcia both address efforts rooted in a growing area of work around integrating digital media technologies into K-12 schools, but present contrasting perspectives and differing notions of technological disruption and integration. While Sims’ ethnographic work on the “school for digital kids” is rich in conceptual tools that help readers understand what he calls cycles of disruptive fixation that have occurred throughout the history of public education in the United States, Garcia’s embedded perspectives as high school teacher provide practical guidance for integrating new media technologies with responsive and critical pedagogical practices. Taken together, these texts highlight both the promises and the pitfalls of integrating new media technologies into existing models and contexts of education often labeled as outmoded for life and work in the 21st century.     

Self-care and entrepreneurism: an ethnography of soft skills development for higher education staff

Despite the ubiquity of staff soft skills programmes, few studies have examined why and how academic and corporate services staff utilise these programmes for self-care/governance. This study reports on findings from an ethnography of soft skills learning and development programmes (LDPs) in a UK university, focusing on interviews with programme participants and facilitators. Results suggest that, as social worlds with neoliberal directives, LDPs promote various self-governance activities in the form of entrepreneurism and novel, corporate versions of self-care. Time on LDPs was seen as a chance to, ‘put oneself first,’ examine career options and cultivate sought-after attributes, including self-confidence and assertiveness. Social networking and performance management also emerged as significant issues. Career development was important for all participants; however, perceptions of how to realise this differed. Based on our findings, we propose three types of work-related performance – ‘career nomad,’ ‘reluctant entrepreneur,’ and ‘course hopper’ – constituting a typology for understanding social worlds inhabited by contemporary university professionals. Our study suggests that self-care ‘technologies’ have multiple, competing functions in continuing professional education. While LDPs can help professionals navigate paths through increasingly challenging organisations, their entrepreneurial ethos and content reflect the market interests they serve.     

Using visual ethnography to explore a principal's perceptions of innovations made in a South African primary school

Abstract

This study investigates a South African principal's view of implementing invitational education (IE) as an example of a professional development programme (PD) within a particular school setting. Two types of literature inform this study: leadership supportive of school development and the invitational education approach to teaching and learning. The study uses qualitative reflexive photography to explore the following research question: How does the principal perceive the way in which intentionally inviting changes were made in the school under his leadership? The data analysis revealed the following categories: people: focussing on care; places: changing the physical setting; policies: regulating the functions of the school; programmes: developing people through helpful initiatives; and process, that is, organising the context in which schooling takes place. The findings support the fact that the process of IE needs to organise all the other factors in a way that is both democratic and humane. IE requires a commitment to certain goals if changes are to be implemented successfully; this, in turn, implies that a school should develop a culture of collective learning and that learners should be encouraged to care about one another in the school.     

Ethnography,materiality, and the principle of symmetry: problematising anthropocentrism and interactionism in the ethnography of education

ABSTRACT

In this article we draw on actor-network theory (ANT) in order to challenge the methodological and empirical orthodoxies of anthropocentrism and interactionism that have long informed dominant discourses of ethnographic work. We use ANT to open new possibilities for understanding education as emergent in relational fields where non-human forces are as equally necessary as and possess an agency equivalent to, human forces: the principle of symmetry. We argue that this generates important conceptual as well as political possibilities in constituting different possible outcomes in the accomplishment of ethnographies of education. We draw attention to the problematic of the decentring of the human subject and the critical investigation of the interface between people and objects that frame this special issue, and also propose a methodological response framed by a commitment to empirical research through ethnography as well as a theoretical response framed by relational materialism, operationalised here through recourse to ANT.     

Discourses of whiteness and blackness: an ethnographic study of three young children learning to be white

In blatant, but nuanced and often invisible ways, racism continues to exist globally, nationally and locally, implicating us all. The insidious nature of racism is deeply rooted in the lives of young children. In order to interrupt and reverse those practices, we must know how race is constructed during the early years. This study looked closely at the lives of three white children to identify and examine discourses in their worlds that unveiled how they learned to be raced.     

Children writing ethnography: children's perspectives and nomadic thinking in researching school classrooms

This article makes a connection between narrative ethnography, childhood studies and new materialist theories in studying children's perspective on school. It presents ‘children writing ethnography’ as an approach based on complexity and involving participatory research. The question of ‘what is happening in the classroom’ is explored through writings produced in class by 10-year olds. The ‘messy’ ethnographic data are examined within the framework of narrative ethnography using the idea of ‘small stories’ that capture everyday interaction. Furthermore, both material and embodied meanings in the writings are discussed. New materialist theories and the idea of nomadic make it possible to account for the connectivity between the writings, the classroom reality, the child-ethnographers and the research, which are seen as mutually producing one another. The author suggests that engaging with children's free-flowing ethnographic writing serves as a productive way to conduct participatory ethnographic research, as well as to investigate contemporary childhoods in all their complexity.     

Education on the rails: a textual ethnography of university advertising in mobile contexts

ABSTRACT

As universities have succumbed to market discourses, they have adopted advertising strategies. It is not uncommon to see advertisements for them displayed in such mobile spaces as railway stations and alongside highways. Whilst it is true that such environments have always sought to take advantage of populations in transit, the fact that higher education institutions have turned to them as promotional sites, reflects the fact that the ‘transit’ demographic now includes large numbers of young people and high school students. In this paper, a sample of higher education advertisements found in Sydney’s transit spaces is analysed along with the ‘rationale’ provided by advertising companies responsible for their design. It is argued their existence reflects the fact that universities compete against one another for students and need to develop a persuasive ‘brand’. Thus in line with neo-liberalist constructions of subjectivity, they individualise the educational experience, and translate that experience into an economic asset, as a value-adding process. It is of note then that much of the imagery and copy of the advertising ‘visualises’ education as a journey and underpins the fact that mobility is an inescapable predicate of quotidian life.     

From school militarization to school securitization: national security finds its place in schools

This ethnography explores daily life at Milton High School, a US public school with its own specialized Homeland Security program. From ‘military grunts’ serving in distant theaters of war to Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agents defending the US borderlands to National Security Administration (NSA) technicians monitoring worldwide cyber communications, Milton’s Homeland Security program trained students for the multiple permutations of the global war on terror. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Milton, this article offers an analysis of what I call ‘school securitization’. While growing critical education scholarship importantly investigates the intensification of militarized education evident in the rise of military charter schools and harsh disciplinary regimes, this ethnography documents how other actors like major defense contractors, security companies, and federal agencies contributed to the school’s remaking. Broadening the analytical framework of school militarization to school securitization accounts for the range of actors, institutions, epistemologies, and security-oriented beliefs beyond the military that shape public education for the production of violence.     

Supporting African refugees in Greater Western Sydney: a critical ethnography of after-school homework tutoring centres

This paper discusses the Refugee Action Support Partnership Project between the University of Western Sydney, The Australian Literacy and Numeracy Foundation and the NSW-Department of Education and Training (DET). The critical ethnographic method is used to evaluate the after-school homework tutoring centres as a vehicle of literacy development and youth transitions. Given the nature of strife and unrest in the African Continent, refugee children may have been unable to attend school before coming to Australia, or obtained only interrupted schooling at best. Since parents are unfamiliar with the education system and because many do not speak English, they cannot help their children as they would wish to, and children may be left to deal with difficulties alone. The School of Education at UWS offers service learning programs like the after-school homework tutoring centres, to deliver effective and sustainable support to schools so that refugee students can feel safe and begin to learn.     

对大连市高水平体育后备人才培养现状的调查与对策研究

采用问卷调查、访谈、数理统计法等研究方法对大连市体育传统项目学校、大连市全国体育后备人才培养试点中学、体育后备人才培训基地和少年足球俱乐部、足球学校等形式的体育后备人才培养现状进行调查分析。研究提高建立新的运动训练网络系统的新模式,提出大连市高水平体育后备人才培养的对策和建议。     

Politicising ESE in postcolonial settings: the power of historical responsibility,action and ethnography

This article argues that the mission of Environmental and Sustainability Education (ESE) is inherently political and that, by not acknowledging this, ESE interventions risk becoming part of the problem of sustainability rather than the solution. The article offers a theoretical framework for thinking about the (de)politicising effects of ESE rooted in three key elements: historical responsibility, action and the postcolonial condition. This framework builds on Ricoeur’s phenomenology, Arendt’s theory of action and the work of postcolonial scholars in arguing for a grounded understanding of ESE, which necessitates the use of ethnographic methods in ESE research.