How students use their libraries: A case study of four academic libraries

The purpose of this study was to explore the similarities and differences in student behavior in or uses of four academic libraries in the greater New York City area. Using on-site observations and semistructured interviews, the authors collected data about resources and tools used by students as well as their academic and nonacademic activities and contributing factors. Across all four libraries, the study identified that students were actively engaged in academic pursuits utilizing multiple library resources while working with print and digital tools. Students were also observed resting, eating, and engaging in other nonacademic activities. The variations in student behaviors across the four libraries can be explained by contextual variables that influence students' behavior in a library, including student demographics, academic requirements, work habits, and disciplinary affiliations.     

Reflective Voices: Valuing Immigrant Students and Teaching with Ideological Clarity

Students who are not part of the dominant culture need teachers that have a clear understanding of their role as cultural workers (Freire, 1998). Moreover, it is imperative that teachers who work with immigrant children become reflective about their ideology and how their belief systems impact their interaction with culturally diverse families. In order to help immigrant students acquire the necessary academic skills to succeed in our society, teachers must also be supportive and aware of the delicate and nonstatic process of acculturation, which children undergo as they interact with a new culture, language, or reality that may not be in tune with their previous experiences. In this article, we will hear the voices of four novice teachers, as they critically examine assumptions they hold about their most disadvantaged students, and as they strive for ideological clarity in their practice.     

The symphony: Organizational discourse and the symbolic tensions between artistic and business ideologies

This study represents an ethnographic account of the organizational discourse that constituted, at least in part, the cultural world of a regional symphony. Within the Symphony, organizational members embraced a particular ideology that was grounded in the symbolic expression of either an artistic code or a business code, each code competing with one another for organizational prominence. The enactment of these codes revealed the fractured nature of Symphony life where musicians and their expressions of the artistic code were pitted against management and the board of directors who primarily advanced a corporate vision of decision making. Based on the routine speech of organizational members, it was argued that a business orientation prevailed much of the time and, consequently, served to diminish artistic concerns about how the Symphony should function.     

Thanks to referees

This study, part of a larger linguistic ethnographic enquiry carried out in two primary school classrooms in Flanders and the Netherlands, sheds light on the perils faced by the ethnographer caught between pupils’ inventiveness and his own ethnographic naivety when dealing with these pupils’ ethnolinguistic identity construction. The study first focuses on a classroom interaction set up by the teacher, who - because of the presence of the classroom ethnographer - wishes to construct one pupil's identity accordingly to a presupposed yet untapped ethnolinguistic affiliation that matches the ethnographer's ethnic background. Second, the study takes a reflexive peak at the ethnographer's own performance and at how he stumbles into a trap set up by two multilingual pupils through emblematic language use. The article concludes by drawing a number of considerations with regard to linguistic ethnography and the interface between the ethnographer, the object of knowing and the known. It advocates for an interest in the mundane construction of sameness rather than solely on its ruptures.     

Education for all: Experiences of principals at rural secondary schools in Mpumalanga province

Abstract

This article deals with the challenges in the implementation of education for all as experienced by principals in rural secondary schools in Mpumalanga. Interventions which have been implemented on national and provincial level to improve teaching and learning are not equally successful in schools countrywide. The central phenomenon of interest involved the determination of the management and leadership views of rural secondary school principals concerning their ability to ensure Education for All. A theoretical grounding of the situation was developed through a literature review. Interviews were conducted with principals in rural Mpumalanga to collect empirical data for the research. Two main aspects that emerged from the study, was the impact that change, tradition and culture have on teaching and learning in the rural secondary schools in Mpumalanga.     

Ethnography's troubles and the reproduction of academic habitus

In this article, we explore the methodological possibilities of dual observation and ‘inter‐reflexive’ interpretation as we have experienced this in a longitudinal ethnographic case study of music teaching and learning in an English Cathedral Choir School. Our intent here is to understand the ways in which our particular historical, social and cultural perspectives lead us to partial yet complementary sensings, seeings, hearings and feelings in this setting, and the ramifications of this for the interpretations we bring to observational data, and the subsequent development of interpretive narrative accounts. Through an analysis of our respective narrative accounts of our first observational encounter in the research setting, and subsequent ‘inter‐reflexive’ interpretation, we seek to interrogate the ways in which a plausible, credible and believable narrative can be developed through the separate and joint analyses of storied reflexive observation.     

The Teenage Expertise Network (TEN): an online ethnographic approach

The take-up of digital technology by young people is a well-known phenomenon and has been subject to socio-cultural analysis in areas such as youth studies and cultural studies. The Teenage Expertise Network (TEN) research project investigates how teenagers develop technological expertise in techno-cultural contexts via the use of a purposefully designed, youth-friendly, online environment – significant in this current age of Internet-mediated learning and rapid technological development. The design of TEN follows principles of ethnographic research adapted to an online environment. This article discusses the design, objectives and outworkings of this new media object, highlighting the tensions associated with conducting online research. This article considers why and how we should reengineer online methodologies and the complexities associated therein. It discusses the classification of this method considering the literature surrounding online data collection methods and virtual ethnography.     

Portuguese Public University Student Satisfaction: A stakeholder theory-based approach

This study reports on the steering of a self-access learning center in a Japanese university by its “middle management” committee over the first years of its operation. Middle management practice was informed by an ethnographic archive of various facets of center use, particularly concerning language policy and curriculum integration, issues about which the archive reveals considerable shifts in stakeholder views over time. It is argued that this evidence-based middle management style has been an effective, but sometimes limited, means in decision-making as it succeeds in placing research at the center of middle management activity, not at its periphery.