Ethnography and Education, Volume 5 Issue 3 2010

Considering gendered careers: the influence of resilient mothers and sisters upon white working-class young women
Carrie Freie
Pages 229 – 243
This article explores the identity development of a group of white working-class adolescent girls as they consider their futures after high school. Attention is paid to themes of gender and social class as well as the impact of a deindustrialised economy. Despite the fact that few of their parents graduated from college, the girls expressed a strong desire to attend college, viewing college education as an economic necessity. The girls were reconceptualising gender in new ways and, at the same time, were discussing careers, some of which step outside of typical working-class jobs because of the level of education they require. Furthermore, the girls discussed their future plans as stemming from, and informed by, life lessons they had learned from witnessing their mothers' struggles with family, employment and education.

From voicing your opinion to politicised voice: a youth-led social justice class at an urban continuation high school
Kysa Nygreen
Pages 245 – 260
This article examines the work of three urban youths as they designed and taught a social justice class at an urban continuation high school in California, USA. Drawing from a two-year ethnographic study of the project, it shows that youth participants constructed a set of imagined binaries to frame teachers, schoolwork and coercion in opposition to students, voice and liberation. The article examines how the youths distinguished ordinary coercive teaching from their own liberatory teaching, creating a coercive/liberatory binary that served as metaphor for a series of binaries shaping their approach to social justice education: teacher/student, adult/youth and schoolwork/voice. It concludes that although the social justice class accomplished many important aims, the reconstruction of and reliance on a coercive/liberatory binary within the project ultimately limited its effectiveness as a social justice education effort.

Understanding student resistance as a communicative act
Jeong-Hee Kim
Pages 261 – 276
In the current era of 'zero tolerance', disciplinary practices including punishment, expulsion, physical and psychological surveillance, and confinement are a major part of resistant students' lived experiences. This article is an ethnographic study of student resistance that is observed in an alternative high school in the USA, which serves students expelled from regular schools for their acts of resistance. The purpose of this study is to explore how understanding of the meaning of student resistance can be used as a theoretical and pedagogical medium with which teachers can create an equitable educational milieu that upholds views and experiences of the marginalised students. The study also offers a new insight into resistance theory drawing upon Dewey's transactional theory of resistance as a communicative act to further suggest what might be possible for the teachers and students to transcend conflicts in order to establish a more meaningful teacher-student relationship moving beyond zero-tolerance policies.

Pedagogic struggles to enhance inclusion and reconciliation in a divided community
Michalinos Zembylas
Pages 277 – 292
This article explores the successes and failures of teachers' pedagogies and school policies to establish a culture of inclusion and reconciliation at a shared secondary school in Cyprus—a school in which students from the two conflicting communities (Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots) are co-educated. Drawing on an ethnographic study based on interviews and observations of six teachers, interviews with students and the school principal, and observations of students' interactions inside and outside the classroom, it is shown that there is resistance to shared education and the formation of reconciliation pedagogies. While most teachers choose to avoid contentious issues rather than exploring them in order to prevent possible conflicts, a few others push for clear integration policies and pedagogies. It is argued that although these efforts are well-intentioned they simply reinforce existing divisions due to the lack of commitment to systemic structural change.

Trust, time and collective-individual priorities for educational development in marginalised communities
Ray Basson
Pages 293 – 308
This article captures educational development from the perspective of those living on the social margins in South Africa, whose collective-individual priorities resulted in education for the community. The data were fugitive, in the minds of people for the most part, a small sample of key informants being selected by deliberate decision for in-depth interview to probe and uncover their perspective. These data were supplemented with observations of planning meetings, site visits and archival records of meetings, over several years. The data indicate that the development of education is grounded in trust and trust-building, and takes time. The process is described, which suggests, amongst others, an experience more typical to East Asia than Africa, an important temporal dimension in such provision and a mechanism assisting them alleviate their condition through education.

Calming the spirit and ensuring super-vivencia: rural Mexican women-centred teaching and learning spaces
Ruth Trinidad Galván
Pages 309 – 323
The changing social, cultural and economic conditions of transmigrant communities in rural Mexico require that women who stay behind, while their loved ones travel back and forth to the USA, create social relations that ensure their survival. From over five years of ethnographic research, this article explores the healing potential of women-centred teaching and learning spaces. By juxtaposing Ortega y Gasset's notion of vivencia - to live - with hooks' idea of collective healing and drawing on empirical data from Mexican rural women's convivencias (gatherings; coexistence), the author analyses the relationship between the mutual coexistence transpiring in women's gatherings and their survival (super-vivencia).

The perceptions of knowledge and learning of Amazonian indigenous teacher education students
Tuija Veintie; Gunilla Holm
Pages 325 – 343
This study focuses on the perceptions of knowledge and learning by indigenous students in an intercultural bilingual teacher education programme in Amazonian Ecuador. The study framed within postcolonial and critical theory attempts to create a space for the indigenous students to speak about their own views through the use of photography and researcher-respondent discussions. We found that the students conceptualised knowledge and learning primarily through their everyday domestic life rather than through their experiences of schooling which appears to play a secondary role.

Institutional ethnography and actor–network theory: a framework for researching the assessment of trainee teachers
Jonathan Tummons
Pages 345 – 357
This article provides an analysis of assessment practices on one university-led teacher-training course in England, delivered across a network of further education colleges. After establishing that assessment practices are bound up in texts of different kinds, this article draws on two theoretical frameworks - institutional ethnography and actor-network theory - in order to explore how the work done by tutors and students on the course is mediated by texts. Through analysing the ways in which texts are used and the ways in which students and tutors respond to them, the paper suggests that assessment practices are in fact characterised by complexity and contingency which are masked by the dominant discourses of quality assurance and managerialism.