In the voyage to increase student achievement, centralized education agencies apply pressure to school principals and teachers in ways that transform their work. This critical ethnographic study of a historically underperforming public elementary school serving predominantly Latinx/a/o students in Texas utilized poststructural theories of subjectivity to demonstrate how the political system of educational

This article examines why a group of elite students assured of their life‐chances willfully engaged with stress‐inducing school experiences. Unlike common portrayals of "stress culture" as being the result of economic uncertainty, I found that stress was viewed as a necessary prerequisite for students’ understandings of moral worthiness. I conclude by discussing how students' affective and evaluative

This article examines everyday disciplinary practices in three kindergarten classrooms and their role in identity construction. Taking a “figured worlds” perspective, I show how racialized and ableist discourses mediated processes of surveillance, escalation, and physical restraint, leading educators to disproportionately position Black students, particularly boys and those with disabilities, as “behavior

This article examines the cultural production of three transfronterizo children who daily, physically cross a U.S.–Mexico international bridge. Drawing on theories of identity, border inspections, literacy, and language, the findings reveal that transfronterizo children developed literacies of surveillance, or the acquired and produced language and literacy practices to move across the surveillance

Declining support for US higher education and the corporatization of this institution shape students’ experiences. This ethnography describes a campus culture stratified by an ideology called “majorism.” Majorism, a term particular to this study’s site, is the preferential treatment of science and technology over the Liberal Arts. By understanding majorism through the lived experiences of undergraduates

Two‐way bilingual education (TWBE) is guided by three traditional goals: academic achievement, bilingualism/biliteracy, and sociocultural competence. The rapid growth, whitening, and gentrification of TWBE programs have prompted a call for an extension of the three traditional goals to include a fourth one: critical consciousness. This critical ethnography examines how the author and a fifth‐grade

During an ethnographic study of two Chilean schools over a period of three years, we observed the discursive assemblage of “what is vulnerable” emerging from an algorithm used to allocate public resources. In this article, we unravel the ways in which the algorithm intra‐acts with other elements in the process of producing what is vulnerable and how this affects our approach to ethnography. We conclude

I investigated how two U.S.‐born Salvadoran eleventh grade boys formulated college‐going mindsets at the nexus of family‐based cultural influences, adolescent development, masculinity, and academic self‐appraisals. With asset‐based theories, findings show how immigrant families encouraged college going by shielding their sons from noneducational responsibilities and conveyed educational messages with

Over twenty years after González (1999) asked anthropologists of education “What will we do when culture does not exist anymore?” the author reflects on the stubborn persistence of culture in his life and his students’ lives. Although anthropologists have productively deconstructed the culture concept, this paper argues that the field must grapple with a different question: What do we make of the fact

This paper examines a state department of education’s (SDE) decision to contract a consultant to “turnaround” schools, per a logic of outsourcing for external expertise. Our ethnographically informed case study explores whose knowledge had the most worth in diagnosing areas for improvement and identifies this case as part of a trend to rent competencies, under a neoliberal guise of efficiency, but

This article examines how sound—as a medium, method, and modality—attunes educational ethnographers to writing the “field” in new ways. In particular, the authors ask: How might cultivating practices of writing the field recording reorient the field note as an ethnographic object of inquiry? Examining the field recording as a representational, experimental, and pedagogical resource for prolonging encounters

Theorizing classrooms as contexts of reception shaped by ideological, relational, and pedagogical dimensions, and drawing on ethnographic data from a yearlong study of recent‐arrival immigrant youths' educational experiences in an urban U.S. high school, this paper describes how a group of recent‐arrival youth acted upon the discourses, pedagogical practices, and identity categories in their content‐area

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among six middle‐class families in a Copenhagen housing cooperative, this article explores cultural ideologies of childhood, parenting, and individual freedom in Scandinavia as evoked in daily negotiations between parents and children. Combining language socialisation studies of family discourse and anthropological parenting studies, the analyses show how children seek

This article provides ethnographic evidence of how Latinx undocumented youth navigate racialization processes. The research occurs in a focal state in the New Latino South, a highly restrictive and hostile context toward immigrants broadly and undocumented ones specifically. The author situates this research in Rogelio Sáenz and Karen Douglas' call for the racialization of immigration studies, considering

Sex education presents a major dilemma for state‐minority relations, reflecting a conflict between basic rights to education and religious freedom. In this comparative ethnography of informal sex education among ultra‐Orthodox Jews (Haredim) in Israel and England, we frame the critical difference between “age‐appropriate” and “life‐stage” (marriage and childbirth) models of sex education. Conceptualizing

This paper explores the possibilities and challenges of building cross‐racial solidarity between Southeast Asian American and Black communities through an ethnographic account of a community‐based educational space (CBES) working with low‐income Southeast Asian American and Black youth. CBESs can play a unique role in teaching youth to engage in anti‐racist work and building cross‐racial coalitions

This article explores how a local community came to value a Latinx bookstore as a supplementary knowledge space for Latinx history, literature, and culture. Findings detail how the bookstore served as a catalyst for a heterogeneous group of Latinx families and educators to (1) access empowering reflections of Latinx histories that were not found in traditional K–12 school curricula and (2) build alternative

This article introduces the term translanguaging in the bidialectal educational context of Cyprus and presents a typical example from a Greek–Cypriot classroom where children use both of their linguistic varieties to acquire knowledge and enhance their understanding. The research data were analyzed under key questions related to translanguaging spaces, academic learning, and communicative functions

In this “reflection on the field,” I use critical auto‐ethnography to reflect on the process of bringing urban French vernacular to New England suburbs. I analyze teaching vernacular language as linguistic gentrification, using other people’s words for the construction and continual performance of cosmopolitan whiteness. As I reflect on moving from cosmopolitan desires to critical awareness I share

Public perceptions about the Roma are perpetuated with deeply ingrained prejudices. Crossing sociocultural boundaries, this study sought a firsthand, contextual understanding about the Roma through funds of knowledge framework. Findings illustrated a sense of active agency, as the household members employed resources and opportunities despite the rapid changes and challenges in their surroundings.

In Ecuador directors of Indigenous education administer a Kichwa proficiency exam as a requirement for employment. This article considers promises and challenges of the exam, such as how standardized language ideologies manifest in it, and what it says about how institutional knowledge is classed, racialized, and urbanized. Furthermore, though research often describes audit culture as hegemonic, almost

This article employs the comparative case study (CCS) approach to examine how four public pre‐kindergarten (pre‐K) teachers in Michigan enacted a state‐mandated parent involvement policy. Using CCS, we trace policy enactment from the policy text, through mid‐level administrators, and into the classroom context. We demonstrate how teachers used strategic knowledge to develop hybrid parent involvement

In this reflection we unpack students’ first fieldwork experiences and how this parallels a rite de passage. We do so in two domains: (1) students' first fieldwork with a focus on entering the field, staying in the field, and researcher identity; and (2) the impact of fieldwork experiences on students’ professional skills. Two struggles are prominent: letting go of the idea of “objectivity” and learning

This article explores the ways in which social scaffolding and cultural brokering processes within educational spaces engender ideological tensions among predominantly Latinx youth participants and educators within a college and career readiness organization. Based upon data from an 18‐month ethnography, they engaged in forms of resistance through infrapolitics. Youth and educators simultaneously critiqued

In this article, we make a case for incorporating translanguaging pedagogy into the framework of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP). Drawing on data from a one‐year ethnographic study of an adult ESL program, we show how teachers believed in and attempted to create spaces for translanguaging and CSP but in practice fell short. We conclude that translanguaging is most powerful when understood as a

This article presents a case study that examines how undocumented students created a safe space for themselves on their college campus and how that space was ultimately institutionalized by the university. It also considers the politically vulnerable position of undocumented youth in such endeavors. Drawing from Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems model, the analysis provided here examines the micro

Based on Indigenous education research in Canada, the U.S., and Peru, small Indigenous school founders and educators reveal visions and tensions emerging through commitment to community‐based Indigenous schooling. Major themes encompass connections to histories, relationships with the environment, and navigation of local and state pressures. Anchoring each school are efforts to protect Indigenous lands

This paper examines how issues of citizenship and belonging within an emergent “multicultural” South Korea are articulated through inter‐ethnic relations among elementary school children. Based on ethnographic data and drawing on theories of affective citizenship and intimacy, I argue that affective dimensions of citizenship provide insight into everyday dynamics of exclusion and inclusion, through

This article explores notions of belonging and citizenship for “American Mexican” students—Mexican‐heritage youth born in the United States who return to Mexico with their families. Our findings reveal belonging as a sociocultural practice that participants negotiated spatially and relationally, chiefly by making their US‐born status more and less visible within particular spaces at school. The experiences

English‐language voluntourism is a practice in which Global North, often young and inexperienced, volunteers teach English in the Global South on a short‐term basis as a form of alternative travel. Like other forms of volunteer tourism, English‐language voluntourism is characterized as global citizenship education for visiting volunteers and as development assistance for host communities. Drawing upon

This paper examines how high‐stakes, standardized testing shapes language and literacy instruction for emergent bilingual students in a public high school on the U.S./Mexico border. Drawing from discourses of citizenship education and language and literacy theory and scholarship, this paper finds state‐mandated exit exams overwhelming guide instruction and shape language and literacy education in ways

This paper draws upon data from two youth‐focused, ethnographically informed inquiries—one in Poland, the other in Guatemala—to describe how historical memory can conflict with both state historical narratives and with globalized approaches to democratic citizenship education. This analysis helps us to better understand the ways that, in post‐conflict societies, schools function as spaces in which

This paper analyzes how knowledge is reproduced as “universal” in contemporary higher education and how this production of universality influences the application of knowledge. Using a case study of clinical psychology, it describes the results of over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a university and professional settings in Singapore with short comparative field studies in Australia and the

This paper asks, what significance do diversity committee meetings have for how diversity workers experience, make sense of, and navigate the challenges of diversity work at a large, public research university? Drawing on a sixteen‐month ethnography of diversity policy and practice, I analyze the practice of “preaching to the choir” among committee members and explore the different affective attachments

Popular educators are encountering students’ past trauma and dealing with how to engage ethically with social issues through “difficult knowledge” (Britzman 1998). The force of their curriculum provides the education community the ability to learn from their social conditions and share in the difficult knowledge experienced among them. This paper focuses on work at one popular education high school

This essay utilizes autoethnography to explore myriad cultural and institutional practices that impacted the author’s education while she was growing up in Jamaica, West Indies. Informed by and through the use of some postcolonial theory, the information in this text is presented in the form of the creative nonfiction essay and chronicles the ways in which education is a path to economic well‐being

Learning disabilities (LD) researchers have produced a knowledge base about the academic side of LD. A gap exists concerning the experiences of individuals with LD, particularly their feeling‐meaning‐making about having LDs. Based on a three‐year qualitative study using critical ethnographic methods, I center Sophia Cruz’s experiences with LD and the label. Sophia experienced the hegemony of smartness

This article describes several ways that anthropologists of education can maximize impact on knowledge projects, policies, and practices. The approaches discussed here are all anchored in powerful and distinctive qualities of our field, and include: (1) Centering our disciplinary authority by refusing to capitulate to dominant forms of knowledge, (2) adopting the sensibilities of public anthropology

This study examines how students of majority and minority ethnic backgrounds in Botswana understand national identity as inclusive of their ethnic groups. Within assimilationist policies and curriculum, we find that the value of national identity rests on its positioning as a path toward higher levels of education and employment. However, for ethnic minority students, enacting this national identity

This special issue focuses on the methodology of video‐cued ethnography (VCE) as a process of using film to elicit explanations and responses to educational contexts that can reveal the cultural and socio‐political variation in how people understand educational ideas, practices, policies, and relationships. We aim to advance an understanding of the method itself as well as demonstrate its broad potential

This article reports on our use of a “deaf lens” in adapting video‐cued multivocal ethnography for the “Deaf Kindergartens in Three Countries: Japan, France, and the United States” project. Beginning with a discussion of how this “deaf lens” shaped the design of the study, research questions, and methodology, the article concludes with an example from our fieldwork illustrating the powerful potential

In this article, we describe the purpose and the process of video‐cued ethnography. Using examples primarily from the Children Crossing Borders study, we outline six basic elements of video‐cued ethnography including site selection, participant‐observation, filming, editing, focus group interviews, and comparative analysis. We detail some of the challenges and tensions that accompany video‐cued ethnographic

In 1982 I began using classroom videos as cues for ethnographic interviews. My colleagues and I asked practitioners in three countries to respond to videos shot in their own and each other’s preschools. The video cues worked to produce conversations that we used in our 1989 book Preschool in Three Cultures to present perspectives on the same events by cultural insiders and outsiders. This article tells

This article highlights the voices and expertise of Latinx immigrant parents when describing their and their children's experiences with schools in Texas and California. The video‐cued ethnography method allowed participants to engage in dialogue among themselves across space and time as well as explore issues regarding their voice and power. By creating dialogic spaces and listening to Latinx immigrant

This article highlights how video‐cued ethnography (VCE) helped facilitate conversations about race between parents of color and preservice teachers. Utilizing VCE, we conducted exchanges between both groups to determine what would occur if they engaged in asynchronous discussions about the impact of race in schools. Two notable shifts emerged: (1) the necessity of conversations to end racial oppression

This article demonstrates how the original Preschool in Three Cultures method can be extended and modified. Modifications to the method include using videos not only as interviewing cues but also as data for microanalysis; conducting multiple return interviews with the same informants; re‐editing videos to draw more explicit attention to key issues in the research; and using videos shot in classrooms

This article describes how, in our research with Head Start teachers in American Samoa, we combined video‐cued multivocal ethnographic method (VCE) with traditional ethnographic approaches to understand our interlocutors’ perspectives on curriculum and pedagogy, and the contrast between them and mainland US teachers using the same federally endorsed curriculum. We provide illustrative examples of how

This article describes the use of video‐cued multivocal ethnography (VCE) in the Civic Action and Young Children Study conducted with preschool children in South Texas. We detail how and why we continue to use the VCE method as a process of collective reflection and analysis with participating communities. We also explore how VCE helps us enact our commitment to equity, change, and justice as activist

A Hawaiian adaptation of Tobin et al.’s (2009; 1989) video‐cued ethnography (VCE) illuminates the possibilities and challenges of implementing culturally sustaining and revitalizing Indigenous education in contemporary Hawaiian schools. Findings highlight (1) the successful classroom integration and transmission of Indigenous interactional styles and (2) the potential of VCE as a collaborative pro

This article addresses a gap between discussions of transnationalism in our field that largely remain focused on implications for educational attainment and current political discourses about immigrant youth and citizenship. Drawing on insights from our own research with transnational youth, we suggest that their experiences in transnational social fields offers them unique forms of critical consciousness

This ethnographic study reconsiders the concept of tribe and its influence on group boundary‐making practices in South Sudan. The findings revealed ways in which students manipulated their group boundaries by giving different meanings to nominal category of tribe. Further, the study unveiled that, moving in and out from those boundaries, students live in a complex social reality in a postcolonial,

This article examines how teachers in post‐coup Honduras approached implementing neoliberal school finance reforms with which they disagreed. The laws in question decentralize national public education and demand that teachers secure funding for basic school infrastructure and academic programs from private businesses. I show how teachers reluctantly engaged aspects of this legislation, but for their

Detailed, longitudinal ethnographic approaches that explore how school success and failure evolve as interdependent sociohistorical positions are important for understanding how such processes affect unintended educational inequity in schooling. This study describes how one student comes to inhabit the identity of a disruptive student relative to a classmate who gradually comes to be viewed as the

Although social movements are frequently background and occasionally foreground in the studies of anthropologists of education, the knowledges produced by movements have seldom been a focus of our work. In this Reflection on the Field, I argue that investigating the production and circulation of social movement knowledges, as contextualized by educational processes and spaces, can enrich our understanding

Focusing on low‐cost English‐medium schools, this article investigates whether the ideology of the transformative potential of English‐medium education squares with most people’s experiences of this education in urban India. It shows how such schools enable socioeconomic mobility among the middle classes while also creating new forms of inequality. It argues that a meaningful evaluation of education

Educational research widely neglects the effectiveness of multicultural education courses among teacher candidates of color (TCCs). In this article, the experiences of six Black preservice teachers enrolled in a diversity course are explicated to unearth nuanced pedagogical missteps that hinder their development as students of asset pedagogies. Undergirded by the five principles of critical race theory