Studying Schools, Studying Ourselves: Ethnographic Perspectives on Educational Reform

Reform and Resistance in Schools and Classrooms: An Ethnographic View of the Coalition of Essential Schools. Donna E. Muncey and Patrick J. McQuillan. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. 319 pp.
How It Works: Inside. School-College Collaboration. Sidney Trubowitz and Paul Longo. New York: Teachers College Press, 1997. 172 pp.
Studying Your Own School: An Educator's Guide to Qualitative Practitioner Research. Gary L. Anderson. Kathryn Herr. and Ann Sigrid Nihlen. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 1994. 203 pp.     

Teaching Evolution in Primary Schools: An Example in French Classrooms

Teaching evolution in primary schools is important for spreading evolutionary knowledge and scientific methodology. Through constructing simple interrelationship trees, pupils gain scientific knowledge, scientific methodology, and argumentation skills. Activities conducted in French primary schools are described in this paper.     

Con Respeto: Bridging the Distances between Culturally Diverse Families and Schools, An Ethnographic Portrait

Con Respeto: Bridging the Distances between Culturally Diverse Families and Schools, An Ethnographic Portrait Guadalupe Valdés New York: Teachers College Press, 1996. 237 pp.     

Redefining the Ethnographic Object: An Anthropology Museum Turns Fifty

Exhibit A: Objects of Intrigue. Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, March 9, 1999–March 31, 2000.
Objects and Expressions: Celebrating the Collections of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Vancouver: Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, 1999.     

Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution.

Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution. Donald L. Donham. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. 236 pp.     

Explaining Adherence Success in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Ethnographic Study

Background

Individuals living with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa generally take more than 90% of prescribed doses of antiretroviral therapy (ART). This number exceeds the levels of adherence observed in North America and dispels early scale-up concerns that adherence would be inadequate in settings of extreme poverty. This paper offers an explanation and theoretical model of ART adherence success based on the results of an ethnographic study in three sub-Saharan African countries.

Methods and Findings

Determinants of ART adherence for HIV-infected persons in sub-Saharan Africa were examined with ethnographic research methods. 414 in-person interviews were carried out with 252 persons taking ART, their treatment partners, and health care professionals at HIV treatment sites in Jos, Nigeria; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and Mbarara, Uganda. 136 field observations of clinic activities were also conducted. Data were examined using category construction and interpretive approaches to analysis. Findings indicate that individuals taking ART routinely overcome economic obstacles to ART adherence through a number of deliberate strategies aimed at prioritizing adherence: borrowing and “begging” transport funds, making “impossible choices” to allocate resources in favor of treatment, and “doing without.” Prioritization of adherence is accomplished through resources and help made available by treatment partners, other family members and friends, and health care providers. Helpers expect adherence and make their expectations known, creating a responsibility on the part of patients to adhere. Patients adhere to promote good will on the part of helpers, thereby ensuring help will be available when future needs arise.

Conclusion

Adherence success in sub-Saharan Africa can be explained as a means of fulfilling social responsibilities and thus preserving social capital in essential relationships.     

Cooperative Learning in Context: An Educational Innovation in Everyday Classrooms

Cooperative Learning in Context: An Educational Innovation in Everyday Classrooms. Evelyn Jacob. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 223 pp.     

Student Voice as Agency: Resistance and Accommodation in Inner-City Schools

In this article we describe the results of a comparative case study of two inner-city high schools located in the southeastern United States. One school, a citywide school with high admission standards, enrolls an all-African American lower-to-middle-class population. The other school enrolls a more ethnically and racially diverse population of students from a single lower-class neighborhood. Using Grossberg's notion of identity politics, we describe how students' racial/ ethnic identity to a greater or lesser degree becomes both a means of resistance and accommodation to white hegemony.     

Japanese Working Class Lives: An Ethnographic Study of Factory Workers.

Japanese Working Class Lives: An Ethnographic Study of Factory Workers. James E. Roberson. New York: Routledge, 1998. 227 pp.     

Portrait of a Greek Imagination: An Ethnographic Biography of Andreas Nenedakis.

Portrait of. Greek Imagination: An Ethnographic Biography of Andreas Nenedakis. Michael Herzfeld. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. 333 pp.     

Making Sense of a New Transport System: An Ethnographic Study of the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway

An increase in public transport use has the potential to contribute to improving population health, and there is growing interest in innovative public transport systems. Yet how new public transport infrastructure is experienced and integrated (or not) into daily practice is little understood. We investigated how the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, UK, was used and experienced in the weeks following its opening, using the method of participant observation (travelling on the busway and observing and talking to passengers) and drawing on Normalization Process Theory to interpret our data. Using excerpts of field notes to support our interpretations, we describe how the ease with which the new transport system could be integrated into existing daily routines was important in determining whether individuals would continue to use it. It emerged that there were two groups of passengers with different experiences and attitudes. Passengers who had previously travelled frequently on regular bus services did not perceive the new system to be an improvement; consequently, they were frustrated that it was differentiated from and not coherent with the regular system. In contrast, passengers who had previously travelled almost exclusively by car appraised the busway positively and perceived it to be a novel and superior form of travel. Our rich qualitative account highlights the varied and creative ways in which people learn to use new public transport and integrate it into their everyday lives. This has consequences for the introduction and promotion of future transport innovations. It is important to emphasise the novelty of new public transport, but also the ways in which its use can become ordinary and routine. Addressing these issues could help to promote uptake of other public transport interventions, which may contribute to increasing physical activity and improving population health.     

An Ethnographic Filmflam: Giving Gifts, Doing Research, and Videotaping the Native Subject/Object

Using the discussion of self-reflexivity as an organizing principle, this article examines how mobilizing digital video technology during fieldwork opens up empirical and theoretical space for reconceptualizing the relationship between anthropologists and informants. Placing the field of visual anthropology into critical conversation with long-standing theoretical arguments about the objectivist limitations of native anthropologists, I argue that the slipperiness of nativity as an anthropological designation helps to provide analytical tools for examining filmmaking as a kind of gift-giving process between native ethnographic filmmakers and the subjects of their films. This article highlights some of the ways in which my own filmic and videographic exploits in Harlem, New York, mark integral connections between seeing and being the proverbial other, probing social exchanges predicated on the usefulness of low-budget digital technology as a means of fostering politically and epistemologically valuable ethnographic collaborations.