27th Annual Ethnography and Education Research Forum
Center for Urban Ethnography at the Graduate School of Education
University of Pennsylvania
Victor Llanque Zonta (Macalester ’08)
“What we want is just to be accepted”: Ethnography of a High School
Social skills constitute an essential part of the cultural knowledge that high school education transmits to younger generations. This study explores the social skills high school students learn in order to meet their psychosocial needs in the context of the high school. In addition to academic skills, they learn how to (re)assert their identity—commonly in association to a social group—while establishing a web of relationships that are crucial for their adjustment to the school’s social life. Interviews using the Spradley-MacCurdy method were conducted with a high school student regarding his daily social interactions and social relationships both within and outside of the school.
27th Annual Ethnography in Education Research Forum
“Educators and Ethnographers Negotiating Ideological and Implementational Spaces”
February 24-25, 2006
University of Pennsylvania
Graduate School of Education
3700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA
Throughout the world ideological and implementational gaps continue to develop between globalizing forces and national educational policies on the one hand and pedagogical and social justice demands in classrooms and schools on the other. Educators who negotiate these gaps on a daily basis search for third spaces and creative ways to fill them. They struggle to meet the demands of standardized assessments while trying to create curricula that are both engaging and relevant for students with diverse backgrounds. They seek out pedagogical strategies for helping their students benefit from the social and economic advantages of globalization without sacrificing local ways of being and doing. Educational researchers, in turn, attempt to understand the inter-connections and disparities between different levels of educational practice – from policy-making, to curricular design, to the work of classroom teachers. These researchers collaborate with teachers and administrators to bridge implementational gaps and to reconcile local ideologies with those reflected in educational policy, including ways of transforming, resisting and challenging those ideologies.
The Ethnography in Education Research Forum invites papers that explore these issues by documenting grassroots responses to varying levels of educational policy, describing teacher-researcher collaboration in the negotiation of third spaces, making theoretical and methodological connections between the study of societal level phenomena and local processes, bringing to light covert responses to overt policy decisions, and critically examining relationships between academic and public interests. |
