Investigating Educational Policy Through Ethnography

by Geoffrey Walford

Overview

Within the United Kingdom questions about the relevance of educational research and its relationship to policy have recently been the centre of a prolonged, public and sometimes acrimonious debate. The chapters in this book illustrate the ability of ethnographic work to assist in understanding the effects of educational policies to gradually influence the policy discourse. The book includes studies of policy initiatives at the local level that show the extent to which an intended change actually occurred in practice, others where actual change occurred, but there were unintended consequences as well as those planned by the policy, and others that illuminate the contradictions within the original policy itself. Chapters focus on a diversity of topics such as the ideology of educational 'success', politics and school mathematics, ITC teaching, sports coaching, basic skills provision for offenders, second language learning, ESOL teaching, primary teachers work, and the teaching of reading and spelling.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780762310180
Publisher:	Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Publication date:	04/22/2003
Series:	Studies in Educational Ethnography , #8
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 8.86(h) x 1.02(d)

Table of Contents

The politics, policy and ideology of school mathematics; Educational 'success' and the standards agenda: hierarchical discourses in action; ICT education policy: cultural lessons from families; What can qualitative research contribute to emerging evidence on basic skills provision for offenders on probation supervision?; Discovering the 'coaching self' through ethnography: coach as a committed volunteer; Performativity and primary teacher relations; Making it their own: patterns of reading and writing in a newly-literate Papua New Guinean community; POG game practices, learning and ideology. Local markets and identity work; Dealing with multilingualism in a Dutch primary school. An ethnographic study of the practice of teaching spelling to first and second language learners; Linguistic space: an ethnographic study of gender in a Canadian ESL classroom; Navigating the politics of identity: the struggle for cultural preservation in an ESOL classroom.