This study examines how tolerance is enacted in Indonesian primary classrooms through an ethnographic approach. Conducted over six months across seven schools, the study draws on classroom observations and interviews with teachers, students, school leaders, and parents. The findings show that participation in classroom dialogue is uneven, shaped by confidence, recognition, and social positioning. Although students express support for tolerance, engagement across difference is often mediated by familiarity, trust, and existing relationships. Experiences beyond school, including family, community, and digital environments, further influence these interactions. Collaborative activities such as group work and gotong royong reveal forms of civic participation that extend beyond classroom talk, making citizenship visible through cooperation and shared responsibility. The study argues that tolerance and citizenship are relational practices negotiated through everyday interaction rather than outcomes of diversity exposure alone.
This paper proposes a reflection on the role of educational ethnography in understanding school change from a collaborative perspective. All research entails a political, ideological and ethical stance, as well as an onto-methodological and methodological positioning. It thus implies a future-oriented project that engages in collective transformation processes. Research, therefore, involves progressing in the complexity of knowledge processes aimed at transforming the realities investigated. We present an ethnography on disruptive practices and nomadic knowledge. This ethnographies supported change projects in the curricular and/or methodological orientations of the schools. The ethnography were accompanied by narrative and collaborative research processes. The results allow us to reflect on the possibilities of the collaborative perspective in ethnographic research, enabling it to be part of the transformation process. In the same way, ethnography allows us to reconstruct the narrative of educational processes, questioning hegemonic logics and advancing toward new ways of acting by all those involved.
Expressions referring to Nazism, such as Nazi salutes, are present in Nordic schools. In this ethnographic study we observed the everyday life of seven lower secondary schools in Finland and scrutinised interviews with 100 members of the schools' staff. We examine how the staff makes sense of the presence of Nazi expressions among pupils. Our results show that there were uncertainty, interventions, downplaying, indifference, and frustration in their responses. Although Nazi expressions were common in the schools, the staff downplayed their significance, considering them to be typical teenage boundary-testing and humour. The staff found Nazi expressions inappropriate, but they rarely connected them to white supremacy, racism, or radicalisation. The exception was one school where the staff conducted an intervention when they interpreted the incidents as having a connection to neo-Nazism. We find that the normalisation of Nazi expressions maintains white supremacy and racism in the everyday life of school.
This paper explored the ways in which Haredi (Jewish ultra-Orthodox) male kindergarten teachers negotiated seemingly conflicting worldviews: their traditional religious view versus secular contemporary views. Teachers' attitudes towards techniques to enhance children's sensorimotor skills were examined in an Enrichment Centre for Haredi kindergarten children in Israel. A close look at the teachers' practices revealed a twofold attitude in which, on the one hand, these techniques were granted a status of significance, while on the other hand, a clear hierarchy was established between Haredi religious principles and these techniques, rendering their significance conditional on serving the religious principles. Findings were analysed through the prisms of Hybridity and Thirdspace, illuminating a specific modality involved in the negotiations of seemingly conflicting concepts.
This study examines interactions between prison teachers and their students at a Learning Center situated within a Swedish prison. The study's findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork and include the teachers' enactments of support and control in their work as facilitators of learning. The teachers' enactments are analyzed using the theoretical concept of 'institutional gaze in practice'. Prison teaching combines (i) elements of working for a disciplinary regime and (ii) ethical aspects of a teacher's work. The concept 'institutional gaze in practice' reveals how teachers can be flexible in their interactions with their students. However, it is also shown that even when teachers try to see the student as a person rather than as an offender, they often struggle with this task. Disciplinary work, such as establishing and following up on rule violations, results in interactions that frame students as offenders.
We explore how Norwegian students understand and cope with mental health and well-being challenges in higher education. We use innovative visual collaborative methodology with a critical approach to well-being, drawing on a sociology of world relations. Our findings add insights into students' perspectives in a field largely informed by quantitative data. They illustrate the extent of students' active self-management of emotional, temporal and relational aspects. They also reveal everyday challenges of self-judgment and shame. We find, to improve a sense of health and well-being in a university context, students' perceptions of personal productivity are significant but more so supportive relationships.
With connected screens, human sociality and digital technology has hybridised in most domains of everyday life, including education. This article addresses methodological and ethical challenges in investigating hybrid situations containing students' screen-mediated communication, both within and beyond the classroom. Drawing on two-year long fieldwork in a multi-sited participatory research project involving students aged 14-16 at four lower secondary schools in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, we employ a participatory hybrid ethnographic approach. Three different but intertwined student positions in relation to the research task emerged: as co-researchers, as informants and as learners, contributing to insights from the students' perspectives. The study highlights the importance of continuous informed consent, student agency, and context-sensitive methods in ethically sustainable research. We argue that methodological flexibility is essential for capturing the complexity of hybrid social practices and for developing participatory research practices that are responsive to both student perspectives and diverse educational settings.
Indigenous parenting traditions offer a powerful alternative epistemology, yet scholarship on such traditions remains limited. This study explores how parents and cultural leaders in Manggarai, Flores, Indonesia, perceive and practise the 15T method, an Indigenous parenting framework consisting of fifteen Manggarai-language concepts beginning with the letter T. Drawing on a ethnographic engagement that included two months of intensive immersion, daily participant observation, and ten in-depth interviews with cultural leaders, a religious leader, a cultural expert, and parents, we analysed data using reflexive thematic analysis. Our findings reveal that the fifteen T concepts cluster around four interrelated dimensions of parenting: (1) foundational training of the body and basic capacities (Titing/Toting, Tanang); (2) the transmission of wisdom through advice and modelling (Tong, Tamang, Toming, Toing, Titong); (3) the cultivation of character and social bonds (Titing/Tatang, Tatong, Toto Nai Bakok); and (4) prohibitive moral principles expressed through the prefix toe ("do not").
Placed in the context of debates on decolonising schools, particularly the role of Indigenous culture in the curriculum, this article discusses key insights arising from the study of a grassroots educational programme focused on teaching the traditional skill of canoe building to out-of-school youth in the Marshall Islands. A 'patchwork ethnography' which draws on 8 years of engagement and four periods of fieldwork, it argues that the programme skilfully navigates a reimagined educational 'Thirdspace' (Soja, E. W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Blackwell) by drawing on aspects of formal Western schooling, as well as capitalist work practice, combining these with Marshallese approaches to knowledge and learning. By drawing on Klafki's work on 'educational substance' (Klafki, W. 1995. "Didactic Analysis as the Core of Preparation of Instruction (Didaktische Analyse als Kern der Unterrichtsvorbereitung)." Journal of Curriculum Studies 27 (1): 13-30. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022027950270103), it outlines how the canoe itself constitutes the curriculum that is taught. It concludes with some reflections on what we can learn from the approach more broadly for both Indigenous models of education and formal schooling.
In Finland, a recent reform extended compulsory education to the age of 18, renewing attention to the role of school guidance. This ethnographic research investigates school guidance practices in which certain youth-initiated topics are dismissed. Drawing on fieldnotes from 78 observation days, the study focuses on individual guidance sessions with 8th- and 9th-graders. An analysis of guidance interaction and dismissive practices was performed using Vehvil & auml;inen's framework of counselling orientations. For its broader theoretical framework, the study draws on critical guidance studies and youth research. By reframing concerns positively, emphasising individual responsibility, referring young people to psychologists and relying on structured forms, counsellors limit not only the kinds of topics that can be addressed in guidance but also the range of emotions that can be expressed. The findings highlight a dominant problem-solving orientation that constrains reflective dialogue and overlooks contextual factors that shape educational choices.
In Quebec, within a context of school competition, most public secondary schools now offer both the regular programme and specialised programmes, many of which are enriched and selective. Drawing on data collected in a public high school located in a socioeconomically disadvantaged and culturally diverse area of Quebec City, this article investigates how students in specialised programmes are governed. Combining a sociology of school markets with a Foucauldian approach, the article highlights a disciplinary apparatus embedded in the organisation of the specialised programmes. This normative infrastructure aims to regulate students' performance and behaviour while contributing to the school's position within the local educational market. The findings also highlight how students who deviate from the 'ideal' profile of specialised programmes participants face administrative and symbolic exclusion. In conclusion, the article questions the disciplinary and normalising mechanisms that may lead to the exclusion of students from selective specialised programmes in such schools.
This article explores how Year 5-6 students in a London primary school navigated well-being under the pressures of high-stakes testing. Based on six weeks of ethnographic fieldwork-anchored in participant observation and fieldnotes, and extended through participatory tools such as co-designed focus groups, photovoice, and creative mapping-the study centres children's voices and their negotiations of pressure and wellbeing. The analysis distinguishes agency from autonomy, framing agency as a relational practice enacted within institutional constraint rather than a matter of individual choice. Students' micro-practices of resistance, reframing, and peer solidarity functioned both as coping strategies and as agentic acts that reshaped classroom culture. The study contributes to debates on neoliberal schooling, subject formation, and student well-being by showing how participatory ethnography can illuminate the ways school environments simultaneously constrain and sustain students' emotional lives. Its innovation lies in documenting the micro-processes of coping and agency as they unfolded in situ.
Using ethnographic fieldnotes from a Japanese preschool, I examine how classroom time and participation are organised across surrounding days as a scheduled parent observation lesson (hoiku sankan; hereafter 'open class') approaches. I trace one open class across an ordinary-time comparator (Day -25), final rehearsals (Days -3 to -1), and a brief afterlife in which the event is recalled and evaluated (Day +3). I show how teachers make an approaching parental audience consequential by (i) invoking 'tomorrow' and parent references to frame recognisable participation, (ii) tightening tempo and alignment through timing cues and environmental markings, and (iii) closing segments with brief endorsements (e.g. applause cues) that make progress easy for families to follow. Day 0 was not observed; I treat it as a calendar reference point and restrict claims to explicit orientations, event-related artefacts, and post-event talk documented in fieldnotes, rather than inferring effects from temporal proximity alone.
Pedagogical competence in early-childhood education is commonly framed through procedural standards and measurable outcomes. Yet much of teaching unfolds in moments that exceed formal specification. Drawing on an eighteen-month, multi-sited ethnography of teacher education in Vietnam, this article examines how student-teachers learn to organise play-based activities under conditions of standardisation. Based on classroom observations, video-recorded micro-teaching, ethnographic journals, and repeated training cycles, the analysis shows that competence did not consolidate through faithful execution of lesson plans. Instead, it took shape through small, situational adjustments - modulating pace, shifting bodily position, waiting, or stepping back - that helped sustain interaction as children's engagement fluctuated. These adjustments were rarely named as competencies, yet they proved decisive in preventing play from fragmenting. The article offers an ethnographic account of how pedagogical competence is formed through responsiveness and situated judgment in everyday practice.
Indonesian early childhood teachers navigate severe material constraints, shared phones, intermittent electricity, and unpaid labour. Professional learning community scholarship, however, remains rooted in Western, well-resourced assumptions. This ethnographic study explores how teachers in rural East Java construct WhatsApp-based professional learning communities amid geographic isolation and infrastructural precarity. Through 33 months of participant observation across three groups, analysing 3,000 messages and interviewing 12 teachers, the study examines everyday practices of collective agency. Findings reveal features absent from secular theories: volunteer facilitators practising 'accompaniment' ethics, Islamic spirituality reframing policy compliance as sacred obligation, cascading dissemination bridging rural-urban divides, and infrastructural solidarity making material constraints collectively negotiable. Critical analysis exposes contradictions - accompaniment depends on women's unpaid labour, spiritual framing risks depoliticising structural critique, and digital inclusion produces new exclusions. Centring Southern epistemologies, this study challenges deficit narratives and invites scholars to rethink professional learning theory through Indonesian practices of accompaniment and solidarity.
This article examines how sensory and digital ethnography can enrich climate education through relational, arts-led methodologies. Conducted amid the COVID-19 pandemic, our ethnographic project, Global Youth (Digital) Citizen-Artists and their Publics, engaged over 500 secondary and university drama students across six global sites. As pandemic restrictions necessitated a shift to virtual spaces, we embraced sensory ethnographic approaches, focusing on feeling with participants through creative methodologies such as site-specific theatre-making and soundscape workshops. Through these methods, we uncovered how youth collaboratively construct new socio-ecological imaginaries, moving beyond individualistic climate education models towards intergenerational and intercultural engagement. We argue that attunement to sensory and more-than-human dimensions of climate research fosters alternative ways of knowing and engaging with the environmental crisis. Our findings suggest that theatre and performance can serve as transformative spaces for climate education, offering relational, embodied and participatory approaches that challenge conventional pedagogies.
During the 2023-2024 academic year, two doctoral theses employing ethnographic approaches in education were presented within the same doctoral program at the University of Barcelona. The first thesis (Estalayo Bielsa, 2023) involved a two-year ethnographic study at a Barcelona secondary school, exploring how students' subjectivities develop through intra-active processes in which global and local forces intertwine and reconfigure materially. The second thesis (De Riba Mayoral, 2024) also employed a two-year ethnographic approach in a primary-secondary school setting, examining collaborative filmmaking in educational research through a post-qualitative methodology. Drawing on these studies and grounded in feminist new materialisms and relational ethics, this article examines the reciprocal relationship between schools and researchers through written reflections and dialogic interviews with both researchers and school management teams. Through meta-analysis, the article traces movements of affect, responsibility, and recognition that endure beyond fieldwork, proposing educational ethnography as a collaborative practice characterized by care and co-responsibility.
This study examines the ethnomathematical components inherent in the design, patterns, and cultural significance of the woven tandok, a traditional artifact of the Batak Toba community in Indonesia. Using an ethnographic approach, the study involved thirteen key informants to explore the relationship between mathematical concepts and cultural practices. Data were collected through participatory observation, semi-structured interviews, and documentation of tandok artefacts. The findings show that the construction of tandok reflects four fundamental ethnomathematical activities: counting, measuring, designing geometric forms, and determining spatial orientation. These practices relate to specific mathematical concepts, particularly geometric properties and structures. The study highlights that tandok is both a geometric form and a cultural representation of the Batak Toba worldview. Although teachers and students can recognize geometric elements in woven tandok, these have not been incorporated into classroom mathematics instruction. Therefore, this study recommends integrating tandok-based ethnomathematical activities into elementary mathematics curricula.
This paper examines ethical issues and shifting power relations in educational ethnography that involves 'studying up'. It extends critiques of codified research ethics by analysing situations in which research participants are not solely vulnerable or powerless in relation to the researcher. Drawing on an observational study conducted in an elite school in southern Sweden, the paper presents three analytic vignettes that illustrate how vulnerability, misrecognition and exposure may be experienced by both researchers and participants. These examples demonstrate how ethical concerns emerge and evolve as power relations move in practice. The analysis argues for an approach to research ethics that accommodates the fluid and relational nature of ethnographic fieldwork. The paper proposes voluntary vulnerability as a methodological and ethical stance for navigating the dilemmas that arise when conducting research 'up'.
