- Volume 7, Issue 3, 1999

Introduces the topic of this journal issue: ethnography as a resource for understanding classrooms as cultures. Presents excerpts from student essays to show the knowledge students have about life in classrooms and about classroom cultures. Offers a list of premises and questions to help make visible the often invisible patterns of life in classrooms.

Uses the author’s experiences and observations teaching first- and second-grade children to argue that pullout programs may have a negative effect on the community of learners. Documents the major disruptions to a class and to a child’s continuity of thought of preparing to leave, leaving, and then reentering a classroom. Outlines suggestions for bringing about change in pullout programs.

Looks at how a short story by three students in a bilingual third-grade classroom came to be. Examines the literate practices already established in the classroom; the classroom norm of using two languages; learning to include information from multiple sources; and learning that interaction is a valuable part of the writing process.

Describes how a bilingual teacher and a professor collaborated in a bilingual classroom to create culturally relevant opportunities for learning. Examines the work of four fourth-grade students of different backgrounds to show what this culturally relevant learning looked like. Discusses sources of knowledge generation: families, multicultural literature, and the students themselves.

Describes the author’s year-long analysis of one student’s work to demonstrate her larger and ongoing research process in her classroom, as she investigated whether and how students were taking up the key inquiry-based processes that serve as a foundation for learning across disciplines in her classroom.

Reflects on the author’s experience as principal of an elementary school where classrooms became part of an ethnographic project focusing on what it means to be a community of learners.

Describes how the author, an elementary school principal, has changed his observational style and shifted his focus when visiting classrooms and evaluating teachers, as a result of his growing ethnographic understanding of classrooms as cultures and communities.