AdultEdEthnographies

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List of Ethnographies in Adult education/Adult pedagogical spaces

Contributed by Council on Anthropology and Education listserv members 2005

Compiled by Sofia Villenas, Ph.D

Associate Professor of Education and Latino/a Studies

Cornell University


  • Gowen, S. (1992). The Politics of Workplace Literacy. New York: Teachers College Press.
  • Caroline Heller called Until We Are Strong Together -- about a group of women writers in the S. F. Tenderloin.
  • Mira Katz (1999) (Unpublished dissertation) looks at adult learning in workplace contexts and other articles
  • Dorinne Kondo (1990). Crafting Selves: Power, gender and discourses of identity in a Japanese Workplace
  • Victoria Purcell-Gates, Robin Waterman (2000) Now We Read, We See, We Speak: Portrait of Literacy Development in an Adult Freirean-Based Class Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
  • Celia Haig-Brown (1995) Taking control: Power and contradiction in First Nations Adult Education. UBC Press
  • Philip H. Henning (1998). Ways of Learning: An Ethnographic Study of the Work and Situated Learning of a Group of Refrigeration Service Technicians, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 27 (1), 85-136, April 1998.
  • Douglas Harper (1987). Working Knowledge: Skill and Community in a Small Shop. University of Chicago Press. (not sure if available in paper)
  • Annette Henry (1998). Taking Back Control: African Canadian Women Teachers' Lives and Practice. SUNY Press.
  • Jenny Horsman's (2000) Too Scared to Learn: Women, Violence, and Education," (Lawrence Erlbaum) - This is not an ethnography, it's an interview study, but it has powerful things to say about adult women learners and literacy and the "literacy workers" committed to making a difference in people's lives. This likewise is a study in Canada (comments from J. Preissle).
  • Nelly P. Stromquist (1997). Literacy for Citizenship: Gender and Grassroots Dynamics in Brazil. SUNY Press
  • Juan C. Guerra (1998) Close to Home: Oral and Literate Practices in a Transnational Mexicano Community (Teachers College Press).
  • Tara Goldstein (1997). Two Languages at Work: Bilingual life on the Production Floor (1997) published by Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Vicki Bradley (2004). “What if we are doing this all wrong?”: Sequestering and a community of practice. Anthropology & Education Quarterly September 2004, Vol. 35, No. 3: 345-367.

“This article explores how sequestered novices within a community of practice struggled with their reliance on individual learning resources and identity development. In a year-long study at a child-care center that included methods of participant-observation, interviewing, videotaping, and apprenticeship, five inexperienced child-care teachers, including me, relied heavily on our creativity, recollections, learning by doing, and embodied experiences. I suggest that future studies of communities of practice examine instances of sequestering and include the perceptions of novices.

  • Sylvia Hart-Landsberg and Stephen Reder have several pieces of pay for knowledge and learning in work places. One is in the Reading Research Quarterly between 1992 and 1995. Others are posted on the web – Suggestion by Judith Green
  • Mark Jury’s work (recommended by others)

[From Mark Jury] Glynda Hull's work on a community college vocational program in banking and finance, from the early '90s. Here are a couple web-accessible articles w/ links:

Hull, Glynda. (1993). Critical Literacy and Beyond: Lessons Learned from Students and Workers in a Vocational Program and on the Job. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 4, Alternative Literacies: In School and Beyond. pp. 373-396. The AnthroSource link for this article is http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/aeq.1993.24.4.04x0066n?cookieSet=1

You can also access via the web her National Center for Research on Voc Ed report, "Their Chances? Slim and None": An Ethnographic Account of the Experiences of Low-Income People of Color in a Vocational Program and at Work." MDS-155. NCRVE. Nov 1992. The link: http://www.nccte.org//publications/ncrve/mds-01xx/mds-155.asp?Printer=Y

  • Hart-Landsberg & Reder's work. They have a chapter on that work in the 1997 book Glynda edited, _Changing work, changing workers: Critical perspectives on language, literacy and skills_. (SUNY Press.) Along w/ Hart-Landsberg & Reder's, several other good ethnographic accounts by the likes of David Jolliffe, Juliet Merrifield, Chuck Darrah, Jenny Cook-Gumperz, Marisa Castellano, Sheryl Gowen, Debby D'Amico...
  • Mark Jury and Glynda Hull have a paper they’re getting ready to send out for review. It revisits data from Hull’s banking study and their long-term ethnographic study of work in two electronics manufacturing plants in the Silicon Valley. They offer up the education and working life histories of one vocational student and one factory supervisor, and they discuss these in light of some "second chance" literature, including a Maxine Greene essay on seeing "alternate possibilities." The working title of the paper is "Accounting for New Beginnings: Vocational students and workers construct lives and careers." Mark will be glad to send a PDF version to those who are interested. Email Mark Jury at jury at flash.net.
  • Mica Pollock (2004). Colormute: Race talk dilemmas in an American school. “[This] book is largely about adults, in interactions w/ kids.
  • Carol Thompson (In press). Hopeworks: Youth Identity, Youth Organization, and Technology. In David Buckingham and Rebecca Willett, Digital Generations (Erlbaum, in press). Qualitative study
  • Jacobs-Huey, Lanita. (2003). Ladies are Seen, Not Heard: Language Socialization in a Southern, African American Cosmetology School. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 34, 3, 277-299.
  • Judith Marshall (1993). Literacy, Power, and Democracy in Mozambique: The Governance of Learning from Colonization to the Present. Westview Press, Boulder Colorado 1993. 313 pages. She has an article length piece in CAE that might work well for class.
  • Wendy Luttrell (1997). Schoolsmart and Motherwise: Working-Class Women's Identity and Schooling. Routledge
  • Janise Hurtig (forthcoming December 2005). “Mexican Mothers Retelling the City: Stories from the ‘Parents as Writers’ Workshop.” City and Society - Special Issue: Revisiting the City: The negotiation of urban space in Chicago
  • Janise Hurtig (2005). Resisting assimilation: Mexican immigrant mothers writing together” In Latino Language and Literacy in Ethnolinguistic Chicago, Marcia Farr ed. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers.
  • Judith Preissle recommends also anything of Lave and Wenger's but not sure if either have ethnographic studies in print. They would have good material in their bibliographies


Sofia Villenas, Ph.D Associate Professor of Education and Latino/a Studies

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