My own 'naturalistic observation' was pertinent to the genesis of this research project, which investigated mature students' emotions within higher education. I have been involved for many years in the kind of classroom environment where I have observed that many female mature students lack confidence in their academic ability, something that is…

This book aims to provide a foundational understanding of the writing processes associated with innovative forms of ethnographic writing. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book offers advice, examples, and exercises for every step in the ethnographic writing process, including field observation, field notes, narrative development, and editing. It…

This book documents and explores the range of strategies that a competent group of language users (17 students in a graduate course) employed when responding to a range of reading and writing tasks over a semester's time in a naturalistic instructional setting. The book is divided into the following six chapters: (1) "The Nature of…

This book provides a catalog of observer systems that can be used to analyze interactive and environmental events that occur in physical education and athletic settings. These systems maximize opportunities for collecting data from many perspectives using different techniques for data sources to explain or modify instructional phenomena. The…

This ethnography explores the academic practices of three lesbian faculty members at a public research university. The book seeks to rethink constructions of identity and knowledge in an academic setting by looking closely at how these women are defined by and redefine the terms "lesbian" and "academic," and it examines how…

Celebrating the achievements of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) by highlighting the promise of its future, this book presents 12 essays that describe how WAC programs have adapted and continue to adapt to meet new challenges. Essays in the book explain strategies for continuing WAC programs in an atmosphere of change; explore new avenues of…

This ethnographic study investigated why so few women become scientists or mathematicians. The study followed the lives of two groups of women, one black and one white, all with strong academic records, who were attending two southern U.S. universities, one predominantly black and the other predominantly white. The study was initiated in 1979 when…