This article is a critical ethnographic study that examines rural Chinese girls' literacy practices in sanctioned and unsanctioned spaces, and their negotiations with the articulated and delivered literacy program. In particular, this study focuses on a group of 1st-grade girls, who I call the "Spy Girls," engaged in the celebration of…

This article is based on a team ethnographic study in the province of Yauyos in the Peruvian Andes. It focuses on rural education and the inequalities surrounding it. Teachers and parents exchange mutual recriminations as they seek to explain why some children have greater difficulties than others and why urban schools achieve superior results as…

Steps away from where a concrete wall once divided this city east from west, a group of Muslim 1st graders at E.O. Plauen Elementary School sing a phrase that is unfamiliar to most German ears. Though the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches have long provided voluntary religion classes in Berlin schools, only recently have the courts allowed an…