A study in progress investigating cultural and structural factors which affect educational opportunities for white middle-class and Punjabi immigrants in a California high school is reported. In the two-and one-half years since the project began, researchers have interviewed a broad range of students, parents, teachers, and administrators. The…

A middle-class adolescent peer group was examined, using ethnographic techniques, to describe the group's relationship to adults and to uncover the adult reference group after which the group modeled itself. Although this group was organized to help poor people, it modeled itself after middle-class adult managers. (Author/GDC)

Observations in the infant room of a school-based daycare center for teen mothers revealed how "scripts" of White middle-class mothering were embraced or resisted by White teachers and (primarily) African-American student-mothers. Scripts of good mothering conflicted with similarly constructed scripts of the good student, emphasizing…

An ethnographic sketch of a small, Midwestern, middle-class American community emphasizes the shared value system, the derived code of conduct and an analysis of the three levels of social interaction and their respective functions. Data were gathered over a two-year period of field work, including ten months of intensive observation of the town,…

Reviews an ethnographic analysis of Teach for America, a 1990 educational reform program that illustrates how underlying assumptions about "marginal" urban and rural students and their "deficient" environments solidify existing power structures, acculturate students to middle-class norms, generate resistance to teachers, and…