The widespread adoption of ethnography in the study of educational processes in the 1970s and 80s represented a break with the methodological and theoretical assumptions of previous work in several ways. Of particular importance was the new attention to pupils' experience of an adaption to school. Even so, this ethnographic work inherited the preoccupation with social class inequalities that had characterized previous sociology of education.
Recently the focus of ethnographic work in education has broadened to give sustained attention to gender and ethnic differences, under the influence of feminism and of campaigns for multi-cultural/anti-racist education. Gender and ethnicity produce a complex pattern of pupils' careers in school, and raise crucial educational and political issues. This book offers a sample of recent ethnographic work that takes seriously these dimensions of pupils' experience and addresses the issues they raise. It explores arguments about discrimination and about the cultural processes by which pupils' responses to school are mediated. It also provides access to some of the intense debates that work in this field has stimulated.
