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In her new book, bestselling author Cynthia Ballenger explores the intellectual strengths of students that teachers find puzzling poor, urban, immigrant, or bilingual children who do not traditionally excel in school. Ballenger challenges the assumption that these children whose families in many cases have less formal education, read fewer storybooks, and talk less with their children about school-like topics have fewer intellectual or academically relevant experiences. This practical book offers a detailed roadmap for traversing the daily work of teaching today s diverse population, helping educators to refine their work as it unfolds in the classroom. Ballenger guides the reader as she analyzes what the children said, what this indicates about their thinking, and how her dialogues with them informed her teaching.

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Many scholars have turned to the groundbreaking critical research methodology, Youth-Led Participatory Action Research (YPAR), as a way to address both the political challenges and inherent power imbalances of conducting research with young people. Revolutionizing Education makes an extraordinarily unique contribution to the literature on adolescents by offering a broad framework for understanding this research methodology. With an informative combination of theory and practice, this edited collection brings together student writings alongside those of major scholars in the field. While remaining sensitive to the methodological challenges of qualitative inquiry, Revolutionizing Education is the first definitive statement of YPAR as it relates to sites of education.

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In this Third Edition of his bestselling text John W. Creswell explores the philosophical underpinnings, history, and key elements of each of five qualitative inquiry traditions: narrative research, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case study. In his signature accessible writing style, the author relates research designs to each of the traditions of inquiry. He compares theoretical frameworks, ways to employ standards of quality, and strategies for writing introductions to studies, collecting data, analyzing data, writing a narrative, and verifying results.

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Youth-led organizing, a burgeoning movement that empowers young people while simultaneously enabling them to make substantive contributions to their communities, is increasingly receiving attention from scholars, activists, and the media. Melvin Delgado and Lee Staples, recognized leaders in social work macro practice and community organization, have produced the first comprehensive study of this dynamic field. Their well-organized book takes an important step toward bridging the gap between academic knowledge and community practice in this growing area. 

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Drawing on years of teaching and field research experience, the authors develop a series of guidelines, suggestions, and practical advice about how to write useful field notes in a variety of settings, both cultural and institutional. Using actual unfinished, "working" notes as examples, they illustrate options for composing, reviewing, and working field notes into finished texts. They discuss different organizational and descriptive strategies, including evocation of sensory detail, synthesis of complete scenes, the value of partial versus omniscient perspectives, and of first person versus third person accounts. Of particular interest is the author's discussion of note taking as a mindset. They show how transforming direct observations into vivid descriptions results not simply from good memory but more crucially from learning to envision scenes as written.

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In The Interpretation of Cultures, the most original anthropologist of his generation moved far beyond the traditional confines of his discipline to develop an important new concept of culture. This groundbreaking book, winner of the 1974 Sorokin Award of the American Sociological Association, helped define for an entire generation of anthropologists what their field is ultimately about.

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A manual addressed to students rather than to teachers or researchers, Oral History: An Introduction for Students is unique among the "how to" books in the field, adapting some of the best methods of group oral history projects to the needs of individual students. Useful in courses devoted entirely to oral history, the book also addresses the wider audience of students who may choose to do oral research in the context of otherwise traditional courses. The emphasis is on humanistic, imagininative, and intellectual challenge for students in integrating oral accounts with written documents. Only by achieving such flexibility, argues the author, can oral history fully realize its potential as a learning and teaching technique.

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In Telling Stories, Mary Jo Maynes, Jennifer L. Pierce, and Barbara Laslett argue that personal narratives―autobiographies, oral histories, life history interviews, and memoirs―are an important research tool for understanding the relationship between people and their societies. Gathering examples from throughout the world and from premodern as well as contemporary cultures, they draw from labor history and class analysis, feminist sociology, race relations, and anthropology to demonstrate the value of personal narratives for scholars and students alike.

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Participatory Action Research (PAR) introduces a method that is ideal for researchers who are committed to co-developing research programs with people rather than for people. The book provides a history of this technique, its various strands, and the underlying tenets that guide most projects. It then draws on two PAR projects that highlight three integral dimensions: the meaning of participation; the way action manifests itself; and the strategies for gathering, analyzing, and disseminating information.