About the Book

This book, a collection of ethnographic studies of Chinese schooling, aims to take the reader into Chinese schools and provide a picture of students and teachers as actors who practice culture. The case studies also provide a means by which ethnography is explored as a central methodological focus and concern. This book explores the meaning of ethnography, both in describing Chinese schools and in the broader context of the defined purposes and practices of research. This self-reflexive approach to school ethnography in China includes issues of cultural translation and the connections between the process of ethnographic work, the emergence of a text, and the construction of a theory.