208 pages
228mm x 145mm
ISBN-10: 1 85856 341 0
ISBN-13: 978 1 85856 341 1
August 2005

'...useful for students to read before they embark upon research, an encouragement for students to pick up in the middle of their projects and helpful to read when nearing the end. It may also be constructive for project supervisors approaching the supervision process for the first time.' - Evaluation and Research in Education

Here is an exciting departure from existing volumes on educational research methods. This book focuses on the writing of an ethnographic dissertation and provides examples of successful ethnographic studies that have earned doctorates. It is a core reader for students pursuing ethnographic research at Masters, EdD or PhD level.

Professor Eve Gregory is Director of Studies in the Department of Educational Studies at London University's Goldsmiths College. The other authors have all been her part-time MPhil/PhD students; they have used ethnographic methods in their fields of culture, language, literacy and identity; all three have classroom experiences and a fascination for their research topics.

The book provides an overview of the value of an ethnographic approach to researching issues of diversity in education and offers models of writing for each stage of the work. The authors each relate how they went about writing their study and describe the difficulties they encountered. This makes compelling reading and offers a moving personal and professional rationale for ethnography as a research approach. The result is an excellent model and guide for new researchers, especially inexperienced writers or part-time students such as teachers, on how to go about writing postgraduate research dissertations.

Dr Jean Conteh's book Succeeding in Diversity, and Dr Chris Kearney's The Monkey's Mask are both reworkings of their theses and both were published by Trentham in 2003.