ABSTRACT
staggered over the five years of the project with research starting in three schools in 2010. However, for their PhD projects, Matthew Shaw and Howard Prosser each spent eight months in their research sites (Cyprus and Argentina, respectively). In each school, research team members (usually two, sometimes three) generate data through conventional ethnographic techniques including intensive observations of various institutional practices and each school’s semiotic ecology, interviews and focus group discussions involving students, teachers, the school principal and leading members of each school’s governing body, alumni and parents’ associations. Case studies of individual students (roughly 10 in each school) are also being developed through interviews with them over the two last years of their schooling and their second year out after having left school.
