ABSTRACT
As it has turned out, I more or less fell into fieldwork. What I mean with that awkward juxtaposition of tenses is that I never planned to take up educational ethnography. For that matter, I never planned to take up research of any kind, even in 1980 when I began doctoral studies in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Whatever plan I had then entailed, at best, learning something more about schooling, particularly curriculum and, more particularly yet, curriculum for students who experience little success in school and who I had been teaching for about a decade. If I had a long-term view, I expressed it as becoming a teacher of teachers.
