Abstract
The work of John Furlong on school and classroom ethnography is located in its context and its achievements celebrated. The paper focuses on class, ethnicity and gender issues as it explores the changes and continuities in the ethnography of education over the 66-year period covered. The qualities of a good ethnographer are playfully compared to those of the African-Caribbean trickster figure Anansi used by Furlong in an early article. Looking back to 1954 and forward to 2020, the key themes found in the qualitative research on schools and classrooms in the UK and the USA are compared and contrasted.
Notes
1. Despite research on a wider range of pupils two books on white males are still the most frequently cited (Lacey, Citation1970; Willis, Citation1977). There is continued valorising of Willis (Citation1977) despite its fundamental flaws (see Hargreaves & Hammersley, Citation1982, or Walford, Citation2007). Spindler and Hammond (Citation2006) contains, in 394 pages, no citation to any non-American school ethnographer but Willis. It is unclear why Woods (Citation1979), Hey (Citation1997) or Mac an Ghaill (Citation1994, Citation1988), to take three examples from England, or Brown (Citation1987) from Wales are not standard citations in the USA.