Using meta-ethnographic analysis to understand and represent youth's notions and experiences of learning in and out of secondary school

Abstract

In the last four years, we have been researching how five groups of young people were learning inside and outside secondary schools. The novelty of this proposal was to invite these young people to act as researchers by carrying out their own ethnographic cases. As a result we produced 10 ethnographic reports - 5 prepared by students and 5 by the university research team. In this paper, we show part of the conversation between the five ethnographic reports written by us giving account of the processes and results of the studies implemented by students. This meta-ethnographic process tries to accomplish two main objectives: (a) to characterise the variety of youth' learning experiences in their mobilities and transitions in and outside schools and the ways of giving account of them in the ethnographic reports; (b) reporting own learning about the possibilities and limitations of the metaethnographic analysis.