Strangers' gazes, personal perceptions

Schools share comparable curricula and follow regional and national institutional guidelines. In their materiality, however, the living spaces of schools bring forth a constant interaction on the part of its members with a given, distinctive space. In the process, school members shape and traditionalize a unique and distinctive culture in every school. Within their ongoing project, the authors seek to grasp the interpersonal and spatial complex constituted within a school culture. To document and understand the cultural specificity of individual schools, they have further developed qualitative research methods from the methodological repertoire of educational and cultural anthropological research. Building on the component of strangeness as a key component of ethnographic experience and insight, two methods were designed to complement the overall toolkit deployed within the project: guided walks and short term visits by individuals socialized in another culture. These methodological approaches promise new insights for research in schools as well as for other organizational and institutional cultures.