Ethnography has typically been seen as a singular research journey in which the lone researcher engages in the study of a community. However, increasingly within the social sciences, ethnographic research takes place in teams. This article explores the processes of using fieldnotes to develop team ethnography in a study of Gujarati complementary schools in a diverse English city. Complementary schools are also known as supplementary, heritage and community language schools. They are voluntary, usually run by local communities, and outside the state education sector. The article looks at how fieldnotes are used by researchers to constitute a team, contest interpretations and produce nuanced accounts of complementary schools. For the purpose of this article, a set of fieldnotes has been selected and presented as a case study to illustrate the role fieldnotes played in the team. The article explores their iterative use by the four-member team to settle upon particular research themes. We consider the role fieldnotes played in the team's reaching contested but shared accounts of social and linguistic action in one particular complementary school.

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This paper focuses on teacher-student interaction in two Gujarati complementary school classrooms in one school in the East Midlands city of Leicester, UK. To date, little work has been published on interaction in complementary schools, and little is therefore known about the cultures of learning and teaching in such contexts. Our study of complementary schools in Leicester has shown how the classroom participants manage bilingualism and bilingual learning and teaching. One of the most noticeable features of the discourses of the two classrooms is the way two languages are juxtaposed to create learning opportunities. This uncontested use of two languages through the pedagogic strategy of code-switching goes against the perceived notion of bilingual learning/teaching as being a deficient strategy. Classrooms in complementary schools offer a highly significant, though under-researched, context in which to study language choice, and specifically the multilingual experiences of classroom participants. By exploring the educational pedagogies and classroom discourses, it is the aim of the paper to extend theoretical insights into the way complementary schools might help to transform, negotiate and manage the linguistic, social and learning identities of the participants in the classroom.