proposing research – On anthropology, education, culture, and more …

The ultimate ignorant school master?

One of our doctoral students, Ms. Mako Miura, recently challenged me with a question I had never entertained. We were discussing Jean Lave’s model for learning through participation (1991). We were focusing on some of the examples Lave mentions that point to the asymmetry between those in the “peripheral” position and those in the “full” position. Prototypically, we have an apprentice, initially ignorant but granted the legitimacy to participate, and the master who granted this legitimacy and eventually gets the apprentice to “learn” through participation that which characterizes a particular “shop floor” (to index Garfinkel). I emphasized that Lave is building a “model” to help us through initial analyses of the “educational” (“instructional,” “learning”) aspects of the organization of any floor. And I proposed we approached the encounter between first time parents and their child as just such a floor where a very legitimate participant will be learning everything that already makes this particular “family” (to keep it simple): familial configuration, ethnic or regional particularities, language, “culture.”

As this point, Miura asked: “could we argue that, on this floor, it is the child who is at the center and the parents who are on the periphery as they will have to ‘learn’ parenting?”

I must say that, whenever I have taught Lave (& Wenger)’s book, I have never pondered whether we should also consider the possibility of a feedback learning whereas the apparently “full” person discovers what apprentices are like, how they are learning, and what these apprentices are doing with that. I do not think that Jean Lave (or Ray McDermott with whom I once participated with her in a joint seminar on “ignorance”) ever considered such a possibility. And yet, particularly if we approach the issue after reading Rancière’s Ignorant Schoolmaster ([1987] 1999), as we did in the class, then the question is one we should take seriously.

The issue is a classic one in cultural anthropology, particularly in the Boasian traditions led by M. Mead and many others who build on what appears to be a common sense generalizations. Here is the way Geertz once put it:

One of the most significant facts about us is that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end up in the end having only lived one.” (1973, 45)

In other words related to ignorance and knowledge, one starts knowing nothing (but able to learn anything) and immediately gets taught in the language, styles, religion, etc., of one’s population, thereby limiting further and further what one can do with the rest of one’s life. Cultural anthropology is, also, about the ongoing restriction on possibilities (and the powerful ones re-enforcing these restrictions).

I suspect any introductory class in cultural anthropology (and all related discipline) starts with a version of this and will include discussion of enculturation, socialization, the development of an identity, etc.

This is probably where I would start, if I had to teach such a class.

father changing an infant's diaper — Father and infant on an educational floor: who is teaching what to whom and how?

But, things are not so simple when one considers the “shop floor” where a child and their parents first stare at each other wondering what to do next. The parents may be quite articulate about their wonders. They probably deliberate extensively with each other and with all the significant others with whom they are currently living or who directly impinge on their lives (parents, peers, the media, pediatricians). The infant may not be able to do much more than smile or cry but anyone who has been with a child, however young, has experienced the ongoing investigations that the child is doing (via , first, eyes, arm movements and such, and, soon, through various forms of vocalizations that turn into words). The child, we must assume, is not just “absorbing.” The child is also analyzing, exploring, testing, etc., and doing it more and more articulately as time passes (consider the 3 year-old who keeps asking ‘why?’). I am not proposing anything here about the child’s “consciousness.” I am just suggesting that we should never assume what a lack of linguistic articulation might imply in relation to analysis, exploration, testing, etc.

One thing that is certain is that, along with anything else the child may be doing, they are arguably, imposing their will to live on bumbling parents and thereby teaching them (plural) how to deal with them (singular) while being totally ignorant of what it is that they are teaching.

The infant would thereby be the ultimate “ignorant schoolmaster”…

Food for thought for future anthropologists who will conduct research on early child development, the production of particular family styles, and such.

[this is also a message to you (EB, GR, MN) to push dis- (vision, hearing, mental) studies to take very seriously what is otherwise a pious cliche “teachers learn from their students” (as it certainly applies to me): what exactly is it that a blind/deaf/confusing/… person teach the most significant persons in their entourage (assemblage) through ongoing everyday interaction in routine activities? How do they do it and with what stuff? (The prototype that should guide any research in this line is Goodwin’s work on communication with a person with aphasia (2004))]

References

Geertz, Clifford 1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.

Goodwin, Charles 2004 “A Competent Speaker Who Can’t Speak: The Social Life of Aphasia.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14, 2:151-170.

Lave, Jean and E. Wenger 1991 Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Rancière, Jacques [1987] 1999 The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation.. Tr. by K. Ross. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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When the young teach the young, what is the emerging order? Where are the controls? How would we find out?

I have a doubt: who controls anthropology at the AAA meetings? Is there a spider at the center of this web of meaning? Where are, as far as the discipline as object in history is concerned, the collective (not individual, of course) controls? Are they now in the hands of the apprentices? Or are they hidden, perhaps through symbolic manipulations of status displays (the shift to first names on tags, the almost universal disappearance of neckties on men, and other methods that hide differentiations of who can establish that this is anthropology)? How might we answer these questions, ethnographically, given the kind of theoretical approaches I advocate?

A while ago, I found a way to keep my sanity at the AAA meetings: play “session roulette.” I recommend it. The rules are simple: walk down any corridor and, without paying attention to any signs about the title of the session, or the timing of presentations, enter the room, seat at the back, listen for a while, and then leave before frustration or boredom overwhelm. Playing this (not very deep) game, I made wonderful discoveries: Chuck Goodwin reporting on a conversation with his aphasic father about importing California oranges to Florida (“No!”), hot disputes around the “Eve hypothesis” (one of the rare times I actually heard anthropologists passionately argue with each other during a session!), or, this year, wonderfully detailed accounts of “liturgical dancing” around the world (I actually stayed for the whole session: I could imagine myself as Marcel Mauss reading ethnographies of ritual performances!).

But mostly, I listen to the courageous efforts of young women and men (mostly women actually) who tell other young women and men (same caveat) “giving” a paper. I am sure the association someplace has the statistics about the relative seniority of presenters. My altogether not random sense is that they are mostly at the very beginning of their career. Since I have the privilege to teach quite a few of the presenters, I experience the pressure all actors (stakeholders, those entangled in this web, or caught by the spider) are under: individuals have to build up their curriculum vitae, professors must advise them to present early and often, professional associations (journals, etc.) must provide the opportunities for public displays.
Continue reading “When the young teach the young, what is the emerging order? Where are the controls? How would we find out?”

The sequencing of research questions in ethnographic research: before, during, and after

1) Before (at home, in the ivory tower)

University professors, faced with students planning research, will, at some point, ask:

Q:“What are your questions?”

As a generation of research has demonstrated, all questions (given a setting, authority pattern, etc.) place the person addressed in a box that severely constrains the immediate future. In the ivory tower, at research proposal relevant times, the question is not one to which the professor knows the answer (this is not elementary school!). But the professor will hold the student accountable to a rhetorical shape for the proper answer to the question. The student (the professor hopes!) can produce an answer in the appropriate genre even though the student should also expect that almost any answer will be in some way “wrong” (during a possibly very long sequence of revisions, rewritings, etc.):

A: “What time is it?” or “How do the the So’n’Sos” view time, temporality and history?” (Given a proposal for research on “History and temporality among the So’n’Sos” or “The metapragmatics of time among the So’n’Sos”)

This “research” question is then assessed in terms of the literature and methodologies.

E: Interesting! Have your read Geertz’s “Time, Person and Conduct in Bali”? What techniques will you use?

So, within the ivory tower, the research question is the second statement within a prescribed sequence that will repeat itself many times.

However, in all the social sciences (and I suspect this would apply to psychology too, if not to ethology and all sciences of communication), the “research question” can also be the first move in the interaction with the people about whom one is to say something (aka “the informants,” or “the natives,” or “the research population” or …) to the inhabitants of the ivory tower (or the masters of these inhabitants). So:

2) During (away from home, in the field), it might appear common sense to proceed as follows:

Q: Researcher asks: “What time is it?”

A: Someone responds: “xxxxx xxxxxx”

E:“Interesting!” as Researcher writes down the answer as data

This may even be the required sequence in some disciplines–as it was in some version of early anthropology when the researcher was, for example, expected to bring back to the ivory tower a local kinship vocabulary according to the “genealogical method” which required the researcher to get the person asked who was his “actual” “biological” “mother” no matter whether the person cared about this at all.
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on expert ignorance

A visit from Gus Andrews is always refreshing and invigorating as we explore some of the intellectual links in our mutual networks. So, last Wednesday, February 12, we talked, among other things, about the efforts of the organization where she works (she will have to provide the link…) to convince people around the world to use encryption to communicate in ways that, perhaps, governments and other cannot listen in. One of the problem is that it is hard to identify who are these people and, when members of plausible audiences are identified, convince them that this encryption is the solution to a problem many do not know they have. Some already use VPN (whatever that is, and however it works–it will advertise my ignorance here) and tell representatives of the institution that this works well enough for their purposes.

Now, this is a classic problem in adult education when potential teachees cannot be caught and wittingly or not, transformed into students whose knowledge can then be assessed. It is of course also a problem in the mandatory public education of children and young adults in schools and colleges. But there it is more a matter of sub-rosa resistance. Adults may listen to experts and accept being taught by them but expertise, as such, is rarely enough. One can coerce adults to take mandated courses in various forms of what used to be called “re-education” (safe driving, sexual harassment, etc.) but state coercion can only go so far. There actually is an academic field of “adult education” in schools of education where courses with titles like “How adults learn are” taught. I am not specifically in that field but, of course, most of what I, along with many my students of the past decade or more (including Gus Andrews, of course), have been concerned with.

Mostly, though, we have been concerned with collective self-education when adults seek new knowledge and devise new ways to gain it. This is what Jacotot’s students did when they taught themselves French by reading a French-Flemish version of Fenelon’s Telemaque. What Gus’s institution is trying to accomplish is more akin to what experts upon experts keep trying to accomplish when they tell whoever will listen that one should not smoke, eat more vegetables, devise stronger passwords, etc…

The questions that came to my mind later in the day of Gus’ visit concerned the experts’ ignorance about a whole range of issues:

From the exact location of the people to teach: how are “we” to find them? Where should we look?
to the extent to people prior knowledge and or experience with the experts’ expertise;
to the exact nature of the ignorance the experts’ teaching might alleviate;
And so on and so forth.

The big issue is that experts are not always (mostly?) not aware of their own ignorance about all these matters and are more likely to blame (or patronize) the people for the inability to listen to the expert and learn from them. In medicine, this produces a whole literature on “patient resistance. In field of adult education, it produces much discussion of the properties of adult and their learning.

We need to convince the world of experts, and particularly those who fund research, that they need to find out about their own ignorance and its consequences—particularly when what the experts have to offer is ostensibly valuable.

Anthropology: NOT this kind of experimental science

One does need to imagine situations, to be shared together by the observer and the observed (i.e. ethnographic participant observation), that will reveal the kind of work, its conditions and constraints, that we cannot imagine but that we suspect, for good theoretical work, is taking place.

[a follow up on yesterday’s blog entry]

Thanks to Beau Bettinger who sent me the following link (to something in the New York Times, no less) to a review of research entitled: Escaping the Cycle of Scarcity

The research quoted is “experimental” in just the way Geertz imagined all experimental research proceeded (1973: 22): given a constant (making decisions about alternatives) various conditions (prosperity/poverty) appear to make a difference thereby leading to an inference about the processes at work (cognitive overload). Nothing about this research makes sense, whether the concepts, the operationalization, the tests, or the inference. (And we will have to continue criticizing every one of these steps in this kind of research.)

Q: So what does an anthropology grounded in Boas/Garfinkel propose instead?

A: Any versions of what the powerful team Michael Cole once assembled proposed and conducted.

Jean Lave, a constitutive member of this team, has recently (2011) given a wonderful account of the steps she took, in the 1970s, to respond to Cole’s challenges. For several years, she re-designed alternate means of observing the activities of tailors. Again and again she revised what she had to do in her next field trip. And so she revealed matters, conditions, practices, that cognitive psychologists could not have imagined, that would resist conceptualization, and that, precisely, could not be transformed into a (correlational) theory–in the “grounded theory” sense. The point was to “make work visible” in the felicitous title of recent book edited by Whalen and Szymanski (2011). And, in the process, she also revealed constraints and possibilities in the very practical activity of conducting ethnographic research.

To do all this, one does need to imagine situations, to be shared together by the observer and the observed (i.e. ethnographic participant observation), that will reveal the kind of work, its conditions and constraints, that we cannot imagine but that we suspect, for good theoretical work, is taking place.

I have been gratified, over the years, by the number of research projects by students in our programs in anthropology at Teachers College, who have imagined such situations and revealed some possibilities of life in disability, immigration, poverty, that could not quite be imagined. For example, to mention only one among many, when Juliette de Wolfe (2013) spent a year following “autism warriors” she did not just “make available to us answers [to our deepest questions about humanity] that other shepherds, guarding other sheep in other valleys have given” (Geertz 1973: 30). She helped us answer deep questions about producing local and historically specific social orders when faced with dis-abling condition (that includes not only their children’s autism but a whole slew of other matters ostensibly involved in helping child and parent).

a call for exploring everyday science education

We must investigate carefully how people, in their everyday life, find out about the scientific research that is presented as requiring political decisions.

Today, I continue my experiments in drafting introductions to research proposals. The text below was written at the suggestion of Professor Peter Coleman of Teachers College, who asked me to write a brief (“people are busy”) statement summarizing my interests to colleagues, mostly scientists in the environmental sciences, in the hope that some might be interested in collaborating. I am developing here asides I have made about everyday science education in my recent work (2009, 2010).

So, and I quote:

How new scientific knowledge enters the public sphere is something we still know little about-systematically and scientifically. The issue is all the more pressing when this knowledge has immediate political implications-as most forms of scientific knowledge in the past two centuries has had. In physics (relativity theory, atomic bombs, nuclear power), medicine (in vitro fertilization, stem cell research), environmental science (global warming), etc., about all scientific developments have been translated out ofthe scientific polities within which they initially came to make sense, and into broader polities where they remain vigorously debated. Most importantly, as debates have evolved, scientific work has itself been affected. The limits on the use of stem cells, or the investigations into the e-mails of climate scientists, are but the most glaring of an ongoing systemic process of re-appropriation, some would say resistance, of science by non-science.

The issue is often presented as a struggle between the knowledgeable and the ignorant, and the solution as a matter of the knowledgeable teaching the ignorant through some kind of “educational” program–or perhaps just controlling the import of the obdurate ignorant through political marginalization. Such assumptions represent, at best, a naive understanding of educational processes and, at worst, a great danger for the future of scientific work as its authority over the production of knowledge for policy is eroded. Education, for all those who think most deeply about it, is never a simple matter of the transfer of information bits from one unit (generally modeled as an individual person) to another. But it is only recently that we had access to robust theoretical foundations for the systematic investigation of alternative models. This foundation has begun to produce preliminary empirical research illustrating the reality of collective educational processes that had remain relatively hidden to regular inquiry. These developments should allow us better to trace, and perhaps even simulate, what can happen when the temporary consensus of a polity on a topic (e.g., that the earth is warming and that this warming is the result of human industrial activity) is presented to other polities (national governments, local communities, families) as matter requiring action (carbon taxes, recycling regulations, changes in thermostat settings).

On the basis of this recent research, I am convinced that the overall process is best understood as a process of deliberations within and across polities, and thus as an interactional process leading to a temporary consensus about what to do next. I gloss this process as “education” and specify it as a set ofspeech acts (noticing, seeking, asking, instructing, convincing, trying out, evaluating, etc.) that always involve a multiplicity of people linked to each other in complex ways. In this perspective education is not a matter of transfer but a matter of recasting, or perhaps more exactly re-placing, what can appear as a bit of knowledge (or, more exactly again, knowledge with consequences since we are not talking here solely about a cognitive matter but a practical matter for future practices). In this perspective, a new scientific consensus about the world is a challenge to other forms of consensus and a trigger for new educative activities by the various groups caught in the challenge.

Much research is needed on all this. I am interested in collaborating with others to explore these processes. More information about the work I refer to is available at:
http://varenne.tc.columbia.edu/hv/edu/edu.html

on designing new methods for needs assessment

how to design new methods for needs assessment and service delivery that takes into account the ongoing education people give each other about their needs, and about the services offered to them.

This blog will take a somewhat different tack as I try to think through how to fund the work of the still unapproved Center I inaugurated a year ago. As I mentioned earlier, one of the difficulty of intellectual work that takes into account what we have taught ourselves about the properties of all work, is that every aspect of this work must take into account its multiples conditions. Simply put, we must speak (write, perform, etc.) differently to different audiences without losing the core of what we are trying to say. Some might consider this shaping of one’s statements as forms of dissimulation, selling out, if not hypocrisy or outright lying. But we know, as Sacks put it, that “everyone must lie”–which, of course, is not to be taken as a moral statement but as a statement of the human condition, and thus of the intellectual condition as well, particularly when ones steps out of solipsitic ivory towers.

So, I was looking at the web site of the W. K. Foundation, and particularly at the list of the grants it has recently awarded. None of the first 40 or 50 I looked at have anything to do with anthropological research, or indeed with research of any kind–at least in terms of their purpose statement. Typical is a statement that states:

strengthen the capacity of low-income pregnant and parenting women to improve
their birth outcomes and optimize the health and development of their children by supporting a planning process to develop specific interventions, implementation strategies, and evaluation plans

educate providers about how to best address the physical and psychosocial needs
of overweight/obese children, adolescents, and their families and increase their access to current, culturally-sensitive, evidence-based prevention, treatment, and management modalities by …

I chose this one because Sarah’s professional experience might make her credible as the designer of programs aimed at “parenting women” or “providers [of services] to families.” I suspect we might also find Kellogg funding programs relating to autism. Our issue is whether we can fit our work under such a statement?

The problem is not simply that I, as potential Principal Investigator, do not have a credible professional experience in the design or delivery of services. Some of us have this experience. The issue is how to remain true to our sense that much of these programs are based on faulty understanding, and thus research, on the issues the programs are aimed at alleviating–and still claim that we could help.

So can we say that we are proposing something that will be based on a sounder understanding of the conditions people are facing? Could we say something like:

“It is common sense that service delivery must be responsive to familial or community needs. What is difficult in this statement concerns the assessment of these needs. How do we, as expert outsiders, get to know these needs? Census figures about the rate of a condition (e.g. obesity) look like a good place to start. But they do not tell us much about the social and cultural settings that are likely involved in the rate. Surveys, focus groups and other such techniques may offer a glimpse into the actual settings of the condition of concern, but, at their best, they only produce reports of what happens in the settings, reports often framed by questions imagined by the investigator. Ethnographers have claimed that they can provide more ecologically valid accounts of life in the settings of context. We agree with this but are aware of one further limitation. Any account of the “culture” of a community or family is inadequate if it ends with a list of traits, customs, and procedures, that are then presented as an indefinitely long present. Recognition that human beings are always involved in transforming their most local conditions, wily nilly often as the conditions around them change, must be a fundamental investigatory principle. We need new methods for assessing community characteristics and needs, as well as the impact of a service on the people served as they are being served–particularly if it is successful enough to produce the kind of cultural change hoped for.

Our goal then is to use the setting up of a model [health] [autism] educational center in [TBA] founded in a new form of communal need assessment both before and during the first years of the center. This assessment will be based on the now well-documented reality that people, everywhere, and on an ongoing fashion, face the uncertainty of their conditions, particularly when these are directly impacted by a major life event [such as XXX], by investigating, analyzing, discussing, deciding what is to be known and what is to be taught, and then develop the methods to move forwards–methods that can include services offered by expert outsiders, or resistance to these services. In our words, people always educate themselves, and service delivery must bring out the work that the people do. Identifying conditions is one step but is not sufficient when people keep transforming these conditions. Finding the methods they use to do so is essential.”

I have drafted a longer draft of this elsewhere.