This is the second in a series of notes to lectures for my class ITSF5016 "Anthropology of Education"

•  Varenne, Hervé Introduction and Chapter 1 of Educating in life: ethnographies of challenging new normals. Routledge (2019).

1. What is "Teachers College" about and its evolution from
   1. a college for the training of teachers
   2. to an encompassing "school of education" concerned with the whole child, and the whole teacher, and the administration of all this.
   3. to a "School of Education, Health & Psychology"
2. is this a definitional issue, or is this a conversational (dialogical) process among various stakeholders as time passed, constraints and opportunities were noticed?
3. Classically, the answer to this question is that is a matter of definition. So, a historian once wrote, late in the history of Teachers College:
   I have conceived of education in this essay as the deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort to transmit, evoke, or acquire knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, or sensibilities, and any learning that results from the effort, direct or indirect, intended or unintended. This definition obviously projects inquiry beyond the schools and colleges to a host of individuals and institutions that educate - parents, peers, siblings, and friends, as well as families, churches, synagogues, libraries, museums, settlement houses, and factories. And it clearly focuses attention on the relationships among the several educative institutions and on the effects of one institution's efforts on those of another. What is needed most for a sound historical understanding of these relationships–or linkages, as I have called them here–is a variety of investigations that study them in their own right, with explicit educational questions uppermost in mind... (Cremin 1978: 567)
   1. Definitions and ideal-types: how are we to convince each other that we are talking about the same things? How are we to recognize that
      . this which we are observing is an instance of
      . that which we wish to study
      1. note that this is a problem
         1. when studying "close to home" (as Cremin did) and is a matter of cross-setting or cross-temporal comparability
         2. when studying "away from home" (cross-culturally)
      2. note also that this is all the more of a problem when addressing the people who commission our work and who may work with other definitions:
         1. colleagues
         2. policy makers
         3. the polity at large, our consociates:
            1. family members;
            2. co-workers;
            3. politicians.
      3. Note finally that all this has to do with the relationship of the scholar (observer, theoretician, author) as learner and teacher, e.g. as educator, with the many people and institutions with whom this scholar is entangled. That this is true of EVERY educator is a major theme of this class.
      4. But, as McClintock argues (c2007), definitions may be the problem.
4. Alternatives to definitions
   1. empirical generalizations from puzzles
      1. ethnographic: how can that not qualify? (e.g. efforts by parents to shape their children's religiosity?)
      2. analytic: how can that be the case? (e.g. that certain children do not learn language?)
   2. postulates based on empirical generalizations
      "start with the postulate that people, everywhere, unceasingly, and always in concert with others, work at changing themselves and their consociates through often difficult deliberations." (Varenne 2007)
      1. which leads to interesting questions such as the relationship of education to politics (check the convergent definition of the politic by de Jouvenel, 1963)
   3. models
5. Classical issues and conundrums
   1. beyond "formal/informal"
      1. common sense
      2. sociological theorizing
   2. beyond habitus, identity and (personalized) culture-as-learning
   3. beyond "learning"
6. Openings and organization of the course
   1. theoretical
      1. Lave
      2. Garfinkel
      3. culture as (historical) production of (arbitrary) conditions
   2. empirical
      1. rereading of old ethnographies
      2. new ethnographies
7. Examples of possible ethnographic investigations fromEducating in Life
   1. Chapter 2: Sarah Wessler (Columbia, 2015) on adolescent girls in an afterschool program
   2. Chapter 3: Michael Scroggins (Columbia, 2017) on the first years of a "DoItYourself" biology lab
   3. Chapter 4: Daniel Souleles on private equity investing (Columbia, 2015. Published in 2019)
   4. Chapter 6: Juliette de Wolfe on parents of children with autism (Columbia, 2013. Published in 2014)
   5. Chapter 7: Gabrielle Oliveira on Mexican mothers taking care of children in Mexico & New York (Columbia, 2015. Published in 2018)
   Earlier dissertations of interest:

   1. Michele Verma on Indo-Carribeans doing Hinduism in Queens (Columbia, 2008)
   2. Payal Arora on computer use in a small Indian town (Teachers College, 2009, Published in 2010)
   3. Divayani Tirthali on educations into diabetes (Teachers College, 2013)
   4. Karen Velasquez on Mexican immigrants in Korean businesses: education into multiple languages (Columbia, 2014)