This is the tenth in a series of notes to fifteen lectures for my classITSF5016 "Ethnography of Education"
  1. A tradition of high school ethnographies emphasizing the social structuring of the student body and its implications
    1. the Lynds and Middletown (Indiana)
    2. Hollingshead and Elmstown (Illinois)
    3. Henry and "culture against man" in the United States
    4. Colin Lacey and Paul Willis in England
    5. Varenne and Sheffield (New Jersey)
    6. Rizzo-Tolk/Varenne and WestSide High School (Manhattan)
    7. Goldman and New Sheffield (New Jersey)
  2. Social class: its (re-)production and its consequences
    1. The role of schools
      1. moving away from the debate "is it schools? is it families" to figuring out what each does in the career of a child (the transformation of a child with potentialities to an adult with grades, degrees, labels, etc.).
      2. testing and tracking as gate-keeping ("chutes and ladders") in the movement from generalized legitimate peripheral participation in the world of adults to a particular "full" position of a particular type.
      3. This is a long journey with many intermediate steps, including the shifting from track to track, or from school to school.
    2. schooling those who will not make it (as identified earlier by school people):
      1. meta-pragmatic discourses: "they are not going to make it" (p. 37); "you know, your basic bottom" (p. 85).
      2. everyday practices of justification and constitution.
        1. a generalization of McDermott on Rosa.
  3. Page and the differentiation of curriculum
    1. a four cell comparison
      1. one school district (Mapplehurst) and two high schools:
        1. Southmoor: statistically: more professionals, more minorities; discursively: "easy to teach students" (p. 83) and then differentiation between the tracks.
        2. Marshall: statistically: more workers, less professionals; discursively "homogeneous ... typically blue collar kids" (p. 128-9)
      2. two ways of doing lower tracks ("Additional needs"). Producing
        1. dis-organization at Southmoor (p. 85ff)
          1. "Education" and its caricature (p. 91)
        2. super-organized at Marshall (p. 137ff)
    2. Conversation analysis of class interaction (beyond Mehan but before formalization of various forms of authoritative interaction)
    3. Discourse analysis of what the teachers say about the students, pedagogy, curriculum
  4. From "achievement gap" to "switching network" (networks or webs moving people into various positions--as well as the people designing and maintaining the network
    1. from properties to consequences of interaction:
      1. Completing the shift from placing success/failure in (derived) personal properties to focusing on the concrete practices that identify and label and, most importantly, mete consequences including on one's teaching, that is: having produced several labels for types of school, types of parents, and types of children, then one changes one's pedagogy.
    2. tracing the activities (e.g. translation)
    3. Koyama on Latour
  5. a methodological note
    1. ethnography and policy about tracking (p. 248)
Some questions
  • How would you relate Page to Mehan?
  • Not teaching, not learning, not being acknowledged as teaching/learning
  • class, club, and clique