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1. Developments
   1. exploratory papers on "comprehensive education" (with Ed Gordon)
   2. ethnography research project looking for settings for education in Harlem (with Linda Lin and Eckson Khambule)
   3. paper (web site, short book) pushing further the search for education as ongoing process of cultural production in uncertainty: 'When' is education?
2. 'When' is education?
   1. a classic problem in strict structuralism (Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Jakobson, and conversational analysis) : classic syntagmatic structures (e.g. single sentences, turns in a conversation, sequences such as jokes or classroom lessons) are both single events and have a temporal dimension. Modeling a set of sequences for their (structural) properties must involve a bracketing of temporality. But the performance itself is going to take place over a few seconds or minutes. Other kinds of sequences (e.g. gift, marriage, honor exchanges) may develop over much longer time frames (from days to years). This has complex implications that have been explored by sociologists like Bourdieu () but not much further than he has when he used one aspect of this temporality--the inescapable uncertainty of the participants about where they happen to be at any particular time--to argue against most forms of structuralism and explored "strategies" (). By contrast, conversational analysts and ethnomethodologists have focused on the work people perform to keep each other on track. In shorter sequences it appears that most of this work is performed at the edge of discursive consciousness (e.g. through eye contact, "hm hm," etc.). Recently, Garfinkel has started talking about the specific instructions people give each other when they "screw around" (2002). It is in fact this emphasis on ongoing instructions about a sequence (e.g. an always available meta-discourse) that led me to think further about education as the moment when inevitable ongoing trouble leads to an actual shift to conversations about other conversations.
   2. thus, telling a joke would not be educational as such while correcting someone which he is telling a joke or saying that it is not funny with suggestions about how to make it funny, is more probably educational. This implies that education is an aspect of human temporality, and is triggered, in real time, by the reality of performing (enacting) a controlled sequence (i.e. a multi-party, collective, syntagm). Thus educational moments are identifiable in terms of their discursive properties (explanations, interpretations, suggestions, etc.) but, even more importantly, their own temporal sequencing within a moment, a time-for-something, a life. Examples,
      1. from instructions
         1. Kate's explanation "I always play with her" (Varenne in process)
         2. Rosa "let's go around!" (McDermott et al.)
         3. Lonnie's jokes (Varenne and Cotter 2006)
      2. to questioning, explorations, and the making of "projects" (Bartlett 2007)
         1. Tracy Johnson and the Hmong girls
         2. Kalmar (2001) on Mexicans figuring out how to teach each other English
         3. a movie (Davis 2007) on Black girls, color, and a reproduction of Kenneth Clark's doll experiment?
         4. Wieder on "telling the code" (1974)
         5. policies about school (Varenne on NCATE 2006)
3. Schools
   1. as education (disruption of other facts), and
   2. as fact (sequence of sequences) that will continually require education about itself (in and out of school control) as it is disrupted, corrected, reconstituted
      1. child development as rationalization
   3. as moments in human history
4. Education and cultural production

 

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