ITSF4199
ISSUES IN ANTHROPOLOGY AND EDUCATION
On the Future of Anthropology in Schools of Education
October 18th & 19th
Professors Lesley Bartlett and Hervé Varenne
1 point

Course Description

The intersection of Anthropology and Education remains a site of productive tensions we must continue to explore. The Programs in Applied Anthropology and Anthropology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University are organizing a small conference bringing together faculty and graduate students to discuss the current challenges facing our field. The conference will feature presentationsWe seek papers with a particular focus on the ethnographic discovery of the unexpected designs that defy imposed structures and classifications, and thereby challenge easy generalizations about populations, their education, and their fates in contemporary schools.

The course is based on attendance at a University Seminar organized by the Programs in Anthropology at Teachers College, Columbia University. This is a two- day seminar to will take place on October 18th and 19th, 2013, from 9 AM to 5 PM. The program includes four keynote lectures by senior anthropologists, a roundtable, and 5 sessions of paper presentations by twenty scholars in the field. The sessions are organized around three broad areas: Theory, methods, and analysis of research findings.

Students in the course will attend the conference, participate in the discussion sessions, and write papers based on topics address during the conference.

Course objectives

Students in this course will be able to:

. Discuss the history of anthropology in schools of education
. Describe different possible future configurations for anthropologists in schools of education
. Outline current trends in theory, research methods, and analytical approaches in anthropology of education.

Requirements

. Students will attend all sessions of the conference
. Students will write a 15-20 page paper on a topic discussed with either Professor Bartlett or Professor Varenne in the week following the conference. The paper should involve bibliographic work reviewing literature related to the topic. (Suggestions for recent overviews of the field are listed below.) (Papers should be double-spaced, in Times New Roman 12 point font, with one inch margins.) Due on Monday November 18th.

Syllabus of Suggested Readings

Anderson-Levitt, Kathryn, ed. Local meanings, global schooling: Anthropology and world culture theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003

Anderson-Levitt, Kathryn, ed. Anthropologies of Education: A Global Guide to Ethnographic Studies of Learning and Schooling. Berghahn Books. 2011.

Cazden, Courtney, Vera John and Dell Hymes, eds. Functions of language in the classroom. New York: Teachers College Press. 1972

Levinson, Bradley, Mica Pollock, eds. A companion to the anthropology of education. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. 2011

Spindler, George, ed. Education and anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1955

Spindler, George, Lorie Hammond, eds. Innovations in educational ethnography: Theory, methods, and results. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum. 2006

Varenne, Hervé, ed. Alternative Anthropological Perspectives on Education. Special Issue of the Teachers College Record. 2007

September 21, 2013