Anthropology, education, and schooling: Politics, policies and practices

Saturday October 19-- 1-3:30 pm (Milbank Chapel)

Historically, anthropology has offered the field of education research for school reform compelling options for reporting, analyzing, interpreting what is currently done, as well as imagining alternatives. The extensive work of George and Louise Spindler, and that of the students they inspired is exemplary of this contribution of the discipline. This work has often been at odds with schooling policies founded on the measurement of cognitive development as a guarantor of an individual's future stability, with correlative assumptions that schooling is where the cognitive development gaps between individuals are to be equalized, and that exemplary practices, if grounded on data-driven research, should be of universal validity. Anthropologists continue to document that these foundations and assumptions are unhelpful if not dangerous. Through close empirical work they keep documenting details of school and classroom practices that are not quite imaginable without this work.

Chair: Daniel Souleles (Teachers College, Columbia University)

• Bathurst, Laura (University of the Pacific)
  • "Cultural and Intercultural "Competence: Contrasting Approaches to Teaching and Assessing Cross-Cultural Skills "
• Chikkatur, Anita (Carleton College Department of Educational Studies)
  • "Shifting perspectives: How ethnographic research methods can help researchers and teachers"
• Rodela, Katherine (Stanford University)
  • "Contradictions & Cultural Crafting: Latino Immigrant Parents in a Preschool Popular Education Program"
• Hung, Aaron (University of Washington)
  • "Video and Conversational Analysis Classroom Ethnography"
• Tippett, Stephen (University of Delaware)
  • "What is 'Transformative' about Study Abroad? "
• Laura A. Valdiviezo (Organizer/Contact), Maria José Botelho, Denise
  Ives, Cara Crandall, Margaret Felis, & Kathleen Lazdowski (University of Massachusetts)
  • "Teaching and Learning Ethnography for Social Justice"

Discussant: Jill Koyama (University of Arizona)