Recently, Audrey Le successfully defended a most interesting dissertation about “hackathons.” Like me a while ago you may have no idea what those would be… Well, they are events when (very much mostly) young (mostly) men play/work over a weekend at developing some “thing” (app, process, and who knows what else) that involves some computer programming (or can be analogized to computer design). Until Le started teaching me about them, I had never heard of hackathons–like I had never heard of DoItYourself biology labs, venture capitalists, equine therapies, video badge games and so many other wonder-inspiring stuff that first appeared in the late 20th century. There is indeed much “new” here for anthropologists looking for the odd human beings they thought could only encounter up the Amazon or the Congo. An anthropologist just has to go down the corridors of Columbia (Harvard, MIT, etc.) to meet never-yet-imagined “others.”
Continue reading On hackathons, machines, and flamingos
Category Archives: Education
On the importance of reading footnotes
Those who know my work know that I am a great admirer of the historian Lawrence Cremin whom I happily coopt not only as an anthropologist, but also as an anthropologist ahead of his time even as he channeled the Boasian tradition he was taught at Columbia while a graduate student.
What I found this morning is a wonderfully clear critique not only of most definitions of education, including common ones from anthropologists, but, most impressively, of most definitions of “culture.”
This is the footnote:
Bailyn advances a definition of education as “the entire process by which culture transmits itself across the generations.” Yet, as Werner Jaeger made clear in the introduction to Paideia, until the word “culture” is clarified, such a definition remains obscure. “We are accustomed to use the word culture,” Jaeger noted, “not to describe the ideal which only the Hellenocentric world possesses, but in a much more trivial and general sense, to denote something inherent in every nation of the world, even the most primitive.” He was referring, of course, to the concept as developed by the social scientists-a usage he saw associated with “the positivist passion for reducing everything to the same terms.” By Bailyn’s definition, “education” is ultimately synonymous with “enculturation,” as that term is used by the anthropologists, notably Melville Herskovits. I myself am sympathetic to Jaeger’s insistence that true education implies the deliberate, self-conscious pursuit of certain intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic ideals, though I am perfectly ready to grant that nondeliberate influences are often, if not always, more powerful and pervasive and that the educational historian must be concerned with both. For a statement of a similar problem of definition that has long bedeviled literary historians, see Howard Mumford Jones, The Theory of American Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1948), pp. 59-61 and passim. My reference to “the architecture of contemporary education” is taken from the lectures of my colleague Martin S. Dworkin in his course at Teachers College on “Education, Ideology, and Mass Communication.” (Cremin 1965: 75)
Note the attack on reductionism and enculturation; note “granting nondeliberate influences” as a kind of exception to “deliberate, self-conscious, pursuit” (aka, in my current vocabulary: practical meta-discursive work).
Note also Cremin approving of a metaphor not be taken as “constructivist” but rather as a prefiguration of Latour’s ANT: the ‘architecture’ of education. I am not sure what Cremin would have done of my added comment that the building, as an assemblage of rooms and corridors assembled on the basis of competing blue-prints with much cracks papered over would look more like the buildings that delighted Lévi-Strauss ([1962] 1966: 17): Cheval’s villa, or Mr. Wilmmick’s suburban villa as imagined by Charles Dickens (who must have seen versions of it!). And, among many others, a Texas version… Not to mention, from the ridiculous to the sublime, the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.
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On thriving children and the hegemony of psychology
I always wonder about the way research on interaction gets reported in the media only (or about always) when it is conducted by psychologists. Easy to chalk to “American individualism,” as institutionalized, and to its sub-forms like “culture of poverty,” or “child development.”
This time, my antennas were agitated by an interview in the University of Chicago glossy publication for alumni. It is titled “Little scientists” with the descriptive subtitle “Think of children as pint-sized psychologists, says parenting expert Erica Reischer, AM’96, PhD’00.”
Not too surprisingly, the editors of the magazine chose, to illustrate, a picture of a child, writing in a notebook. Many will notice that the child is a boy, white, with auburn hair, wearing a blue t-shirt. I notice that he is by himself. If there were a caption, it might be “the scientist at work”…
Irony aside, the underlying work is one I wish I could use when writing about family education. The story starts with a common place: obedience class for dogs is really about training humans. Having just been working on Jennifer Van Tiem’s chapter on horses and human (for our When is education), I know now how extensive the anthropological literature on animal/human interaction has become. But, of course, the editor quotes Reischer for saying something about “teaching us how to think like a dog … so that [the dog] would learn positive behaviors.”
Note the emphasis on thinking for the human, behavior for the dog, and a causal link between separate entities.
On to children, analogically.
“What we really need … is pay attention to our children’s behavior” (as if any human being could NOT pay attention) …. “[then] we can make choices about what we are going to do about [it]” (as if NEXT acts, in an improvised sequence, could ever be matters of choice under separate control).
Most interesting is the metaphor of the scientist (a conceit, really) Reischer proposes and the editor uses as title for the piece: “Kids are doing experiments because they have to figure out how the people in their lives work. I sometimes say, ‘Pretend your kids are wearing little white lab coats, and carrying little lab notebooks, and making notes all day long about what works and what doesn’t work with you’.” Now that could have developed into something Rancière or Garfinkel might have written as instructions to researchers (and parents): notice intelligence at work; notice the noticings and the improvisations on suggested themes given tools and affordances.
Except, of course, that the editor goes back to the atomistic, individualistic, narrative and the “secret sauce” [sic] to happy parenting: Learn how to manipulate your child like a trainer manipulates dogs.
Pavlov? Skinner?
I have not read Reischer’s book. So I am not sure how close the magazine story comes to what she wrote, what she “believes,” or what she could be shown to do when face to face with her own children if we had videotapes of the interaction. My experience with the editors of such magazines is that their priorities are not mine, and may not have been Reischer’s. Public relation editors must translate for their audience: alumni who are mostly not scholars, but may be imagined to be most comfortable with stories about human interaction written in terms of causation between separately acting (free) individuals.
And yet, one might go back and rewrite the story, the book, and maybe even the research (though there many not have been any in this case) to show how the child is indeed, a “scientist” with (ethno-)methods for figuring out what happened in collaboration with (and thus in struggle with) parents as consociates as, together, they improvise the family that will have been. One cannot be a scientist by oneself. And researchers who specialize in individuals will never understand humanity (or why psychology is hegemonic in America).
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On educating a democratic public, democratically
Soon after Lawrence Cremin published Public education (1976), I gushed about the book to a senior colleague. He did not like any aspect of the book because, as I remember he put it, Cremin made of education a form of “brain-washing.” My colleague claimed Paulo Freire and, I guess, an alternate view of what it means to educate, democratically.
I must say I was astonished. My take then, and I have not changed my mind, was that Cremin asks something surprising from us who are given the task to design education for the public. He asks us to pay attention to what people are doing, in the streets and alleys of the world, far from the halls where pedagogy and curriculum are discussed.
I was astonished that my colleague had not noticed that Cremin was asking us to look at the crowds around us and was criticizing the John Dewey of Democracy and education ([1916] 1966) for not imagining any other educational institution than than the State sponsored school. I could see how a very unsympathetic critic might notice that Dewey, as a philosopher who also read the psychologies and social sciences of his time, was quite sure as to what to teach the masses settling in the United States that they should learn to participate in an American democracy. By Chapter 7, Dewey, unapologetically, claims an aim, a “Good Aim.” In brief, in language Teachers College still uses (though we might wonder about mention of a “social ideal” and the measurement of “the worth of a form of social life”):
Since education is a social process, and there are many kinds of societies, a criterion for educational criticism … implies a particular social ideal. The two points selected by which to measure the worth of a form of social life are the extent in which the interests of a group are shared by all its members, and the fullness and freedom with which it interacts with other groups. An undesirable society, in other words, is one which internally and externally sets us barriers to free intercourse and communication of experience. A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible forms of associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder. (p. 99)
It is probably the case that Cremin would not have disagreed with this. Cremin’s concern was with Dewey’s next step, when he gets to assume that the institution of desirable education is the public school. I was then starting my career in a department soon to be named “Family and Community Education,” that Cremin had been instrumental in creating and which he strongly supported. With Hope Leichter, Paul Byers, Ray McDermott, we had to wonder about what might count as education in families and communities. I do not remember us wondering much about who might control this education, assess the worth of the design, or worry that the education parents given their children, each other, friends and consociates, might not be desirable.
Thirty years later, I was introduced to the work of Jacques Rancière who, in many ways, is a scorched earth critique of philosophers-with-an-aim, particularly philosophers of education. Rancière starts with the Plato of the Meno. He sides with the various shoe makers whom generations of philosophers have used as example of people who should not be involved in what we know call “knowledge production,” and even less in the teaching of this expert knowledge. Rancière keeps asking philosophers to pay attention to, and respect, shoe makers
Rancière’s work, like Cremin, is very congenial to the generations of anthropologists who have tried to tell other social scientists and philosophers that all human being produce knowledge, pass on knowledge, transform other forms of knowledge they may encounter and, of course, make different value choices about aims, and are ready to fight for these.
Rancière is also writing about “democracy and education,” but from the point of view of a radical democrat, Rancière’s hero is a teacher who refused to teach his expertise because he believed teaching what one knows will always be a form of “stultification,” brain-washing—particularly if the “learner” is assessed as having (not) learned just what she was supposed to learn not only as knowledge or skills but also as dispositions (beliefs, attitudes, values).
And so, whether one deplored or celebrated what happened last week, we, as the philosophers of education we cannot help but be, must ask ourselves: what is our business. Is it convincing or is it allowing people to make up their mind? And what are we to do with people who do not make the choices we make?
As we ponder the questions, we must face the fact that philosophers cannot control people, even when they are very influential on matters of state authority. That, I’d say, is what a century of anthropological research has demonstrated. Radical democracy may be the human condition.
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on parents challenging schooling
Those who follow my work know that I look for evidence (empirical? evidential?) that Bourdieu’s hypothesis about habitus driving (mis-)consciousness is wrong as written. In this search, I prefer detailed ethnographic evidence (the kind sociologists dismiss as “anecdotal”). But descriptive statistics have their place as evidence opening routes for further exploration.
So, I am thankful to my colleagues Oren Pizmony-Levy and Nancy Green Saraisky for their report of a national survey they conducted on who opts out of standardized testing and why (Who opts out and why, August 2016). The media, particularly in New York State has been reporting on something that is often presented as new: parents (mostly prosperous) refusing to have their children take some high-stake tests. This may be a cultural innovation, either because more parents are doing it, because they have found out that opting out is actually possible, or because the media started paying attention, or for other political reasons. Historical research is needed. I would also relate this movement with other movements of parents organizing to do something those with official pedagogical authority (in Bourdieu’s phrase) wish they did not do. In New York City, Mayor de Blasio and others found out that their efforts to rein in charter schools would fail as parents, mostly inner city parent financially struggling, found a way to stop the reining in. At about the same time, other parents, many recent immigrants from China, many who could not speak English, appear to have stopped another movement by those with authority to change the admission requirements to the most academic public high schools. Elsewhere in New York City, other parents organize to home school their children, while others compete mercilessly to enrol their children in astronomically expensive pre-schools.
Whether all this is good for the children, for their parents, for the State, or for humanity is something else altogether. In any events, parents keep demonstrating that there are ways to resist the school-as-is, or the school-as-some-want-it, even as they participate in the evolution of schooling into un-imaginable forms.
Bourdieu and other structural-functionalists who keep Talcott Parsons alive might mark all this as a failure of early socialization into the practical acceptance of pedagogical authority. It could be that the schools have failed at reproducing whatever made Western schooling so successful for so many years and across the world. We may have a failure in maintaining homeostasis!
But it could also be that reproduction will always fail however determined the efforts to keep alive what was. It could be that (social) life will always be about constituting the heretofore unimaginable.
And so, as I like to say, we need a theory of culture that starts with the impossibility of cultural reproduction and sets aside concerns with enculturation. Instead, we need to pays close attention to the ongoing efforts both to preserve and innovate (Varenne 2007, 2011).
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NotSpeaking as communal achievement: emergence and termination shocks
Imagine a situation (from experience in a small town in Southern France):
Person A announces “I do not speak to person B” which, in French, might be reported by A to X, Y, or Z, as “On ne se parle pas.” “On” here is an indefinite pronoun often used in French for “we.” The declaration constitutes a community of A, B, X, Y, Z with the rule “A/B do not speak when they encounter each other.” The rule is both description and prescription, or perhaps more precisely differentiated instruction about the meta-pragmatics of an interactional style.
NotSpeaking is a complex speech act, and a trigger for further speech acts.
NotSpeaking requires instruction since, everything else being the same, it is performed at a moment when the two could and should speak, as, say, when walking by each other in some parking lot. In rural Southern France, at the turn of the 21st century, such moments start with an expression of acknowledgment that the encounter has started (smile, re-organization of the body, etc.), possibly preliminaries, then “la bise” (three “air kisses” on alternate side of the head with no body contact), and then either developments that might last very long, or else a brief comment about being in a hurry, leading to various closing statements about, say, “having aperitif before we leave.” NotSpeaking, as speech event, involves turning away of the head at the time when the expression of acknowledgment should have appeared (or other bodily movements as, for example, turning away into a side street). NotSpeaking ends after the two bodies have passed and return to their earlier state.
As Bourdieu explained in one of his best passages about ritual insults in the Mediterranean ([1972] 1977: pp. 10ff), Maussian gifts (of which NotSpeaking is a peculiar case) do place obligations on both participants but the response is not automatic. Much is involved. For example, one or the other of the party might make an exaggerated display of greeting by directly looking at the other and saying something like “Bonjour!”, perhaps with a smile. In this case, not NotSpeaking may actually be an insult, whether in intent or in subsequent assessment. In any event, the field is very well organized indeed for what is definitively hard work!
In brief, NotSpeaking happens within what has also been called a “community of practice.” But this is not the nice, cosy “community” of Wenger (1998). It is a dark place as many, in the Summer of 2016, have found, whether in Paris, Nice or other such sites of interaction and political violence. I prefer to us the work “polity” for the groups that emerge as someone or other starts doing something to others that what was not until then part of their “normal” but now becomes inescapable. One cannot make war by oneself, and one cannot not respond to acts of war. Anthropologists will have to think further about this.
One way to start is to wonder about the emergence of temporary polities when people become significant to each other (whether in love or war). The question of emergence does lead to questions about beginnings and ends, as well as questions about participation. NotSpeaking may start when one of the protagonists decides not to speak to the other the next time they met. And it may be that this next time is when B finds out that A does not speak to him anymore—and that may be the “start” for B. One could even look for the instructional moments when A asserts to B, in body movement if not in words, “I do not speak to you anymore” (or the reverse as these things do change). Conversely, the actual performance of NotSpeaking can be said to start when the two notice each other and to end a few seconds later. What is central to me here is that NotSpeaking is specific to particular persons at particular times and requires the setting up of the encounter as a NotSpeaking. Not speaking to billions of strangers is not relevant here. Only NotSpeaking to a non-stranger is relevant (whether the non-stranger is an erstwhile intimate, or an erstwhile total stranger). NotSpeaking, at the turn of the 21st century, in Southern France, is a syntagm that inscribes something in history.
There may be a way of thinking about the emergence of a new polity in history (or the re-organization of an old polity) that I have never seen used in anthropology. It would involved borrowing from physics what is called “termination shocks.” I learned about those a while ago in an article in Discover Magazine about Voyager 1 entering interstellar space. Termination shocks are ubiquitous (check you bathroom sink where you can make one by running water hard into it). NotSpeaking, (making war, falling in love) similarly arises in the interaction between contradictory forces that makes something very real: a boundary marking different kinds of normal, and difficulties when crossing the boundary. NotSpeaking catches people who may be hurt by it. And then its effects fade into inter-communal space where the tiny drama can be safely ignored.
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Policy? or Politics?
Could the hegemony of “policy” be coming to an end?
For many years state officials, “private” foundations, benevolent billionaires, academia and a certain elite media have been telling everyone else what is what in “education”. (For one sense of this set look at Brill’s 2010 story in the New York Times magazine). In the world of academia where I live, this will have been the decade of “data-driven” “policy” “studies.” We keep being told, repeatedly, such “narratives” (stories? fiction?) as:
In Rhode Island schools, a multidisciplinary effort helps teachers to quickly understand what skills their students have already grasped and which subjects need more attention. In Houston, a regional alliance has noticed signs of students going off-track on higher-level math skills and acted to intervene.
What do these stories have in common? Success here derives from access to data, or big data as it’s sometimes called. The examples above come from the Data Quality Campaign, a nonprofit effort driving education outcomes through hard numbers.
(GovTech November 2014, retrieved in December 2015)
What interests me here, of course, is the hint of an “actor-network” of local schools and a corporation “e.Republic, Inc.” “The nation’s only smart media and research company focused exclusively on public sector innovation for state and local government and education” (retrieved in December 2015)
One problem with just sketching an actor-network (an excellent thing to do) is that it can end with an altogether static map and little sense of the movements through it, or the temporalities that assemble and then sometimes dissemble the network.
So, recently, I have tried to write about such networks as acting (and revealing themselves) through crowded conversations (deliberations). I am experimenting with generalizing conversational analyses (somewhat like Latour generalized ethnomethodology when he moved from looking at the production of knowledge in short interactions among a few people (Garfinkel et al. 1981; Goodwin 1995), to looking at a laboratory (Latour 1979), to looking at the scientific enterprise as a whole (Latour 1987).
And so, once upon a time, we had Senator Kennedy and President Bush (as symbolic leaders) producing “No child left behind” after very long conversations that started at least 20 to 30 years earlier –unless it is 200 years (Varenne 2007, 2011).
And then, a few years later, President Obama and Arnie Duncan, his secretary of education, started new conversations which, among other things, privileged “data-driven policy.” I am necessarily wrong in suggesting that they are those who literally started these long-turn taking sequences that were disrupted last years. But they can stand as markers of a new sequence with somewhat different participants and discursive order as the original metaphor (a child is like a sponge) developed into practical conceit (regulations, the attendant bureaucracies, the texts to be produced among the various actors, etc.).
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An actor-network of consequential consociates: applying anthropology to one’s personal case
In this post, I am doing something somewhat different from the usual. I am maintaining the order I think I have established (at least as I look at it, retrospectively): this is an experiment in anthropological theorizing and teaching. But I am delving further into parts of my life that I have not brought out.
So here it goes: applied medical anthropology
A few years ago, my wife, Susan, was diagnosed with a form of cancer known as “myelofibrosis” (who may not know it under that name might be a topic for another post as the exact name can be consequential—see below). The “official” diagnosis was made, not surprisingly by an oncologist, the acknowledged, state approved, expert who can transform speech (this is myelofibrosis) into not simply an act, but a sequence of new moves a particular set of others, from the patient, to her family, to insurance companies, must now make. [This would be easy to model as a special case of entry into a particular kind of polity of practice.]
The oncologist told us, as I remember it four years later, something like: “People live with this for 15 years or more … You are likely to die of something else … It will change your everyday life as you will now have to schedule regular medical visits.” I remember she was altogether good at telling us something that we knew, and much that we did not know: we had certainly never heard of this cancer or of its treatment. Of course we went to the Internet and learned what we could, talked to her further, and settled into what I am experimenting in calling, for various theoretical reasons, a “new normal.” Actually, what we learned was not extremely bad news for people entering in their 70s. The oncologist then (and I will keep emphasizing conversational and interactional temporality) tried a drug that would alleviate the symptoms of a cancer that affects the production by the bone marrow of red blood cells: profound anemia and the attendants limits on mobility.
Susan’s body, in its thinginess and peculiarities, was leading us to various particular disabilities that can be mitigated or expanded depending (de Wolfe 2014).
So, this was actually a good time for us to adopt the car culture of suburbia. The long walks in Manhattan to which we were accustomed would not have been possible anymore. We escaped one disability.
On grades as statements: to whom?
Ray McDermott and Jean Lave once told me that they asked Rancière whether his writing influenced his teaching. As they tell it, he looked surprised and answered something like “not at all!” A reader of Successful Failure once asked me whether I still gave grades. Besides stuttering, I said something like: “I am required to (by my university and New York State)” and/or “students would not accept my not giving them grades.”
Over my 40years+ at Teachers College ,I have also been part of several faculty-wide conversations about “grade inflation.” These never went anywhere and, by now, I gather from various sources, only about three grades are given: A, A-, & B+. Personally that is, mostly, what I do and it is not altogether different from distributing grades among A, B, & C, except that it limits, mostly again, student complaints. And while I do not grade “on the curve,” I do get nervous when I find myself only giving A’s.
Now, of course, what is the point of giving differentiated grades? More specifically, what difference does it make? to whom? and with what consequences? Taking the “gift” of grade as a statement, who is the audience?
A grade is structurally in the position of the “assessment” moment in Mehan (and many others)’s model of the “lesson.” The teacher sets a curriculum, asks students to do something related to “the class,” and then differentially assesses how well each individual students performs the task (“has learned” in the current authoritative language among accreditation agencies). The grade then becomes a datum (actually just another word, in latin, for “gift”) to the student. But a grade is also a gift to others besides the student—though not to everyone given various legal strictures about who may see a student’s grade (tracing who may see a grade when and for what purpose would actually be a way of revealing the structure of social reproduction). These “others” may then legitimately mete various consequences that have nothing to do with the original class, e.g. they may give the student various privileges, including, at the high school, college or Masters level, admission to a further degree program. Thus the grade that looks like a private communication between teacher and student, is also a coded statement to powers-that-be (admissions officers, funding agencies, accreditation bodies, etc.). Which is why, of course, grades are a political issue and “grade inflation” a political problem (see also my post on Lake Wobegon).
What does all this have to do with “education”? Little, I say, with many others. In recent years, I have gotten to say that I translate my current designation as a “professor and advisor of graduate students” into a “masters of apprentices.” In that perspective, I maintain that I give grades because I am required to do so but that they should only be taken as a statement about a progression and my potential willingness to work with the student as apprentice. The grades I give are not about individual learning per se. This “faction” (fact making that may constrain in some future) is easier to maintain at the doctoral level where it is actually the case that one receives a doctorate not by accumulating grades but by demonstrating that one can be recommended for entry into a discipline or profession. So, I’d say:
| Code | equivalent to | a statement like: |
| A+ | = | “Wow!” |
| A | = | “You are at mastery at this stage.” |
| A- | = | “You are well on your way.” |
| B+ | = | “OK, but discipline yourself” |
| B | = | “You may be in the wrong career given your talents” |
In the long run, my “real” assessment of a person work is the enthusiasm of my letters of recommendation whether for funding or professional positions. And these letter never never mention grades since “Pass” is the only possible one at the final levels.
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