My determined focus on 'education', in papers, presentations, and published work, may have started with the publication of Successful Failure and my getting to wonder what might happen if one pushed what, in one iteration, was announced as "the politics of ignorance

• 1982 Report on NIE contract 1400-79-0046: "I teach him everything he learns in school": The Acquisition of Literacy for Learning in Working Class Families.
• 1999 "Ignorance as foundation of sociability?" - November 1999 conference paper
• 2000 to 2001 An introduction to the evolution of anthropology and education (early draft of several later papers.
• 2004 Berkeley/Stanford/Teachers College seminar on "the politics of ignorance" (with Ray McDermott and Jean Lave).
• 2005 Draft of paper "On knitting and goats"
• 2005 "Explorations in the theory of education: Anthropological perspectives" - June 2005 conference (that led to the 2007 special issue of the Teachers College Record)
• 2007 "'When' is 'Education': Finding occasions for productive ignorance" (early draft of a presented at Teachers College in the Fall 2007. This paper was the basic for Educating in Life published in 2019)
• 2006 to 2009 small ethnographic project in Harlem: "Settings for education in the inner city" (with L. Lin -- mostly conducted from 2006 to 2009)