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The study of anthropology offers alternative perspectives of who we are and why we do the things we do through the study of individuals, groups, and institutions different from ourselves. The anthropological analyses of indigenous cultures, cross-cultural interactions, and/or the neighbors next door are all legitimate and necessary means towards making the familiar unfamiliar. This process forces us to rethink how we understand the culture we live in and the process of transmitting this culture to others. In so doing, anthropology demands that we come to consider “the other” as different from ourselves – a not so simple feat. Likewise, by showing the legitimacy of other ways of being, anthropology forces us to confront the possibility that ours is not the only, nor best, way of working things out. Anthropology of education engages these perspectives through the study of schooling in our own culture, from the perspective of minority groups in our culture, and from multiple transcultural perspectives. The anthropology of education engages issues such as the socialization process of schooling; the production, transmission, and acquisition of “culture” within the educational process; the role of ethnocentrism and cultural relativism in schools; the school’s role in the creation of identity; and how minority groups interact with the majority culture of schooling. These issues are at the heart of immense debate and analysis within educational policy and practice, ranging from questions of multicultural education to what it means to be educated; from curriculum design to multiple intelligence; from why minority students disproportionately fail in school to what it means for a test to be “culturally biased.” |
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Site under construction
some resources
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Ray McDermott & Herve Varenne's Culture as Disability
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Nel Noddings’ What Does it Mean to Educate the Whole Child? [click on September 2005, then click on Noddings' article]
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Anne Wheelock’s Keeping Schools on Track
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Bob Peterson’s “Tracking and the Project Method”
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Maureen Hallinan’s “The Detracking Movement”
About the authors:
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Lisa Delpit (read her chapter, "The Silenced Dialogue")
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E.D. Hirsch
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G. Victor Sogen Hori
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Phillip Jackson
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Jonathan Kozol (read excerpts from his Savage Inequalities)
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Jay Macleod
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A. S. Neill (the link is to the actual school in the UK)
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Lois Peak
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Bob Peterson
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George and Louis Spindler
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David Tyack
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Anne Wheelock
Resources
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Anthropology in Education (American Anthropology Association subgroup)
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Voices of the Shuttle - comprehensive database of humanities resources, hosted by UCSB
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Classics in the History of Psychology - full texts of classic works in psychology
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Gregory Bateson (see also http://www.oikos.org/baten.htm)
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Emile Durkheim and here and here
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Margaret Mead (see also the Barnard Center Conference on Mead, 2001)