Persuading Pre-Professionals to be Participant Observers: Reflections on Teaching Anthropology and Education to Professional Teacher Candidates

This paper explains how I design and teach an Anthropology and Education course within a professional teacher education program. After establishing how some teacher candidates might initially imagine that this course is irrelevant to their professional education, I argue that anthropological knowledge and being able to think anthropologically enables teacher candidates to become better teachers. Specifically, I argue that becoming a participant observer of one’s own and others’ practices provides an easily accessible crossover between an anthropological method and mindset, on the one hand, and teacher actions like instruction, observation, assessment, and reflective practice (Schön 1982), on the other. To support this claim, I describe how I teach teacher candidates concepts and theory from anthropology that are applicable to the study of education, and can be used to inform their work on a video ethnography of a classroom (Hester 2012) that I assign to develop their practice of professional participant observation. I then describe how I prepare teacher candidates to consider the context of that video, especially as it offers an encounter with ideological diversity within the teaching profession and schools. The conclusion explains how I encourage the candidates to continue using the participant observer concept to inform their professional work post-graduation.

The “educated teacher”: Joint (self-)reflection on translatability between anthropology and teacher education

Building on the core epistemological features and aims of Educational Anthropology, in this paper we explore the perception of anthropological educational knowledge among teachers and their related reflections on the educational standards of their profession, as well as their own role in society. Following an overview of (the emerging) intersections between teacher education and Educational Anthropology in Austria, the paper focuses on conversations with teachers in Austria on the outputs of an educational anthropological project (TRANSCA) and their applicability. Two of the project outputs – a Concept Book and a Whiteboard Animation (on “Worldmaking”) – serve as the ground for focusing on three aspects emerging from the conversations with teachers: firstly, the concept of the “educated teacher”; secondly, conceptualization as a form of translation of anthropological knowledge via both text and animation; and thirdly, the differentiation between teaching in terms of schooling versus pedagogy. The latter is explored as a crucial dimension of the discussions among and with teachers and lies at the heart of potential future synergies between anthropology and education.

Competition

The spread of competition into all areas of society is one of the master trends of modern society. Yet, social scientists have played a surprisingly modest role in the analysis of its implications as the discussion of competition has largely been confined to the narrow context of economic markets. This book opens up competition for the study of social scientists. The central message of the book is that competition seems ubiquitous but it should not be taken for granted or be naturalized as an inevitable aspect of human existence. Its emergence, maintenance, and change are based on institutions and organizational efforts, and a central challenge for social science is to learn more about these processes and their outcomes. With the use of a novel definition of competition, more fundamental questions can be addressed than merely whether or not competition works. How is competition constructed—and by whom? Which institutional and organizational foundations need to be considered? Which behaviours result from competition? What are its consequences? Can competition be removed? And, how do these factors vary with the object of competition—be it money, attention, status, or other scarce and desired objects? The chapters in the book investigate these and more questions in studies of competition among and within schools, universities, multinational corporations, auditors, waste-disposal firms, and fashion designers and users. The chapters are written by scholars from several social science fields: management, organization studies, sociology, anthropology, and education.

In the Footsteps of an Observer – Looking at Edvard Munch in Åsgårdstrand

This article investigates policies of cultural diversity and difference in the promotion of arts to school children. Based on historical examples from concert promotion for children in Norway the article examines how cultural difference has been produced and mobilized strategically in efforts aimed at strengthening diversity. It is argued that, on the one hand, constructions of difference play an important part in the development of cultural identity and visibility, while on the other hand, a focus on difference can be a basis for cultural categorizations, and potentially, for the formation of unfortunate stereotypes. The article is informed by debates and discussions on arts for children, with reference to theorizations of difference from anthropology and education studies. Questions raised concern how difference best can be addressed in the shaping of an inclusive, anti-oppressive education.

Arts for Children, Cultural Diversity and the Production of Difference

This article investigates policies of cultural diversity and difference in the promotion of arts to school children. Based on historical examples from concert promotion for children in Norway the article examines how cultural difference has been produced and mobilized strategically in efforts aimed at strengthening diversity. It is argued that, on the one hand, constructions of difference play an important part in the development of cultural identity and visibility, while on the other hand, a focus on difference can be a basis for cultural categorizations, and potentially, for the formation of unfortunate stereotypes. The article is informed by debates and discussions on arts for children, with reference to theorizations of difference from anthropology and education studies. Questions raised concern how difference best can be addressed in the shaping of an inclusive, anti-oppressive education.

Educational Anthropology and Engaged Approaches to Teaching and Learning

Since the field’s early years, anthropology has been concerned with processes of teaching and learning. While early anthropological works were comparative in nature—examining schooling systems around the world in relation to those in US society—scholars gradually began to focus more on educational issues in the US. Efforts to bring together the works of scholars of pedagogy and anthropologists slowly morphed into what we now call “educational anthropology” or “anthropology and education.” In tracing the history of the relationship of anthropology and education, scholars have examined how different historical moments have shaped anthropology’s development as a profession, discipline, and specialization. Different publications have focused on exploring anthropology’s transformation following World War II. Funding from organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation contributed to the growth of anthropology as a discipline and profession and helped bolster its role as an academic specialization. The growth of social mobilization in the 1960s, which highlighted issues of inequality, racial discrimination, and political crises, also contributed to a growth in students majoring in anthropology to study these issues. The rise in undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology further helped to increase the establishment of anthropology departments across the United States and the allocation of public funding to improve pedagogical approaches. In the same vein, educational anthropology contributed to the examination of teaching/learning processes but also looking at education in relationship to broader social issues (e.g., inequality, culture, gender, identity). Since the 1980s, the development of educational anthropology has occurred in parallel with other academic efforts to improve instructional approaches. The scholarship of teaching and learning for instance, has focused on exploring different pedagogical approaches in higher education with the purpose of improving teaching methodologies to enhance student learning. Some of these approaches include active learning, engaged learning, and service learning. In the realm of innovative educational approaches, community service learning has focused on establishing long-term partnerships between universities and communities. Such collaborative settings exhibit an overlap with undergraduate anthropological approaches to education, helping to introduce students to the intricacies of social issues as they are experienced in actual communities.

TEACHING HISTORY AND INDIGENOUS CULTURES IN BASIC SCHOOL EDUCATION

This text is the result of reflections on a field research on the teaching of indigenous themes in schools in Capoeiras, in the Agreste of Pernambuco, starting with Law nº 11.645 / 2008 and the indigenous history in the region where the study is inserted. Due to the importance of the study on indigenous peoples, this research aimed to contribute to the dialogues between Anthropology and Education, so that we can think of teaching as a means of social and academic mobilizations for the recognition in the school space of the socio-cultural diversity existing in Pernambuco state.

POSSIBLE CONCEPTUALIZATION OF CULTURE AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCE IN SOCIOLOGICAL PROFILE RESEARCHES

The fundamental concept of the paper is in accordance with the thesis of pedagogical anthropology claiming that the school success of students in minority status is in strictly correlation with the recognition of the cultural difference by the education system. From the point of view of empirical researches related to pedagogical anthropology and education of sociology, the conceptualization of culture and cultural difference is a vital important factor. The paper intends to elaborate on the possible interpretation of these notions based on the relevant national and international literature.

Leadership Effect in Social Justice

Social justice (SJ) is not a “newly discussed” issue. It has made a mark on the history of humanity. It was one of the most frequently discussed concerns of earlier religious and philosophical traditions for both their own context and other contexts around the world. Almost all disciplines, including philosophy, politics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and education, have been in search of a just world for people and have tried to find an answer to the question of what a socially just society is. Social justice has been a debated issue on the agendas of educational researchers, too. Similar to other fields, research on social justice in education has been attempting to describe and analyze its meaning and nature in educational settings. Educational researchers have made significant efforts to provide a definition of social justice in schools and to open the black box of social justice delivered to schools. In education, social justice, in short, may be seen as a fact directly related to providing equal opportunities for everyone in schools regardless of race, ethnicity, culture, social class, wealth, gender, family structure, sexual orientation, disability, and so on. This urges school leaders to be aware of their central roles and responsibilities in terms of justice issues in their schools, and this makes it very clear that a just school depends on leaders believing in social justice. In other words, school leaders and their efforts to create a just school have explicit effects on justice issues in schools.