ITSF5016

From Studyplace

Ethnography of Education

Teachers College • Columbia University Class Meetings  5:10-6:50 ITSF5016 Course Overview Class Schedule 9/9   The Major Issue 9/16   Definitions and Consequences 9/23  Contrasting Ignorance: Disabling 9/30  Contrasting Ignorance: Enabling 10/7  Communities of Practice 10/14 Languages and Speaking 10/21 Telling and Reading 10/28 Classrooms: Interactional Structures 11/4   Classrooms: Comparative Perspectives 11/11  High School (dis)Organization 11/18  College: Friendship, Love, (Academics?) 11/25  Other Routes to Adult Participation 12/2   Education into Disability 12/9   Education into Development 12/16  Conclusion

Professor Hervé Varenne

ITSF5016 Fall 2008

Short description

Introduction to the ethnographic investigation of educational settings and institutions (villages, neighborhoods, families, peer groups, schools, etc.). Attention will be paid to the policy issues this kind of investigation can address.

The main site for the course is at Ethnography and Education

Longer description

This course explores educative processes in what has been known as “community” settings. We will question what we are to mean when we talk both about "education" and about "community" ethnographically--that is when we focus on the details of human practical action in the local face to face settings where it is always experienced. The exploration proceeds through a review and critique of recent research and theorizing concerned with approaching education as collective practice within the strongly framed local settings of everyday life. We will focus on the problematics of "community" and "practice" as it relates to the problematics of education as a total process.

Various settings will be explored (villages, neighborhoods, families, peer groups, museums, as well as schools), in the United States and across the world.

Education and development must be local, “community” processes even as they are also global ones. The course builds on this intuition as continuing work in anthropology and sociology have critiqued it. The concept of community is too powerful as an ideological tool in America to be yielded carelessly. It also indexes something that is too real to be cast aside. The recent interest in practice, agency, resistance, etc., must make us pay close attention to the actual settings where human beings conduct their lives in direct contact with each other. These are the settings often explored as “communities” in a long tradition of work that remains fully contemporary when properly handled. We will be particularly concerned with the collective efforts to transform conditions–efforts which, in and of themselves, are to be considered educational. We will do so using the ethnographic methods that are most likely to reveal the collective and relentless effort to educate.

The course is organized in three main parts

1. The first two lectures address the question: What are we to be concerned with?
   1. Introduction: when is education? [1]
   2. Beyond definitions [2]
2. The next three sections focus on the main issue: how to approach ignorance (not knowledge), its organization, and its productivity within human groups
   1. Contrasting ignorance: disabling[3]
   2. Contrasting ignorance: enabling[4]
   3. Communities of educational practice [5]
3. The ten main sections focus on a series of cases and settings that are always involved in educating
   1. families and local groups ("communities")
      1. Language education and very small children
      2. Communal education of older children
   2. schools and classrooms
      1. the moment-to-moment organization of institutionalized education in the Euro-American modes
      2. other possibilities
      3. high schools
   3. colleges
   4. and everything else
      1. apprenticeships
      2. medical institutions
      3. institutions of "international development"