Drawing on studies on education grounded in ethnographic fieldwork that is anthropology’s primary methodological tool, the course focuses on “bottom-up” approaches of concepts, relationships and practices related to education with an emphasis on the school and the school praxis as well as processes of learning and reproduction of knowledge in diverse socio-cultural and historical frameworks.
The course provides an overview of anthropological concepts and methods in the study of education reflected in a wide range of ethnographies of the school/classroom as well as of alternative educational environments. Specifically, the course concentrates on the social and cultural dimensions of formal educational processes with an emphasis on schooling and the school curriculum as well as learning processes, linguistic practices and ways of managing and reproducing knowledge that take place outside the school context, i.e. the family, community, etc.
The course presents key methodological tools -premised on intense participant observation- developed during the last decades in the anthropological study of education. Through comparative analysis of ethnographic examples from different educational settings (formal, non-formal and informal), the Anthropology of Education brings into light the complexities, tensions and contradictions associated with differentiated practices of education followed by different social groups in the context of broader socio-political frameworks and global transformations. Acknowledging both the importance of institutional frameworks and processes as well as informal practices taking place in the sphere of everyday life as fields of action of the social subjects, even in conditions that constrain considerably the subjects’ agency, anthropological approaches to education highlight the social subjects’ point of views, including those of children.
The course is structured around the following thematic areas:
1. Introduction to the Anthropology of Education
2. Historical formation of the field of Anthropology of Education in the America and Europe
3. The relationship between Anthropology of Education, Critical Pedagogy, New Sociology of Education and Educational Psychology
4. From theories of social reproduction to social constructivism – The rise of the notion of social agency/social agent (socialization, social subject, social interaction, communication)
5. The notion of culture (culture and education).
6. Ethnographic approaches to education and the school.
7. Formal, non-formal and informal education
8. Education, national and ethnic identity: The school as a field of intercultural interactions
9. Anthropological approaches to “learning” and “knowledge”
10. Education, childhood and family.
11. Education and social inequalities
12. Education and mobility
13. Methodological approaches in the anthropological study of education-Doing field research with children