Stuart Thompson

This course is available on the BA in Anthropology and Law, BA in Social Anthropology and BSc in Social Anthropology. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

Undergraduates taking this course should have completed an introductory course in social anthropology unless granted exemption by the teacher.

This course looks at ethnographical and cross-cultural approaches to schooling, language and literacy, and critically examines key theoretical approaches from an anthropological perspective. We will begin by reflecting on students' own conceptions of education, situating these in terms of contemporary paradigms and debates. Next we will examine the efficacy of 'reproduction' and 'resistance' theories of education, and the spread of schooling as a crucial parameter of globalization. Attention will then be paid to schooling and attendant questions of identity, and the cultural production of the educated person. This is followed by a critical examination of bilingual education, racism in education, debates over 'literacy' or 'literacies', and, relatedly, a critical examination of the language(s) of schooling and a radical re-deployment of Hirsch's notion of 'cultural literacy'. The course concludes with looking at higher education initially by attention to Bourdieu's Homo Academicus, and assessing how 'cultural capital' and the so-called 'audit culture' impacts on conditions of knowledge and involvement in university education.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the LT. 10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of classes in the ST.

Anthropology students taking this course will have the opportunity to submit a tutorial essay for this course to their academic tutors. For non-Anthropology students taking this course, a formative essay may be submitted to the course teacher.

Paul Willis 1977 Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working

Class Jobs New York: Columbia University Press

Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco & Desiree Baolian Qin-Hilliard (eds.) 2004

Globalization. Culture and Education in the New Millennium Berkeley:

University of California Press

Deborah Reed-Danahay 1996 Education and Identity in Rural France: the

Politics of Schooling Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Bradley A. Levinson, Douglas E. Foley, & Dorothy C. Holland (eds.) 1996

The Cultural Production of the Educated Person. Critical Ethnographies of

Schooling and Local Practice New York: State University of New York Press

Ofelia Garcia 2009 Bilingual Education in the 21st Century. A Global

Perspective Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell

Glen Peterson 1998 The Power of Words: Literacy and Revolution in South

China, 1949-95 Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press

Shirley Brice Heath and Brian V. Street 2008 Ethnography: Approaches to

Language and Literacy Research New York: Teachers College Press

Veronique Benei 2008 Schooling Passions. Nation, History, and Language in

Contemporary Western India Stanford: Stanford University Press

David Gillborn 1995 Racism and Antiracism in Real Schools Buckingham:

Open University Press

John Conteh, Eve Gregory, Chris Kearney and Aura Mor-Sommerfeld (eds.) 2005

On Writing Educational Ethnographies: the art of collusion Stoke on

Trent: Trentham Books

Exam (70%, duration: 2 hours) in the main exam period.
Essay (30%, 2500 words) in the LT.

The assessed essay must be between 2,000 – 2,500 words in length.