Abstract: Critics of education in China call for increasing students’ “creativity” as key to improving the nation’s education. This article examines the idea of children’s “creativity” in Beijing, associated with an education reform movement called “Education for Quality.” On the basis of ethnographic research in three elementary schools in Beijing, I argue that efforts to increase students’ creativity flounder both on structural impediments within the Chinese educational system and on contradictions inherent within the ideology of children’s “quality.” [China, education, quality, ideology]

Abstract: In this article, we examine how youth in one urban high school talked about race and racism while participating in a curriculum that introduced the analytic lens of story types (stock stories, concealed stories, resistance stories, and counterstories) to look at race and racism and engage these issues through storytelling and the arts. We draw on data from observations and focus group interviews to examine student-initiated themes and conversation as the curriculum unfolded. In particular, we look at the use of language, particularly racialized jokes and name calling, to consider how such talk functions to create social and rhetorical spaces where youth of color can express and critically analyze the particularities of their lived experiences of race and racism in a contemporary “color-blind” context that asserts race no longer matters. [urban education, youth development, racism, resistance].

Abstract: What do anthropologists of education do? Many observers think that we provide quick glosses on what various “cultures”—typically racialized, ethnic, and national-origin groups—“do” in schools. Herve Varenne and I each name an alternative form of analysis that we think should be central to the subfield. Varenne argues that anthropologists of education should expand analysis of teaching and learning beyond (American) schools and classrooms and examine everyday life in various places as containing countless moments of teaching and learning that are worth understanding. Varenne reminds us that teaching and learning occur nonstop in everyday life, not just in classrooms. “Education” is about far more than what we typically call “achievement,” which usually translates into grades, graduation, or test scores.1 This long-standing way of thinking anthropologically about “education” is essential to exploding simplistic notions of what, when, how, and from whom people “learn.” In my essay, I contend that U.S. anthropologists of education also need to analyze thoroughly how U.S. school achievement patterns take shape in real time. I argue that it is our particular responsibility to counteract “shallow” analyses of “culture” in schools, which purport to explain “achievement gaps” by making quick claims about how parents and children from various racial, ethnic, national-origin, or class groups react to schools. Such shallow analyses dangerously oversimplify the social processes, interactions, and practices that create disparate outcomes for children. Shallow cultural analyses are common in both journalism and popular discourse—and in schools of education as well (see Ladson-Billings 2006 for a related critique). They are explanatory claims that name a group as having a “cultural” set of behaviors and then name that “cultural” behavior as the cause of the group's school achievement outcomes. (E.g., some argue that “group x”[e.g., “Asians”] employs a “group x behavior”[e.g., “push their children”] that causes “high” or “low” achievement.) Such claims allow people to explain achievement outcomes too simply as the production of parents and children without ever actually examining the real-life experiences of specific parents and children in specific opportunity contexts. Going deeper requires pressing for actual, accurate information about the everyday interactions among real-life parents, children, and other actors that add up to school achievement patterns (graduation rates, dropout rates, skill-test scores, suspension lists, and the like). When anthropologists of education say that we study culture, we mean that we are studying the organization of people's everyday interactions in concrete contexts. Shallow analyses of “culture” that purport to describe only how a “group's” parents train its children blame a reduced set of actors, behaviors, and processes for educational outcomes, and they include a reduced set of actors and actions in a reduced set of projects for educational improvement. Anthropologists of education should make clear that we examine children's experiences both in context and in appropriate detail; we study interactional processes that other observers might describe too quickly or with insufficient information.2 I think that if anthropologists of education explicitly, publicly, and colloquially name what counts as deep, thorough cultural analysis of American school achievement patterns, we will make ourselves far better prepared to respond to harmfully shallow claims made by journalists, colleagues, and educators alike. We will also support other stakeholders in children's lives (including teachers and teacher educators) to think more thoroughly about which actions, by whom, and in what situations produce children's achievement. This short essay suggests four key ways that anthropologists of education can, do, and should get “deep” in analyzing American achievement patterns. I invite colleagues to edit and extend this list in future editions of AEQ.

Abstract: This article explores the formation of citizenship in Tamil-medium minority schools in Sri Lanka. It is argued that although the new curriculum aims to construct an inclusive notion of national citizenship, the influence of politics on education in reality creates dominant experiences of discrimination and marginalization. I argue, however, that in the more resourceful communities, social networks are effectively put to work to generate an alternative authoritative notion of peripheral citizenship. [citizenship, minorities, education, Sri Lanka]

Abstract: In this article, I aim to further the discussion of engaged research in anthropology and education by examining the unique changes promoted by participatory research in contrast to policy-oriented activist research models. Drawing on my work with Latina immigrant mothers in a school reform movement, I argue for a Latina feminist view of participatory research that illuminates and builds on Latina women's capacities for social critique and transformative resistance. [participatory research, activist anthropology, Latino parents, school reform]

Abstract: This article illustrates how elements of praxis within George Spindler's cultural therapy and Paul Willis's cultural production are useful precedents for a praxis-based pedagogy. I argue that combining the praxis elements within cultural therapy and cultural production engenders a third mode of ethnographic praxis that I call “cultural organizing.” The article provides an example of cultural organizing among Latina/o high school students in Tucson, Arizona. [cultural organizing, ethnography, Latina/o students, praxis, pedagogy]

Abstract: This study challenges and evaluates modern-liberal-humanistic discourse on education as enlightenment through analysis of the life stories of the first Bedouin women to acquire higher education (hereafter: First Women). The liberal discourse is examined in terms of its ethnic and genderial contexts and the special status these women gained as trailblazers. I explore the meaning of enlightenment among Bedouin women and the question of when and whether (higher) education facilitates or impedes their progress. [education, enlightenment, postmodernism, modernism, Bedouin women]

Abstract: Based on a 15-week ethnographic-based research, this article examines the role of a community-based youth center in supporting the academic lives of Chinese American youth from low-income families in an east coast city I call “Harborview.” This study demonstrates the significant role that community-based organizations play for low-income immigrant youth in providing them with social capital. This study also challenges the portrayal of Asian Americans as model minorities who do not face any barriers. [Asian American education, community-based organizations, out-of-school-time programs, social capital]

Abstract: This case study is concerned with how institutional practices of normative whiteness can impede the school involvement of Mexican-descent students. It examines how damaging forms of white normativity can operate in school settings where one might least expect to find them: in commemorations of Mexican cultural holidays. The author shows how such commemorations can have the paradoxical effect of marginalizing Mexican-descent students and discouraging their involvement in a range of school activities. [Mexican American, whiteness, cultural conflict, cultural celebrations, belonging, identity formation]

Abstract: This article argues that the anthropology of education must focus on what people do to educate themselves outside the constraints constituting the problematics of schooling. Anthropologists must do this precisely to fulfill their public role as legitimate participants in the conversations about understanding and transforming schooling. When anthropologists work at losing control in their research practice, they discover the breadth of the educative efforts that are triggered by the arbitrariness of cultural forms and, most interestingly, produce new forms. If this is the case, then the anthropology of education is the anthropology of cultural transformation that it has been difficult for the discipline to produce. [cross-cultural research, culture change]

Abstract: I chronicle the changes in my research, especially those that have moved me closer to C. Wright Mills's call for a “sociological imagination” and Dell Hymes's reinvented anthropology. As I spend more time attempting to create and describe equitable educational environments and less time documenting educational inequality, I have adopted a version of “design research.” I describe the possibilities and limitations of trying to conduct research while participating in the phenomenon under investigation. [sociological imagination, critical ethnography, public sociology, design research]

Abstract: Participatory research is a radical praxis through which marginalized people acquire research capabilities that they use to transform their own lives. In this article, I examine how parent writers incorporated facets of community writing into their research practice as they developed their practices and identities as researchers. I also consider how anthropology, as both research practice and sensibility, contributed to the ways I engaged as an outside collaborator with these parent researchers. [community writing, participatory research, praxis, anthropological sensibility]

Abstract: This article is a slightly revised version of the Presidential Address delivered at the annual business meeting of the Council on Anthropology and Education, Washington, D.C., December 1, 2007. [“little communities,” ethnography as picaresque, parrhesia]

Abstract: This article draws on ethnographic research to examine relationships between literacy and identity for newly literate men and women in the southern African country of Botswana. Situating beliefs about literacy in the intersection of evangelical missionary discourse, colonial-era labor practices, and modernity rhetoric, I argue that literacy is attributed with the power to transform oneself and describe an adult learning community that based pedagogy in these shared beliefs about literacy. [literacy practices, adult education, southern Africa, ethnographic research]

Abstract: As a participant-observer, the author relates observations, interviews, and surveys from her experience in a Cuban Escuela al Campo (“School to the Countryside,” or EAC) camp located on a collective farm outside of the city of Havana. The Pioneers, the youth section of the official Cuban Communist Party, organize the EAC program nationwide. The program's rugged, military lifestyle experience is required for city-based junior high school students in Cuba, an essential rite of passage of the politicization and socialist consciousness-raising efforts designed by the Revolutionary Government. The author proposes that beneath the revolutionary symbols and activities of the EAC, a new and latent socialist consciousness has been evolving for some time, one that reflects neither an absolute nor an erosion of socialist ideals. Rather, this consciousness (conciencia), much like A. Yurchak (2005) demonstrates in his study of Gorbachev's Russia, reveals a system that inhabits incommensurable positions; Cuba's socialism is both everlasting and steadily declining, at the same time full of vigor and bleakness, as well as dedicated to high ideals and devoid of them. None of these positions is a mask. The intention of this article is, therefore, to show how each is real and mutually constitutive in the EAC. Understanding this peculiar dynamic is crucial for understanding the everyday practices of students, their parents and teachers, the socializing function of Cuban schools, and the seemingly duplicitous behavior in Cuban's daily lives. [Cuban education, socialism, value formation]

Abstract: In this article, the work of George and Louise Spindler is reviewed with visual stimuli ranging from the Rorschach technique and Thematic Apperception Technique to inventions of their own, the Cross-Cultural Sensitization Technique, the Instrumental Activities Inventory, and the Cross-Cultural, Comparative, Reflective Interview Technique. The sites of the various researches, the methods of application, and a brief analysis of the results are included. [interview techniques, culture and personality, ethnography and education]

Abstract: In this article, I explore the meaning of disability within the everyday lives of Clear River third-grade students. The concept of a disability narrative is developed to explain how expert disability labels shape the experience of academic performance and failure. Previous studies of disability labeling have neglected the life of the label after it has become entextualized. I focus on how the layperson translates the technical language of experts into the moral language of everyday life. [labeling, special education, narrative, discourse, cultural circulation]

Abstract: George Spindler is often acknowledged as a founder of the anthropology of education, but ties between Spindler, the new field, and their roots in the culture and personality school of U.S. anthropology are rarely explored. This article and the one that follows (“Using Visual Stimuli in Ethnography,” Spindler 2008) highlight theoretical concerns shaping the goals and methods of Spindler's work. McDermott offers background and then Spindler summarizes his 60 years of fieldwork and findings on the relations among culture, personality, and education. [origins of the field, culture and personality, field techniques]

Abstract: In this article, I reflect on Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu's classic research on the “burden of ‘acting White’ ” to develop a long overdue dialogue between Africana studies and critical white studies. It highlights the dialectical nature of Fordham and Ogbu's philosophy of race and critical race theory by locating the origins of the “burden of ‘acting White’ ” in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, who provides some of the intellectual foundations for this work. Following the work of F. W. Twine and C. Gallagher (2008), I then survey the field of critical whiteness studies and outline an emerging third wave in this interdisciplinary field. This new wave of research utilizes the following five elements that form its basic core: (1) the centrality of race and racism and their intersectionality with other forms of oppression; (2) challenging white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and other dominant ideologies; (3) a critical reflexivity that addresses how various formulations of whiteness are situated in relation to contemporary formulations of Black/people of color identity formation, politics, and knowledge construction; (4) innovative research methodologies including asset-based research approaches; and, finally, (5) a racial elasticity that identifies the ways in which white racial power and pigmentocracy are continually reconstituting themselves in the color-blind era and beyond (see A. A. Akom 2008c).[oppositional identity, Black student achievement, youth development, acting white, Du Bois, critical whiteness studies, critical race theory, race, Black metropolis, double consciousness, twoness, hip-hop]

Abstract: This article analyzes the process of youth political activism and development by drawing on ethnographic research on Asian and Pacific Islander youth activists. Young people revealed that collective action begins with a critical analysis of their lived experiences with inequalities. Their actions also involved oppositional consciousness that was nurtured in social justice-oriented community organizations. Tracking youth's successful efforts for school reform, I show how oppositional consciousness is realized and what activism looks like in practice. [youth activism, oppositional consciousness, social–educational change, Asian and Pacific Islanders]

Abstract: This article chronicles the work of the Llano Grande Center for Research and Development, an educational nonprofit organization in South Texas, by following the narrative of one of its students and two of the authors, who are also founders of Llano Grande. Through the use of ethnography, visuals, and storytelling, they present an emerging theory of practice and a hybrid methodology that has contributed to the development of the work, the school, and the community. An activist agenda informed by practice and supported with theory is woven through the text in biographical form. The text also documents the cornerstones of the work: building strong relationships; work originating from self, place, and community; and engaging in meaningful work. When integrated into a seamless practice, this combination of guiding principles yields a certain power that youth and adults alike begin to negotiate within and between their peers, teachers, and community for change. This sense of self, efficacy, and power then informs much of their work as adults. [Latino epistemology and education, activist ethnography, Llano Grande Center, storytelling, community as text, pedagogy of hope] Carmen's Chronicle When Carmen Valdez was 12 years old, her mother hired a coyote to transport her two young daughters and herself from Mexico into the United States. They fled particular domestic troubles and risked the dangerous sojourn, 'para buscar la vida" (to search for life), as Carmen noted in her oral history a few years later. They began their trip in Durango, where Carmen and her sister had been fully immersed in school life and where their mother took odd jobs to make ends meet. Life was good for Carmen in Durango; she was primed, after all, to be the school's next abanderada, an honor given to a top student who would carry the Mexican flag at school functions, and she also had her circle of close friends. Her mother, however, found it difficult to provide for the family, particularly after escaping a controlling and abusive husband who had previously been the main provider. One fateful evening, when Carmen, her mother, and her sister slipped into the inner tubes that would float them across the Rio Grande River, the river that also served as the U.S.-Mexico international boundary, they did not know what to expect. Crossing was a profound experience, and it would become part of a narrative that would help Carmen generate personal and academic power as she moved through high school and into higher education.

Abstract: This article is based on an ethnographic study I conducted in southern Morocco during 2004. I explore the historical, ideological, and cultural background behind educational specialization among Moroccan university students. I describe how French colonial educational policies and postindependence Moroccan national schooling ideologies have created a national system of double standards that: (1) privileges French-educated urban middle- and upper-class students, (2) emphasizes the Arabization of the national education system, and (3) discriminates against Arabized, largely rural students, which have exacerbated regional educational and socioeconomic inequalities. I finally contend that educational specialization in noncompetitive degrees such as Arabic language and literature, Islamic studies, geography, and general law is the result of an ideological matrix I have termed political coherence of educational incoherence. Political coherence of educational incoherence naturalizes the reliance of certain disfranchised regional groups on a traditional preschool Islamic education that is largely based on memorization and inefficient pedagogy and is unsuitable for the modern educational requirements. [Islamic education, school ethnography, Arabization, school failure, minority education]

Abstract: In this article, we describe the identities of U.S. suburban high school students as they attempt to ensure their “market relevance” in a neoliberal era. The data are drawn from a four-year ethnographic study of the construction of educational advantage conducted by a diverse five-person research team. These identities were characterized by strong agentic beliefs, predispositions to exert control, deeply held attachments to individual success, highly developed self-advocacy skills, precociously circumscribed aspirations, keen awareness of new forms of cultural capital, self-consciously cultivated work ethics, and habituation to stress and fatigue. The study uncovered gender and racial differences in the acquisition of specific components of these identities, which are attributed in part to larger contextual factors, such as the subordination of the school's efforts to meet the needs of minority students to its broader goals of remaining competitive. Overall, we interpret these identity characteristics as components of psychological capital that these young people developed to manage risks: in particular, their ability to achieve “success” in a future characterized by acute competition, declining social support, and uncertainty.[identity, neoliberalism, social stratification, high school, United States]

Abstract: In this article, I reflect on the strange career of the “burden of ‘acting White’ ” since it attracted widespread popular and academic attention over 20 years ago. I begin by noting that my original definition of “the burden of ‘acting White’ ” should not be confused with a prominent misconception of the problem as the “fear” of “acting White.” I then offer a revised definition that has emerged in the wake of the collision of meanings attributed to the Capital High study. At the core of the twists and turns this concept has taken is attempted identity theft: In exchange for what is conventionally identified as success, racially defined Black bodies are compelled to perform a White identity by mimicking the cultural, linguistic, and economic practices historically affiliated with the hegemonic rule of Euro-Americans. Third, drawing on recent work on the impact of gender-specific racial performances on Black males' and Black females' academic success, I analyze quantitative data from Capital High to explain the gender-specific response patterns of male and female students to the dilemmas implicit in academic success. Finally, I suggest possible implications of the centrality of the burden of “acting White” for the academic performance of Black students and the identity of African Americans more generally.[burden of “acting White,” identity theft, racial insufficiency, gender insufficiency, Capital High, academic achievement]