January 24-26, 2006
Schedule
Please scroll down to see Michael Agar's introduction to the session on culture
as well as abstracts for the presentations on January 25th.
Tuesday, January 24th 9AM-11AM Pacific Standard Time
................................................................. (Please check your time zones for the time difference)
9:00-9:05 Opening and Dean’s Welcome
9:05-9:55 Presentation. On Culture. Michael Agar (Powerpoint handout)
9:55-10:10 Local site discussions (microphones muted)
10:10-11 Interactive discussion on Culture
Wednesday, January 25th, 9AM-11AM PST
9:00-9:05 Opening comments
9:05-9:25 Presentation. Language and Information and Communication Technologies: Critical Tools for a Globalized World, Olga Vasquez, University of California, San Diego.
9:25-9:35 Local site discussions (microphones muted)
9:35-9:55 Presentation.Talked Images: Process of Meaning Construction in a Biology Class. Cláudia Avelar Freitas, CEPEx / FAFI – MG and Maria Lucia Castanheira, Federal University of Minas Gerais, CEALE. Brazil. (Powerpoint)
9:55-10:05 Local site discussions (microphones muted)
10:05-11:00 Interactive discussion on issues about researching learning and development
Thursday, January 26th, 9-11AM PST
9:00-9:05 Opening comments
9:05-9:20 Comments on Researching Learning: David Bloome
9:20-9:35 Comments on Researching Learning: Judith Green
9:35-9:50 Local site discussions on issues for researching learning and development
(microphones muted)
9:50-10:45 Interactive discussion on issues for designing research for studying learning and development in classrooms and out of school contexts
10:45-11:00 Closing comments from participating sites
Live web-cast for these session is available January 24-26th, 9-11 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. Please check here for technology requirements and further information for the live webcast.
Abstracts
On Culture
Michael Agar, Ethknoworks
I’ve been asked to organize a first session for the January meeting of the Thematic School on “culture.” As part of that request, the organizers asked for some suggested readings.
Two qualifications here: First, as you all know, “culture” is among the most widely used and contentious concepts of the current era. There is a reason for this that we’ll get to during the session. But this means that there is a massive amount of writing in different academic disciplines on the subject. Second, I haven’t followed the arguments as closely as colleagues in anthropology, having busied myself more with complexity theory and epidemiology and economic history in the last several years. I’ll suggest a couple of things to look at, but participants in the thematic course should do some web-work and sample a current debate or two that they find stimulating.
Another useful exercise would be to sample the popular use of the term. Sometime when you’re reading a newspaper or magazine article where “culture” is used as a core concept, take a look at what kind of work the concept is doing in the overall essay. For that matter, you could do the same with use of the concept in any nonfiction or academic work that you happen to be reading anyway. One question, obvious to me as an outsider, is, “what kind of work is the ‘culture’ concept doing in an example of general educational policy discourse?”
A good historical overview of the concept, aimed at a general reader, is Adam Kuper’s Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account, Harvard University Press, 1999. This is a well-written story of the concept, where it came from, and the major changes it has gone through.
A book also aimed at a general audience is Michael Carrithers’ Why Humans Have Cultures: Explaining Anthropology and Social Diversity, Oxford University Press, 1992. I’ve suggested this one to colleagues designing courses for non-anthros, often in medical school settings, and it gets good reviews as an overview.
When I worked on the several case studies of illegal drug epidemics over the last seven years, I found two books particularly helpful in re-thinking “culture” to make some kind of sense with reference to the work I was doing. The first was William Roseberry’s Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture, History and Political Economy, Rutgers University Press, 1989. The second was Ulf Hannerz’ Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning, Columbia University Press, 1992. These are more aimed at an academic market, and both deal with ways that the culture concept needs to change to handle any effort at making sense of the world. A book that helped me get from ethnography to global history was Stanley Diamond’s Sweetness and Power, a book where he shifts from an ethnographic study of a sugar plantation to the general question of “what’s the story with sugar, anyway?” He invents a kind of “ethno-history” that helped us figure out what we were doing with drug epidemics.
“Culture” is a mess right now. Take a look around and consider how you think it might be cleaned up, or whether it makes more sense to just move on to another location.
Talked Images: Process of Meaning Construction in a Biology Class
Cláudia Avelar Freitas, CEPEx / FAFI - MG, Brazil
Maria Lucia Castanheira, Federal University of Minas Gerais,
CEALE, Brazil
This presentation examines how conceptual meaning portrayed by biological standardized image is discursively (re)constructed by classroom participants. Exploring data from a study of a Brazilian classroom, we present a detailed analytical description of how redundancy and contradiction of contextualization cues influences the process of (re)constructing meanings of standardized images.
Language and Information and Communication Technologies: Critical Tools for a Globalized World
Olga Vasquez, University of California, San Diego.
This presentation introduces research on Classe Majica, a new model for bringing about immediate and responsible change in the knowledge and skills that are required by a globalized economy and world society. Rather than focus on the institutional structures that must be in place to funnel resources to under-served populations, this paper focuses on how bilingualism and new technological of communication and information (NTCI) serve as mediating tools for new social relations and new world competencies.
Extensive session . October 24-28, 2005 (Preamble and abstracts- pdf)
10/24/05 An Ethnography by Any Other Name
(presentation & discussion video)
10/25/05 Language, Culture and Ethnography
(presentation & discussion video)
10/26/05 Language, Ethnography and Complex Co-evolutionary Systems (presentation & discussion video)
10/27/05 Public conversation and directions for the future
(discussion video)
Dr. Michael Agar's Preamble for October Presentations
Colleagues and I worked out the above sequence of presentations. I’d like to foreground a couple of things before I start in with descriptions and reading suggestions. The general plan is to take a presenter who shares with most of you an interest in and experience of language-based ethnography, but who has worked for the most part outside your community of researchers and practitioners. Presentations will feature material from outside the realm of education with the goal of casting internal issues in a different light, just as the presenter expects the same effect in reverse once the presentations change to a different speech act, conversations.
The three presentations vary in terms of their fit with presenter’s biography. The first presentation, on ethnography, deals with an area he has worked in continuously for decades. It is his primary and preferred professional identity tag.
The second presentation, on language and culture, is also a lifelong thread, beginning with his graduate training at the Language Behavior Research Lab at UC Berkeley. The last seven years or so, though, he has worked on an NIH epidemiology/economic history project. So this presentation is a mix of the old and a return to it after an interruption with something new, a mix of many of the established practices of “languacultural” research with new thoughts on how to enrich language-based ethnography with the third presentation topic, complexity.
That third presentation introduces a topic in which the presenter has been active for about six years. His initial interest in complexity was by way of the NIH project, to integrate epidemiology, history and ethnography. More recent work involved use of complexity to articulate ethnographic epistemology, summarized in an article that was placed on the UCSB web page for his previous visit. Now he means to explore use of complexity in language-oriented ethnography. In this third presentation, an overview and critique of complexity will be offered, followed by a return to the language, ethnography, and complexity themes.
Initial Session. May 23, 2005
Complexity and Ethnography on the Way to Language
|