The Anthropology of Education and Learning

The course forms part of the MSc Education (Comparative Education and International Development) pathway and provides an in-depth exploration of issues of comparative education, using the insights gained from social anthropology, to complement the broader approaches to international comparison. This course explores how the insights and concepts gained through the discipline of social anthropology, including the ethnographic methodology that underlies it, can add to our understandings of educational theory and practice. At the same time it also aims to show how a detailed examination of teaching and learning processes in different cultural contexts might add to knowledge about the relationship between personhood, learning and culture. The course will pay attention to classic categories such as 'gender', 'class', 'race', 'kinship', 'religion' and 'nation', at the same time as acknowledging the complex intersectionality of these with respect to contemporary human experiences of migration. Study will be structured around cross-cultural comparisons of themes such as literacy, violence, citizenship, discipline, ritual, language and copying. Aspects of education and learning throughout the life course will be covered, as well as both formal (institutional) and informal practices of learning. In examining such processes in detail using ethnographic studies of education from around the world (regional foci will include India, China, the Pacific, the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Latin America), this course aims to encourage students to think critically about both the potentials and problems of applying Western discourses, models and systems of education as a form of 'development'. It aims therefore to give students a confident, and culturally sensitive, grounding from which to make comparisons of teaching and learning in a global context. Credit Level: 11 Year taken: Postgraduate