1st Edition
The Anthropology of Education Policy Ethnographic Inquiries into Policy as Sociocultural Process
Advancing a rapidly growing field of social science inquiry—the anthropology of policy—this volume extends and solidifies this body of work, focusing on education policy. Its goal is to examine timely issues in education policy from a critical anthropological, ethnographic, and comparative perspective, and through this to theorize new ways of understanding how policy "does its work." At the center is a commitment to an engaged anthropology of education policy that uses anthropological knowledge to imagine and foster more equitable and just forms of schooling. The authors examine the ways in which education policy processes create, reflect, and contest regimes of knowledge and power, sorting and stratifying people, ideas, and resources in particular ways.
In contrast to conventional analyses of policy as text-based, dictated, linear, and rational, an anthropological perspective positions policy at the interface of top-down, bottom-up, and meso-level processes, and as de facto and de jure. Demonstrating how education policy operates as a social, cultural, and deeply ideological process "on the ground," each chapter clearly delineates the implications of these understandings for educational access, opportunity, and equity.
Providing a single "go to" source on the disciplinary history, theoretical framework, methodology, and empirical applications of the anthropology of education policy across a range of education topics, policy debates, and settings, the book updates and expands on seminal works in the field, carving out an important niche in anthropological studies of public policy.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
PART 1—SITUATING THE FIELD
- Finding the Practice in Education Policy—A Disciplinary Genealogy
- Theoretical Foundations for a Critical Anthropology of Education Policy
- What Does an Anthropologist of Educational Policy Do? Methodological Considerations
- Producing Policy Prescriptions in a "Persistently Low-Achieving" School
- Studying Educational Policy through its Dissenters: The Anthropology of U.S. Educational Policy Contestation
- The Ambiguous Political Power of Liberal School Reform
- The (In)Flexibility of Racial Policies: Chinese Americans in the Jim Crow South
- DREAMers and DACAmented students in U.S. Higher Education: Toward a Critical Race Anthropology of Education Policy
- Along Ghostly Grains: Toward an Ethnography of Policy
- "Safe" versus "Dangerous" Policy Processes in Urban Public Schooling: The Case of Native American Education in Arizona
- Policy Practices and State Effects: A Comparative Analysis of Social Inequality, Language Diversity, and Education Policy in South Africa and the United States
- Language Sequestration and Public Education: A View from the New Language Policy Studies
Teresa L. McCarty and Angelina E. Castagno
Bradley A. Levinson, Teresa Winstead, and Margaret Sutton
Edmund T. Hamann and Thiru Vandeyar
PART 2—EDUCATIONAL REFORM AND CONTESTATION IN THE U.S.
Jill Koyama
Jen Sandler
Amanda Lashaw
PART 3—RACED, AND RACING, EDUCATION POLICY
Stacey J. Lee
Carol E. Johnson and Angelina E. Castagno
Sabina E. Vaught and Gabrielle Orum Hernández
PART 4—LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, AND EXCLUSIONARY EDUCATION POLICY
Cynthia Benally
James Collins
Teresa L. McCarty
About the Contributors
Index
Biography
Angelina E. Castagno is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Foundations at Northern Arizona University, USA.
Teresa L. McCarty is the George F. Kneller Chair in Education and Anthropology in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and Affiliate Faculty in American Indian Studies, at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA.
