Every theory of education endorses an image of a human being as someone who can be educated and is capable of self-education and self-cultivation. Since J.F. Herbart, educationalists have been sketching this image under the title "Bildsamkeit," which has become a central element of the specific German way of speaking about educational…

Free-listing is a quick, semi-quantitative methodology commonly used by anthropologists to uncover information within a cultural domain. In this method note, we review how anthropologists have used free-listing in a variety of research settings. We then apply the social-ecological framework to describe how free-listing can be used for formative,…

In agreement with the main tenets of the anthropological theory of the didactic (ATD), this study uncovers dependencies between what students can learn, the established curriculum and the current state of mathematicians' mathematics ('scholarly mathematics'). One main result is that the mathematics taught, too often taken for granted by curriculum…

How well do we know how non-humans experience environmental stressors and how do we communicate that knowledge as educators? This paper addresses these questions by way of an auto-ethnographic account of the author's experience of attempting to listen to the Great Barrier Reef, off the Queensland coast. Through a series of methodological failures…

Thailand's general education policy has been intended to provide students with the necessary basic knowledge for their subsequent major studies, as well as to serve other important functions in daily life practices. The university has several reasons for requiring the general education program as part of degree completion. In this paper, I will…

Against the prevailing outcomes-based education and the instrumentalization of education, a movement has arisen towards holistic education. This aims to go beyond objective measurement of the outcomes of education in order to treat the student as a whole person. In this paper, we shall examine some strands of education in Japan which in some way…

The College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) is a US Department of Education funded initiative to support students from migrant/seasonal farmworker backgrounds--i.e., students whose families travel seasonally to work in agriculture--during their first year as undergraduates. This article shares authors' experience of using insights from…

Comics-based /arts-based research is increasingly employed in anthropology and other social science disciplines. As part of my ongoing doctoral research on the experiences of young adults with learning disabilities in India, I have engaged in researcher-produced drawings/comics to depict my fieldwork findings. In this paper, I present three…

This practice-based experiential learning approach utilizes the discipline of anthropology to foster a more nuanced understanding of social and racial inequalities with the objective of promoting advocacy work among student learners in an undergraduate introduction to cultural anthropology course. The purpose of this strategy is for students to…

The Ofsted Subject report series: Religious Education (2024) and the CoRE report (2018) critically evaluate the shortcomings of the current Religious Education (RE) curriculum in UK schools, highlighting a lack of depth and consistency that inadequately prepares students for a diverse and complex world. This paper proposes the integration of…

With all the discussion about what best prepares students for work and life, two candidates are interdisciplinary thinking and international awareness. This summer, exactly 30 years after the author graduated from college, her favorite professor at Bates College retired, which led her to think about her own early experiences with these ways of…

This article describes several ways that anthropologists of education can maximize impact on knowledge projects, policies, and practices. The approaches discussed here are all anchored in powerful and distinctive qualities of our field, and include: (1) Centering our disciplinary authority by refusing to capitulate to dominant forms of knowledge,…

In the first part of the dialogue between theories, which gave rise to a paper in this journal, we discussed the role played by normativity in didactics. In this work, with the aim of taking a step forward in this dialogue, we state explicitly some of the postulates of the anthropological theory of the didactic. They shape the object of study, the…

Today's education has three impediments to meaningful and sustainable educational reform; first, the lack of precise and accurate anthropology of learners; second, dilemma between constructivism-leading academy and behaviorism-dominating classrooms; third, the lack of philosophy of education in theory and practice. The Montessori system was built…

For anthropologists working with young people in schools, an ambiguous and anxiety-provoking balancing act is required; how can the researcher align with the relational sensibilities of ethnography while also adhering to the strict boundaries and risk management ethos of school and university ethics? Tracing research relationships developed with…