Are Teaching and Learning Among the Things We Do For Love?
Professor Marjorie Faulstich Orellana of UCLA suggested that there is a “‘Love’ Revolution” underway in education as reaction against the punitive and judgment-drenc…
Author: Susan D. Blum
The Game of School
Strategies are the main learning outcome of all those years of school. Anyone who flunks strategy basically flunks school. Anthropology is a field of inquiry not only focused…
My new book is coming soon….
Before January 2016, my new book, “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College, will be published by Cornell University Press. You can sign up on…
White + word Gap = wrong
With Netta Avineri and Eric J. Johnson, I’ve addressed a report in the Washington Post on the many contextual factors affecting children in poverty. The well-intentioned plans to teach…
Linguistic Challenges to China’s Centralizing Control
Challenges to authoritarian states’ control of language can be so complex that they exceed the states’ ability to manage them all. Electronic expression of resistance and increasi…
bridging the “language gap”
An invited forum on the so-called “language gap”has just appeared in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology . My piece is titled “‘Wordism’: Is There a Teacher in the House?”…
Cheating all around
The correct and inevitable guilty verdict in the sad case of the “Atlanta Cheating Scandal” is a reminder that the current system of high-stakes testing drives all particip…
the middle class (thinks it) knows best: daring to intervene in disadvantaged households
Photo credit: http://earlyed.newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/articles/images/dad_reading_to_baby_0.jpg (with Lizzie Fagen and Kathleen C. Riley) [On the American Anthropolo…
Coming soon….”Meta-Education: The Movie”
Image source:https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-19FCEJmI32o/AAAAAAAAAAI/AAAAAAAAABU/mImc0dQYxp8/photo.jpg
The Kids are more than all right
Both are seventeen. They are too young to vote in places like the US. But we need more of them! Malala! All around the world people know this…
The so-called language gap
Thirty million words. That sounds precise….enormous….impressive. That is the estimate by some scholars of the difference in words heard by disadvantaged kids in comparison to kids with advantages….
School Is War, Prison, Factory, Machine, Business, Game, Life….And Other Metaphors: recommending Permaculture
If metaphors organize our thinking and if there is no genuinely neutral way of speaking about anything, then it is worth looking into the dominant metaphors used. School is a domai…
“The Language Gap”: Liberal Guilt Creates Another Not-So-Magic Bullet
Why are people poor? Why do children of the poor not thrive? The latest explanation for why children coming from disadvantaged households do not rise in this land…