This article is a slightly revised version of the CAE Presidential Address delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans, LA on November 20, 2010. The address inaugurated a CAE program change in which a full evening session was devoted to the talk, including commentaries by Hugh Mehan and Sofia…

Explores the relevance of anthropology today, stressing that the current relevance of anthropology has to do with current work, building on the previously relevant work of earlier anthropologists. Asking the right questions, good questions, means considering issues that are pursued for decades, rather than focusing on the pursuit of grants. (SLD)

Describes a fieldwork training school for graduate students sponsored by the University of Georgia (UGA). Bringing graduate students to the summer program at the school gives school organizers new perspectives on their own work, surroundings, and relationships. (SLD)

Discusses the development of the concept of context within the field of culture and cognition, focusing on work in the cultural-historical tradition. Some of the failure of educational innovations in everyday classrooms can be attributed to the separation of context and cognition in educational innovations. (SLD)

Reflects on stories educators tell about culture, identity, and education. If stories of self are to help educators reform institutions or build new communities, they must be reinvented to embrace others rather than to defend against contact with others. (SLD)

Examines the politics of representation among teachers at a racially mixed high school undertaking detracking. Interviews with 45 of the 81 teachers, several administrators and counselors, 15 students, and seven parents show how the reform effort, led by female teachers, was derailed as male teachers used a gender discourse to support the status…

Situates three young adolescents in their home, neighborhood, school, and peer cultures and analyzes their uses and interpretations of television contextually. Qualitative differences are found in their everyday learning within television culture as compared with their learning in local culture, although learning about social power across cultures…

Ethnography can encounter such problems as timing and sequence, validity, superficiality and bias toward the typical. More than just participant observation should be used by anthropological researchers. Ethnographers should be active, joining in the responsibility for changing the circumstances of everyday life in schools and school communities.…

Introduces a collection of papers presented at a symposium on the situationally-specific character of problem-solving practices. Reports that findings provoke speculation about relations among social contexts, knowledge and activity, and relations between school-learned problem-solving techniques and those used in other settings. (KH)

Reviews the contributions of anthropology in educational experiments designed to help educationally and socially disadvantaged children. Cautions that educational psychology will retain its hegemony in educational research, unless anthropology is able to show how educational failure can be reversed. (GC)

Reviews the status of educational anthropology. Argues that (1) anthropology's strength lies in understanding groups; (2) the complexity of the gap between a school and its community must be better understood; (3) anthropological research offers theoretical paradigms for understanding educational problems holistically; and (4) without significant…

Discusses important but relatively neglected themes of the 1954 Carmel Conference on anthropology and education: (1) search for philosophical as well as theoretical articulation of education and anthropology; (2) necessity for sociocultural contextualization of educative process; (3) relation of teaching and learning to life cycle; and (4) nature…