This article examines the work of several anthropologists from the 1960s to the 1980s who used images of the future in their anthropology classrooms in order to stimulate alternative thinking in their students. In response to the apparent inevitability of "monofutures" characterized by globalization, I suggest the necessity for such an approach…

In November 2003, the Council on Anthropology and Education honored John Ogbu with the George and Louise Spindler Award, for exemplary and long-term contributions to educational anthropology. But in March 2003, a noted economist condemned Ogbu's work as serving an "oppressive function". In this paper, such contradictory instances are cited as the…

Since the fall of 2006 a number of Towson University students concentrating in the discipline of anthropology have been part of a civic engagement and service-learning project focusing on an historic African-American community in Baltimore. While the focus of the research project concentrates on the processes of gentrification, individual student…

This article begins to fill a gap in recent discussions of the future of Islamic studies with an account of the nature and significance of Anthropological and Ethnographic contributions to the study of Islam and Muslims. Drawing attention to both the problem of essence in Orientalism and the dissolution of Islam's significance for Muslims in…

This article illustrates the importance of anthropology to the multicultural approach to education and depicts the relationship between anthropology and multicultural education as both reciprocal and intimate. (MM)

Because educational researchers are becoming interested in the uses of ethnographic field methods, the author examines some of the theoretical disputes and methodological problems being experienced in contemporary anthropology, such as hypothesis testing, observer bias, and reliability. (Part of a theme issue on anthropology of education.) (SJL)

Freire's cogitation on Information Technology (IT), resources for education have been known since the decade of the 50s. And now, within the current context, this analysis outlines the literacy problem as an issue of gnosis and anthropology while existing in a virtual dimension. Based on research/experiences that also were carried out in Brazil,…

Theological anthropology in the work of Thomas Groome can be understood by exploring the relationship between subjectivity and knowledge in his major works. This relationship is constituted by five fundamental elements: the knowing subject in religious education as existential, liberational, pedagogical, theological, and critical. A comprehension…

The last three decades have seen the emergence of a new discipline of childhood studies, made up of contributions from sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, challenging previous studies of children based on paradigms from psychology and education. This new discipline has revolutionized the study of children and demanded that they be looked…

The growing interest in the anthropological approach to educational research raises some issues about the nature of educational anthropology and traditional educational research. The nature of these two methods of inquiry is different in that anthropology demands that the researcher use the field as the bases for theoretical, methodological, and…

Presented are four possible content bases for art programs, with an expanded discussion of one of them--the anthropological base, which is described as the study of artistic origins. (KC)

The work of John Ogbu on "minority education" has spawned a number of interesting and useful debates in the USA. Having been both an early admirer and critic of Ogbu's work, I reviewed his work in an earlier "Anthropology and Education Quarterly" article. Before discussing his new Shaker Heights study, I recapitulate the main points of the 1991…

What does it mean to use, or do, theory in the scholarship of teaching and learning? The article approaches the question by considering the role of design anthropology in developing studio-based engineering programmes. Central to my discussion within situated contexts of learning is the idea of practice-based exploration conceived as a way of…

This article focuses on children's narrated experiences of fosterage in East Cameroon. It seeks to complement the predominantly adult approaches to fosterage with children's views of the intimate, emotional and competitive aspects of kinship in everyday life. As kinship evolves in homes through sharing food and intimacy, children directly…