Bradley Levinson Research Collection

Permanent link for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/2022/25629

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La antropología de la educación estadounidense: Temas y tensiones en el conocimiento de un campo social
(Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, 2014-02) Levinson, Bradley A.
En esta ponencia, bosquejo una especie de auto-retrato y procuro dar cuenta de algunos temas y tensiones que marcan la antropología estadounidense contemporánea, con alguna atención al concepto de educación que implican estas tensiones. Ilustro la gama de tensiones con una pequeña selección de artículos de publicación reciente en nuestra revista principal, The Anthropology and Education Quarterly, o en los libros de algunos de nuestros colegas más destacados.
Education reform sparks teacher protest in Mexico
(Phi Delta Kappan, 2014-05) Levinson, Bradley A.
The tumult in Mexican education has deep roots in politics and tradition, but it is latter-day global competition and international measures of student performance that are driving reform efforts.
El docente de secundaria ante las reformas educativas. De apóstol a empleado desechable
(Revista Electrónica Actualidades Investigativas en Educación, 2018) Lozano Andrade, Inés; Levinson, Bradley A.
Este artículo trata sobre las condiciones que vive el docente de secundaria ante los cambios derivados de la implementación de diversas reformas educativas en México (2006, 2011, 2013). Se realiza una investigación cualitativa que emplea entrevista semi-estructurada a 18 docentes de este nivel en la ciudad de México. El objetivo es describir e interpretar los significados y sentidos que tienen los docentes acerca de cómo viven estos cambios y de los factores que generan su situación. El análisis revela cómo los docentes de secundaria han significado su labor cada vez menos autónoma y, por tanto, más alienante, este último concepto es fundamental para comprender la sensación que están viviendo hoy en función de la implementación de estas reformas que han generado sensaciones que van desde el desencanto hasta el malestar. Los resultados revelan que los docentes hacen mención a la indisciplina e indiferencia de los jóvenes como una problemática central; a una pérdida del poder derivada de imposiciones para acreditar forzadamente al estudiantado independientemente de su desempeño; a la pérdida del prestigio social de su labor por las campañas mediáticas realizadas recientemente, las cuales justificaban la nueva y última reforma que afecta sus condiciones de estabilidad laboral, lo que les genera una sensación de incertidumbre y discontinuidad. La enajenación, como pérdida del dominio que tienen sobre sus acciones y la pérdida de seguridad en sus perspectivas, se plantea como un factor importante para ser considerado en la comprensión de la situación crítica de la escuela secundaria en México.
Linking state and society in discourse and action: Political and cultural studies of the Cárdenas era in Mexico
(Latin American Research Review, 1999) Spenser, Daniela; Levinson, Bradley A.
On 6 July 1997, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, founder and leader of the Mexican Partido de la Revolucion Democraitica (PRD), scored an impressive victory in being elected mayor of Mexico City. Cardenas's new status as leader of the world's largest city, along with the PRD's substantial gains in parliamentary elections, has raised important questions about the sources of their combined political strength. To what is owed the victory of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and his party? At least three answers suggest themselves: the particular political talents, programs, and bases of support developed by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas; the identification of his father, former President Lazaro Cardenas (1934-1940), with the zenith of a popular revolutionary project; and the exhaustion of the corporatist political model that, perhaps ironically and unwittingly, Lazaro Cardenas bequeathed to the Mexican state. All these elements contributed in some measure to the recent victory, but it is not our intention to sort them out here. Instead, we would like to explore the evidence that the popular legacy of the Lazaro Cardenas era has provided significant support for his son and the PRD.
Radical pluralism and the challenges of educating for democratic-ecological civic identities: Reflections from the Mexican school context
(2020) Levinson, Bradley A.
This paper builds on the growing importance of concepts of identity and diversity in citizenship education studies, and argues for an expanded conception of diversity that ultimately includes the non-human and even inanimate realm. The dramatic pace of human-induced global climate change requires a commensurate urgency in developing forms of citizenship education that shape new ecological as well as political civic identities, and which expand democracy beyond the human community. Situating my empirical work on Mexican civic education reform in a global, comparative context, I consider the challenges that all schools and school systems will need to address to incorporate even deeper practices of respect for diversity and acknowledgement of the radical pluralism that life (and non-life) on earth presents.
Reduciendo brechas entre cultura juvenil y cultura docente escolar: El desafío institucional para crear una secundaria con sentido
(IIPE-UNESCO, 2012) Levinson, Bradley A.
¿Por qué no se ha podido construir una secundaria en América Latina que realmente atienda los intereses y las necesidades de los jóvenes de la región? ¿Por qué sigue habiendo una brecha tan abismal entre la expectativa del joven y la oferta de la escuela? En torno a estas preguntas, compartiré algunas reflexiones que han surgido a partir de mis investigaciones empíricas en México, combinadas con mi lectura de una bibliografía sobre la juventud y la secundaria en todas las Américas así como la teorización sociocultural del proceso educativo. Mis investigaciones en México, cabe señalar, han ido desde la convivencia profunda, etnográfica, con alumnos de una secundaria mexicana de provincia hace ya 20 años (Levinson, 1993; Levinson, 2002), hasta las entrevistas y observaciones con maestros, directivos, supervisores, funcionarios, y responsables de decisiones en distintos ámbitos de la educación básica mexicana, sobre todo con referencia a la secundaria, entre los años 2001 hasta la fecha (Blackwood, Levinson, y Cross, en prensa; Levinson, 2004; Levinson, 2005). A lo largo de muchos años, en mi calidad como antropólogo, he estudiado la problemática de la secundaria cualitativamente desde “abajo”, o sea, desde la perspectiva de los estudiantes y sus padres de familia, hasta “arriba”, es decir, desde la perspectiva de los que ocupan varios puestos de administración y poder en un sistema educativo. Tengo en cuenta todos los actores del sistema como punto de referencia etnográfico. Y hay que añadir que estas reflexiones han surgido también en el marco de un proceso de democratización de la sociedad y las instituciones mexicanas, y de una gran reforma de la educación básica, que hoy sigue en marcha. Así lo marcan los mismos documentos de la reforma mexicana, donde se apuesta a la formación de un estudiante crítico y democrático. A mi juicio, no se puede hablar ni de reforma educativa ni de mejorar la calidad de vida de nuestra juventud sin hacer referencia al horizonte de democratización y la democracia que se intenta construir en México y todas las Américas.
Review of P. Greenfield & R. Cocking’s book Cross-cultural roots of minority child development
(Comparative Education Review, 1998) Levinson, Bradley A.
The discipline of psychology, with its tendency toward ethnocentrism and its overwhelming focus on individual expression and development, has contributed relatively little to the field of comparative education. This strong volume may change that. Patricia Greenfield and Rodney Cocking have assembled a group of essays that taken together demonstrate the value of a cross-cultural perspective for understanding the full range of patterns in human education and development. In so doing, they also enable us to appreciate the contribution of a cross-cultural developmental psychology to the illumination of problems of schooling in comparative perspectives.
Stealth diversity and the indigenous question: The challenges of citizenship in Mexican civic education
(AERA Publications, 2017) Levinson, Bradley A.; Luna Elizarrarás, María Eugenia
In broad brush strokes, the story of citizenship and citizenship education in Mexico features a strongly secular, liberal, nationalist state that in the 19th century begins a project to assimilate its indigenous peoples to a mainstream, mestizo national culture. This project is then inflected, but not fundamentally altered by, the Revolution of the early 20th century, which comes to glorify the indigenous contribution to national culture but provides few differentiated citizenship rights to indigenous peoples. Since the late 1980s this project has evolved in fits and starts toward a more inclusive, accommodating pluricultural framework. Yet there is still much more work to be done.
Theoretical Foundations for a Critical Anthropology of Education Policy
(Routledge/Taylor Francis, 2018) Levinson, Bradley A.; Winstead, Teresa; Sutton, Margaret
In this chapter we revisit and update the foundational postulates of our previous work, articulating a critical practice approach to the study of education policy. We provide what we hope is a more succinct and accessible statement of our approach, placing emphasis on three particular elements: 1) the historical, holistic, and cross-cultural insights that an anthropological lens brings to our understanding of policy as a practice of power; 2) the centrality of a non-dualistic and agentic conception of appropriation in social practice, and 3), an emphasis on social scientific knowledge produced democratically as much for various civic publics as for the scholarly or authorized “policymaking” communities. Along the way we highlight how our particular contribution to the anthropology of education policy, as theoretically informed by practice theory and committed to democratic praxis, has been both challenged and enriched over the last decade and a half.
"Una etapa siempre dificil": Concepts of Adolescence and Secondary Education in Mexico
(Comparative Education Review, 1999) Levinson, Bradley A.
The concept of adolescence as a unique and difficult stage in the human life-course has itself followed a turbulent historical path. Although the term occasionally appeared in European texts from the medieval period,' it was the U.S. psychologist G. Stanley Hall who in the late 1800s advanced the first "scientific" account of puberty's specific psychological entailments, which contributed to the more common and modern usage of "adolescence" we know today. Joseph Kett documents the influence of Hall's work at the turn of this century, and provides an intimate social history of the various groups in U.S. society that attempted to create institutions specifically attending to adolescent needs (i.e., Boy Scouts, the high school, etc.). In the United States and Europe, the concept of adolescence has since become thoroughly enmeshed in both popular and expert discourses on the behavior of youth, prompting Ari's to call this the "century" of adolescence.3 Academic journals and institutes, based primarily in departments of education and psychology, devote themselves entirely to the study of adolescence, while talk shows, books, and magazines communicate proverbial gem of wisdom to parents and teachers in search of advice about their charges. The prevailing thought characterizes adolescence as a universal psychological experience that, in evolutionary terms, we have only recently begun to understand and therefore socially and educationally accommodate. Meanwhile, a number of scholars have begun to question the value and relevance of such a concept. Like Aries had previously done for the concept of childhood, these authors interrogate the analytical value of adolescence, wondering whether it represents, among other things, an ideological conflation of biological and sociocultural life stages central to the social control modalities of modern capitalist societies.

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