Bradley Levinson Research Collection

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

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Afterword: Implications for educational policy and practice
(Rowman and Littlefield, 2000) Levinson, Bradley A. U.; Sutton, Margaret
This book provides rich resources for teaching and learning about broad social and cultural issues in education. At the same time, it raises a question often heard by instructors in educational foundations courses, and that is, "What is the practical relevance of this material?" -to policy formation, curriculum design, school administration, classroom pedagogy, and so on. This is a fair question, but not an east one to answer. Social and cultural analysis in education is often more akin toe "basic" than "applied" research, to use a distinction common in the natural sciences. The primary purpose of this work is to clarify and expand existing insights, illuminate new concepts, raise new questions, and the reframe perspectives on long-standing issues. To be sure, a few of the authors in this book -notably several in section III- do offer specific ideas for improving educational policy and practice that flow from their research. Most, however, leave the reader to draw out such ideas in the context of his or her own specific experiences and understandings. This kind of contingent "application" is compatible with the interpretive enterprise in which the authors are engaged.
An Anthropological Approach to Education Policy as a Practice of Power: Concepts and Methods
(Springer, 2020) Levinson, Bradley A. U.; Winstead, Teresa; Sutton, Margaret
Since the introduction to our 2001 edited volume, Policy as Practice: Toward a Comparative Sociocultural Analysis of Education Policy (Sutton and Levinson 2001), we have continued to sketch the foundational postulates of a critical anthropological approach to the study of education policy. In 2009, we expanded and deepened many of the points from that introduction, more systematically introducing and defining theoretical terms, and providing a bit of their intellectual genealogy (Levinson et al. 2009). We also discussed certain methodological considerations that accompanied the theoretical approach, and we argued for a type of engaged educational anthropology that goes beyond the mere “study” of education policy to its democratization and transformation. Here we provide an updated synopsis of our approach.
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.
Cultural production and reproduction in contemporary schools
(Rowman and Littlefield, 2000) Borman, Kathryn M.; Fox, Amy E.; Levinson, Bradley A. U.
The articles included in this section include a wide range of topical areas and theoretical frameworks. A common set of organizing ideas links the articles that, taken together, cover the life course of school-aged children and young adults engaged in formal schooling arrangements. Three important concepts related to schooling in a capitalist society constitute overlapping themes. These themes are: (1) persistent and inherent inequities in the educational delivery system, resulting in equally persistent gaps in academic achievement between groups of students; (2) inadequacies of current pedagogical and administrative practices; and (3) the continuing importance of race, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status (SES) in structuring students' life experiences and opportunities.
Forming and implementing a new secondary civic education program in Mexico
(Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) Levinson, Bradley A. U.
For at least two decades now, Mexico has been in the throes of a fitful transition from a long history of corrupt authoritarian rule to a more fully democratic regime. yet changes in civil society have not always kept pace with changes in the formal political-electoral sphere. Like so many other countries currently experiencing democratic transition, Mexico has looked to its school system to undertake the daunting task of cultivating democratic attitudes and dispositions among the new generation. There is both great enthusiasm for this project, and great skepticism that schools can accomplish it.
Introduction: Cultural context and diversity in the study of democratic citizenship education
(Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) Stevick, E. Doyle; Levinson, Bradley A. U.
Jefferson's "safe repository" for the power (kratos) of the people (demos) is democracy itself. Since the Athenians first coined the term more than 2,500 years ago, democracies have taken remarkably diverse forms, even while debates over a democracy's essential and ideal characteristics continue. What constitutes a democratic society? The mechanisms of voting? The alternation of power, freedom to assemble, and to speak as one wishes? Meaningful participation for all citizens? Sets of rights- political, civil, cultural, human? Social safety nets or unencumbered markets? Openness to newcomers?
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.
The symbolic animal: Foundations of cultural transmission and acquisition
(Rowman and Littlefield, 2000) Levinson, Bradley A. U.
In this section I present a number of key writings on the nature of education and culture. My aim is to illuminate how the very foundations of the educational process are rooted in the human penchant for making meaning out of experience and communicating that meaning to others. I hope to show that, in a very real sense, education is culture, that is, education involves the continual remaking of culture as human beings transmit and acquire the symbolic meanings that infuse social life.
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.
Toward an Anthropology of (Democratic) Citizenship Education
(Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) Levinson, Bradley A. U.
In recent years, discourses about citizenship have come to occupy center stage, in both contemporary political practice and academic scholarship. The salience of citizenship has certainly made itself felt in anthropology as well, but less so in our educational subfield. In this chapter, my aim is to explore the relationships between educational processes and citizenship education from an anthropological perspective. In doing so, I review (not exhaustively) a good deal of work in anthropology that probes these relationships, but I also argue that our patchwork conceptual frameworks in the anthropology of education have yet to catch up with the richness and complexity of citizenship education across both formal and informal educational domains. I hope to point the way toward a more coherent and unified approach.
Whither the symbolic animal?; Society, culture, and education at the millennium
(Rowman and Littlefield, 2000) Levinson, Bradley A. U.
The question I pose here interrogates the evolution of humankind: How are we unfolding, and what form will our individual capacities and our global society eventually take? Education, of course, provides an important key to the answer, and the fields comprising the interpretive social sciences provide important intellectual resources for understanding and improving education. This reader presents some of the very best work produced by the interpretive social sciences on the social and cultural foundations of education. My aim is to provide teachers and students with the basic conceptual tools to understand a variety of sociocultural dynamics that shape the educational process in its many dimensions. Such sociocultural understanding is especially crucial for designing educational experiences -forging "tools for conviviality," in Ivan Illich's (1973) rich phrase- worthy of the multicultural societies of the present and future. Therefore, this book aims to compose one small part of the answer to the question: Whither the symbolic animal?

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