Comparing Ethnographies: Studying Education across the Americas

• In Event: Knowledge production in comparative and international education: Southern and postcolonial perspectives

Abstract

Kathryn Anderson-Levitt UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) & Elsie Rockwell, Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados, México.

What can be learned when ethnographers of education from Latin America on the one hand and from the US and Canada on the other co-author texts that critically compare the themes and theoretical frameworks of their respective research? We report on a volume we are editing that is inspired by a series of multilingual Inter-American Symposia on Ethnography and Education. We have asked pairs of colleagues from North and South to co-author chapters explicitly highlighting what can be learned by comparing their work on particular topics. We are learning, first, the difficulty—and fruitfulness—of translating concepts. For example, ethnographers from the “North” write about “minorities” or “minoritized” populations, but ethnographers from the “South” study equity for the majority in their countries. Second, we are re-discovering US parochialism. Latin American scholars build theory from Latin American, US and European sources, whereas US scholars rely heavily on US (not “Anglo-Saxon”) scholarship. These differences in theory combined with differences in political and historical contexts lead us to ask different questions. For example, among those who study teachers’ work, ethnographers in the North tend to focus on teachers’ thinking in comparative perspective, whereas ethnographers in the South—particularly in Argentina, notes Belmira Bueno of U. Sāo Paolo—are more likely to analyze what R. W. Connell called the “industrial sociology of teaching” (1985). We conclude that ethnographers in the North most need this comparative work because their hegemonic position creates more blind spots than those that encumber ethnographers from the South.

Author

• Kathryn Anderson-Levitt, UCLA