School Ethnography.pdf

School Ethnography: A Multilevel Approach’ John U. Ogbu* Ethnography is increasingly used by researchers in education. Among nonanthropologists, however, it i s often misconceived and superficially applied; among anthropologists there is a strong bias toward a narrow application of the technique to the study of education. The present paper argues for the application of traditional anthropological ethnography in the study of formal education and for broadening the scope of such studies. It also suggests a framework-an ecological framework-that permits a multilevel application of ethnography in formal education. SCHOOL ETHNOGRAPHY; EDUCATION; M I N O R I T Y EDUCATION; EDUCATIONAL ANTHROPOLOG Y; ETHNOECOLOCY.

The Problem The focus of this paper is on the scope and adequacy of school ethnography for understanding the process of education and for theory building in educational anthropology. It will pay special attention to thestudy of minority education and‘ to the problem of providing a valid explanation for the disproportionate failure of minority groups like blacks, Indian, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans to learn successfully in American publicschools. There are three main reasons for this focus. The first is the misconception of ethnography and i t s popularization and superficial execution in much educational research. To be convinced of this one only needs to read or listen to papers presented at sessions on ethnography at AERA sessions, read research proposalssubmitted to funding agencies, or read in certain journals articles purporting to be based on the ethnographic study of schooling. The second reason for focusing on the scope and adequacy of school ethnography is the bias toward microethnography in educational research. Articles in Anthropology and Education Quarterly, the main outlet for educational anthropologists, and other journals show a predominance of microethnography. in reading the 51 abstraas submitted for the 1980 annual Ethnography in Education Research Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, one finds microethnography very disproportionately represented. The third reason is the concomitant neglect of broader community forces with important implications for schooling. The result is that ethnography of schooling to date provides almost no basis for an overall conception of schooling, especially schooling in the context of social, political, and economic realities-“the imperatives of culture”-in Cohen’s (1971) terminology.

*Department of Anthropology University of California Berkeley, California

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A part of the problem is developmental. School ethnography is still i n its infancy, hardly two decades old. Related to this is that many school ethnographers have not had the opportunity of training in traditional ethnographic methods of anthropology. This limitation is made worse by misconceptions and superficial application of ethnographic research. To some, ethnography i s synonymous with a nonquantitative and nonexperimental study. Ethnography i s accomplished with observations of a classroom, a school or a project for a few hours, a few days, a week or two weeks. Among competent ethnographers the problem i s conceptual-the definition of what constitutes schooling and the reasons for minority school failure. In other words, it i s a question of the relation between theory and method (Herskovits 1955). Those who define schooling as cultural transmission or the process by which “the school develops in the child attitudes, values, notions about the world and notions about the self” become microethnographers preoccupied with school, classroom, or home milieu (Rist 1975:89). Very few school ethnographers go beyond such settings t o study how the wider society and i t s institutions influence minority schooling. Furthermore, even when cultural transmission researchers, such as Philips (1972), simultaneously examine patterns in the community and the school, they generally ask transactional rather than structural questions. They focus primarily on continuities and discontinuities between the home-community and classroom in interactional and communicative styles, in values, motivation, and so. The assumptions are (1) that minority children acquire interactional styles, communicative styles, and the like, in their “cultures” that are discontinuous with those of the classroom setting; (2) that knowledge gained from home-community study can further elucidate classroom events; and (3) that knowledge of the latter would be useful in improving classroom practice and teacher education. In this paper we are calling for a rethinking of our conceptual framework and, specifically, for a framework requiring the ethnographer to ask both transactional and structural questions. By structural questions we mean those leading to an examination of the features of the wider society [e.g., the stratification systems, the corporate economy) that in important ways shape the community patterns (interactional styles, communicative styles, motivational patterns, etc.) that minority children acquire, as well as the responses schools make to these children. And we are suggestingthat the development of educational anthropology as an intellectually stimulating subfield of anthropology would be enhanced by turning from current tendencies, which more or less fit the educator’s definition of the problem of ethnographic inquiry, and returning to traditional anthropological ethnography.

The Bias Toward Microethnography Criticism of Traditional Ethnography Some educational anthropologists are critical of the techniques of traditional ethnography, arguing that they are difficult to apply to American education. Critics often single out the “Malinowskian ethnography.” They note, for example, that the unit of study, an urban American school, i s not like a

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Trobriand village (Erickson 1973:lO). Erickson provides a vivid contrast between an American school and a Trobriand village and concludes that “Malinowski’s theories and methods do not work on schools because these methods are not situationally appropriate” (1973:ll).It seems to me that the comparison suggested here i s not appropriate. The comparison should be between a Trobriand village on the one hand and an American city or urban neighborhood on the other, or between an American school and the educational institution of the Trobrianders. If we compare such population units or social institutions, we may be surprised to find striking resemblances, though mindful of differences i n scale. Malinowski’s analytic view of society as divisible into units such as social organization, economics, technology, language, and belief system i s also said to be inapplicable to American schools (Erickson 1973:ll). However, in an interesting paper appropriately titled, “The School as a Small Society” (1971), Khleif has suggested that these divisions can be made. M y own fieldwork experience in Stockton, California, leads me to suggest, too, that it is possible to apply the traditional ethnographic categoriesto an American school system and to write a reasonably good monograph based on such a study in the manner in which we usually present our accounts of studies of “exotic” and “modern” communities. Included in such a descriptive account of the school system would be ecological settings, language and communication, social organization (including age grading, voluntary association, social stratification, etc.), economy (including labor, food procurement and consumption, taxes, etc.), political organization (including governance, administration, law, and external relations), belief system, folklore, education and socialization, change, and so on. This would be a serious and valid description and not merely a caricature of the school community. Such an ethnographic account of the structure, process, and function of the school system, which links it to .other sociocultural institutions defining its context in the wider community, i s an appropriate field of study for educatidnal anthropologists. Traditional ethnography properly applied to urban education or urban schooling can provide rich and valid descriptive data that can be used for theoretical and practical objectives. And there i s no reason why such objectives cannot be achieved. The population that makes up school people in an American community includes more than teachers and students; it includes other school personnel, certificated and classified, who may never show up in classrooms but whose construction of education “reality” and whose activities nevertheless influence what happens in the classroom i n one way or another. School population also includes other participants in educational politics and governance: schoolboard members, parents, and various community groups whose pressures on local education are easily visible to an ethnographer at a board of education meeting and i n other situations (Mann 1975). All these people are permanent residents within the legal-political boundary of the school system. The school, especially the classroom, is only one of many settings in the community where school people meet and transact educational matters. If a metropolitan school district i s too large (like the “tribe”) to be studied adequately, the ethnographer should choose a neighborhood (just as he or she would most likely choose a village in a tribe) as a manageable unit.

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To do good ethnography of education requires the kind of participant observation traditionally practiced by anthropologists, summed up by Berreman (1968:337)as follows: (Participant-observation) refers to the practice of living among the people one studies, coming to know them, their language and their lifeways through intense and continuous interaction with them in their daily lives. This means that the ethnographer converses with the people he studies, works with them, attends their social and ritual functions, visits their homes, invites them to his home-that he is present with them in as many situations as possible, learning to know them in as many settings and moods as he can. Sometimes he interviews for specific kinds of data; always he is alert to whatever information may come his way, ready to follow up and understand any event or fact which is unanticipated or seemingly inexplicable. The methods he derives his data from are often subtle and difficult to define. Thus, participant observation as an ethnographic technique requires, first and foremost, a long period of residence. In contrast, most school ethnographers are nonresident, scheduled visitors of the “communities” they study. Since school people have their own languageor argot, the ethnographer must learn it in order to carry out effective participant observation. Personal attributes are just as important in school ethnographer as they are in other ethnographies (Berreman 1968:340-343; Beattie 1965; Freilich 1970; Pelto and Pelto 1978). Furthermore, a school ethnographer needs an ethnographic imagination like other anthropologists; that is, he or she needs a good working theory of the social structure of the school and of the wider community in which theschool is located. School ethnography should be holistic; it should show how education is linked with the economy, the political system, local social structure, and the belief system of the people served by theschools. Problems of research design, biases, reliability, data analysis and interpretation, which other ethnographers face, are also experienced by the school ethnographer. Moreover, if, as anthropological folklore maintains, alienation from his or her own society i s an attribute of an American ethnographer in an “exotic” African or Indian community, it can equally be argued that disenchantment with schools’ treatment of the poor and minorities i s the characteristicof the school ethnographer. Both attributes raise questions about bias in ethnographic findings. In general, school ethnographer i s not radically (or should not be) different from other ethnographies. Anthropologists who set out today to study “disputing process” (law) in American communities and other societies (Nader and Todd 1978),changing rural economy in Latin America (Gudeman 1978), education in an urban American neighborhood or rural community (Leacock 1969; Peshkin 1978),or education in a Japanesevillage (Singleton ,1967)can benefit from the broad principles of fieldwork laid down by Malinowski without having to follow the details of Malinowski’s field techniques or his analytical framework. An essential attribute of good ethnography i s flexibility; besides, anthropological ethnography has developed extensively since the days of Malinowski. Our difficulties with the traditional ethnographic techniques i n school research do not arise from the nature of ethnography per se, but rather from thedual heritage of educational

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anthropology, that is, from the cultural transmission orientation of cultureand-personality studies and the service orientation of intervention research, as well as from the patronage of our ethnographic products by particular funding agencies and by educators. We turn to examine these influences on school ethnography. Heritage, Patronage, a n d the Definition of the Probfern The conception of what ethnographers should study about schooling and at what level has been influenced by four factors: traditional anthropological perception of schooling as a social problem, the birth of educational ethnography in a period of social crisis, the background of educational ethnographers in culture-and-personality and anthropological linguistic subfields, and the patronage of school ethnography by educators. Prior to the 1960s very few anthropologists had actually studied formal education, although some had written about it, including Boaz (1928), Malinowski (1936), and Redfield (1943). Henry (1963) was probably one of the few who had actually studied the schools (Spindler 1963:xvii; Wolcott (1971). Anthropological writings on formal education were primarily commentaries on schooling as a social problem for “natives” in colonial and trust territories and for immigrants and ethnicand racial minorities in their own countries (see Johnson 1947; Roberts and Akinsanya 7976:375-81). Anthropologists felt justified to criticize the form and content of schooling for these subordinate groups because of their “acquaintance” with the way the latter raised their children or with “indigenous education.” I say “acquaintance,” because few, except for some culture-and-personality anthropologists, were directly engaged in any systematic study of childrearing theories and practices among non-Western peoples, immigrants, and minorities (see Mayer 1970). Educational anthropologists have inherited this perspective, so that today they still define education as cultural transmission or enculturation. In this conceptualization the relative school failure of some racial and ethnic minorities and the lower class i s often attributed to culture conflict in school and classroom (Gearing 1973:1238). Greater involvement of anthropologists in school studies began in the 1960s. Gearing (1973) suggests that anthropologists became more involved because they desired to make their subject reach a wider audience through anthropology curriculum in the public schools. That was a part of it. But of greater significance for the development of school ethnography i s the social and political crisis of the 196Os, which propelled anthropologists into intervention rather than basic research i n education. I suspect that some anthropologists got involved first as consultants to local school districts and other agencies when the latter came increasingly under criticism for using a “cultural deprivation” model as a basis for remedial educational programsfor the poor and minorities. Anthropologists rightly criticized the false assumptions about cultures of the poor and minorities under the model (Spradley 1972; Valentine 1968). Some anthropologists might have begun their ethnographic studies to provide more valid pictures of the cultures and education of the poor and minorities. Other anthropologists probably got involved to support claims of ethnic and racial minorities that their cultures are different and that their children are

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failing in school because schools do not utilize their cultures for classroom teaching and learning. Even before anthropologists had conducted enough ethnographic research in school, they began to explain differential school success as the result of culture conflict arising from cultural differences. The political awakening of various minority groups and their ethnic and racial identity movements have further reinforced the culture conflict explanation. This interpretation i s quite popular among the minorities; it is also increasingly accepted by the educational establishment; and it appeals to politicians who are in need of ethnic votes. Some difficulties with the culture conflict perspective as a guide to school ethnography will be discussed later, Here the point is that the social and political context in which school ethnography was born has encouraged continued perception of schooling as a social problem and generated an ethnographic tradition with a bias toward events within the school, classroom, home, and playground. We have already noted that until recently culture and personality was the subfield of anthropology where systematic efforts were made to study childrearing practices or indigenous education. This subfield has influenced the development of educational anthropology, and hence school ethnography, in at least two ways. First, many anthropologists who pioneered research in schools have come from that subfield (e.g., Gearing, Herzog, and Spindler). Second, the definition of indigenous education as cultural transmission has been transferred to the definition of formal education whereby schooling is seen as an aspect of cultural transmission (Gearing 1973; Gearing and Tindall 1973; LaBelle 1972; Spindler 1974; Tindall 1976).However, unlike earlier studies of culture and personality, which also examined the influences of various social institutions on childrearing and personality development in a given culture (Kaplan 1961; Kardiner 1939; Linton 1945; Whiting and Child 1953),cultural transmission studies of formal education almost entirely ignore other societal institutions and focus primarily on school, classroom, home and playground events. Conspicuously missing in the cultural transmission research framework i s an adequate conceptualization of social structure and other macroecological forces influencing schooling. Most school ethnographers of this tradition appear, in fact, to be either indifferent to theories of society and culture or unfamiliar with such theories. Patronage. Another factor that encourages microethnographic emphasis i s patronage, which allows educators more or less to define for ethnographers their research problems. This dilemma for the school ethnographer was pointed out some years ago by Wolcott (1971),who noted that the problem that interests the educator may not be the one that the anthropologist identifies as the proper focus of his or her research. Unfortunately, educators directly and indirectly define the research problems of many school ethnographers for three reasons. First, many school ethnographers depend for research funds on agencies and institutions dominated by educators; in fact, the personnel of these agencies and institutions often actually define the research problems in the form of a request for funding proposals. Second, many school ethnographers are located within schools or colleges of education and related agencies where formal and informal pressures compel them to view their research as “applied” rather than “basic.” Micro-

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ethnographic studies have a strong appeal to education people, who see their results as immediately applicable. The findings can be used for in-service training of teachers and other school personnel, for self-correction by classroom teachers, and for teacher training in general. The ethnographer likes the microethnography because he or she sees his or her work as being instrumental in improving some aspect of schooling; policymakers and practitioners like it because it points to something concrete that can be remedied without radically changing the system; clients of the system, the minorities and the poor, like it because it scientifically documents their allegation that their children are failing in school because the schools do not use their communicative etiquettes, their interactional styles or cognitive styles, in short their culture, in educating their children. Finally, the main consumers of educational ethnography products are educators or education people, and the main outlets for publication are journals with a slant toward an audience made up of educators. In summary, the service orientation of intervention research, the cultural transmission definition of schooling borrowed from culture and personality, and the patronage of educators appear to encourage the formulation and implementation of school ethnography without an adequate theory of schooling in the context of cultural imperatives. Contributions a n d Limitations of Microethnography There are many kinds of microethnographies, although generally they focus on school classroom events, home and playground events, or educational projects. Their contents vary as do their theoretical backgrounds and methodological techniques. Here we focus on one type of microethnography of classroom processes, that based on the sociolinguistic model that attempts to explain minority school failure. This particular group of studies deserves a special comment because of its potential theoretical and practical contributions and because of i t s limitations. These studies attempt to show that interaction (verbal and nonverbal) between teachers and students i s a crucial determinant of academic outcomes for children, especially poor and minority children. Their basic thesis i s that communicative styles i n everyday life are culturally patterned; therefore, when teachers and students come from different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, and thus do not share the same communicative etiquettes, there are “mismatches” in communication or interaction styles that adversely affect students’ learning (see Koehler 1978; Philips 1972; Simons 1979). Methodologically, the cultuially patterned communicative styles can be identified in a heterogenous classroom through content analysis of repeated videotaping of selected classroom activities involving teacher-pupil interaction, supplemented with observational notes. Microethnography of this kind owes its theoretical and methodological assumptions to sociolinguistic studies, rather than to traditional anthropological ethnography, and i t s proponents sometimes claim i t s superiority over the latter. Such microethnography has been applied to learning problems among blacks, Chicanos, Indians, native Hawaiians, and others, with interesting results, although the contents of the classroom activities chosen for

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description in these cases have varied. A brief survey of some studies will give an indication of their major features. Philips’s study (1972) examined the communicative etiquettes i n a classroom run by an Indian teacher and in another classroom run by an Anglo teacher on an Indian Reservation i n Oregon. She also compared these classroom observations with communicative etiquettes within the Indian community and found major differences, which she described with the concept of “participant structure.” A participant structure is, basically, a constellation of norms, mutual rights, and obligations that shape social relationships, determine participants’ perceptions of what i s going on in a communicative interchange, and influence the outcome of the communication, such as learning (Simons 1979). Philips found that the participant structure of the Anglo classroom was characterized by (1)a hierarchy of roledefined authority in which the teacher controlled students, and (2) an imposition of obligations on students to perform publicly b y the teacher calling on them as individuals and praising and reprimanding them for their behaviors. In contrast, Indian participant structure (1) deemphasized hierarchical relationship and control, and (2) did not encourage individual public performance, reward, and punishment. According to Philips, Indian children did better in their schoolwork when the classroom participant structure approximated that of their community. Philips’ notion of participant structure seems to underlie subsequent studies in this tradition, some of which are, in fact, attempts to test her hypothesis. In his work among black students Simons (1979) applies the same notion to account for the failure of blacks to acquire reading skills. Citing the work of Gumperzand Herasimchuk (1972), hearguesthat black children fail to learn to read well because they do not share the same communicative background with their teachers; hence, the children and their teachers differ in both communicative strategies and in interpretation of situational meanings. The result i s a miscommunication that adversely affects the children’s learning. The same notion of differences in participant structure or Communicative etiquette underlies the microethnographic studies of Erickson and his students (Erickson and Mohatt 1977, cited i n Koehler 1978). Although with somewhat different theoretical and methodological emphasis, McDermott’s microethnography (1977) also assumes that classroom interaction between teachers and students i s a crucial determinant of academic outcomes. He employs primarily the techniques of nonverbal analysis to study the process of getting turns at reading lessons. And he finds that in a classroom organized into low and high reading groups, the low groups receive less actual reading instruction, because the teacher defines the group as needing more explicit and consistent guidance, which results in her spending most of her time controlling the behaviors of the members of the group (cited in Hansen 1979:75). Given the definition of the source of academic failures of subordinategroup children as embedded in teacher-pupil communication, the unit of these microethnographic studies is teacher-pupil interaction or communicative interchange during a given classroom activity, though sometimes the child’s use of language in the home and playground i s also studied to

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determine i t s compatibility with classroom use. Microethnographers may initially map out a wide range of classroom activities, but they do not aim at a full description of the entire range of teacher-pupil interaction; instead, they opt for selective ethnography, that is, the study of particular activities that are most salient to their background and interests. Sociolinguists tend to select reading more appropriately, teacher-pupil interchange during reading (Simons 1979); others may select any number of activities, such as reading lessons, clean-up, or sharing time (Schulz and Florio 1978).The ultimate goal of analysis and interpretation i s to describe how the educational outcome for students i s determined by the teaching process, the latter being viewed as a com municative process. The utilitarian appeal of microethnography was mentioned earlier. It also has a strong intellectual appeal because it appears methodologically more rigorous or “scientific” than traditional ethnography. With the latest available research technology, such as videotape and computer and with ‘ a small number of subjects (one teacher and one or two students) in a circumscribed setting (classroom), the ethnographer comes closest to a laboratory experimental worker. Microethnographic studies have made significant contributions to our knowledge of how subordinate-group children fail. In the 1960s sociolinguists and anthropologists rejected explanations of minority-group children’s school failure based on a “deficit model,” for example, explanations that attributed black children’s reading difficulties to inadequate language socialization in the home and advocated teaching methods to replace black English with standard English. These critics proposed an alternative explanation based on cultural and linguistic differences and suggested that schools could accommodate black dialect b y using special materials and teaching methods. When the reading problems continued, it was suggested that they were due to either phonological or grammatical interference, hypotheses that have not been substantiated by empirical research (Simons 1979).The present shift to teacher-student communicative interchange seems to show for the first time how cultural and linguistic differences might contribute to school failure. By focusing on process, microethnographic studies also enrich our understanding of the general phenomenon of cultural transmission. Furthermore, the descriptions of what takes place between teachers and students in the classroom have the potential of encouraging more cautious interpretations of quantitative studies of children’s academic performance. However, from a cultural ecological point of view, these microethnographic studies, as presently formulated and implemented, are too simplistic and in some cases misleading. More specifically, the microethnographic approach to minority school failure i s inadequate because (1) it i s not comparative enough, (2) it ignores the forces of the wider ecological environment that actually generate the patterns of classroom processes studied, and (3) while data and insights from microethnographic studies can be used as a basis for remedial efforts (Simons 1979; Erickson 1978), they cannot lead to any significant social change that would eliminate the need for such remedial efforts in subsequent generations of minority-group children. The microethnographic studies are not comparative enough to warrant

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certain generalizations about causes of minority school failures because they have thus far focused primarily on one type of minority group, which I have designated as castelike minorities (Ogbu 1978a). In the United States these include blacks, Chicanos, Indians, Eskimos, native Hawaiians, and Puerto Ricans. These minorities differ from the dominant Anglos in culture and language probably to the same extent that another group of minorities, immigrant minorities, differs from the same Anglos in culture and language. Immigrant minorities include Chinese, Cubans, Filippinos, Japanese,Koreans, and “West Indians.” The assertion by microethnographers that the school failure or failure to acquire reading proficiency of castelike minorities is due to a mismatch in communicative etiquette leads one to ask a few comparative questions: Are the communicative interactions between immigrant minority children and their predominantly Anglo teachers plagued by the same “mismatch” in communicative etiquettes observed among castelike minorities in their interaction with the same teachers? If the “mismatch” in communicative etiquettes exists for the two groups of minorities, how do we account for the relative greater school success of immigrant minority children? If the mismatch does not exist for the latter, how do we account for i t s absence, since immigrant minorities and their Anglo teachers do not share the same cultural or communicative backgrounds? As presently formulated, these microethnographies do not really help us to understand why differences in communicative etiquettes should result in academic failures among castelike minorities but not among immigrant minorities. This suggestion i s even more instructive when we broaden our cross-cultural perspective. In Britain, for example, the “West Indians” are said to be the most similar to the Anglo British i n language and culture of all nonwhite immigrants (including Africans, Bangladeshes, Indians, Pakistanis, etc.). Thus it would be expected that West Indians share to a greater degree the same communicative etiquette with the Anglo British than do other colored immigrants. However, studies show that West Indians are the least academically successful among the colored immigrants in Britain (Ogbu 1978a). In New Zealand, immigrant Polynesians from other islands do better academically than the indigenous castelike Maoris, even though the two Polynesian groups are similar in language and culture in comparison with the dominant white or Pakeha who make up the teaching force (Ogbu 1978a; Huntsman 1979). Furthermore, although microethnographers argue that school failure and especially failure to learn to read among subordinate minorities i s due to a mismatch in communicative style between teacher and student, they present no convincing evidence that blacks, Chicanos and Indians do better in school when taught by teachers from their respective ethnic or racial backgrounds who, presumably, may share the same communicative styles. If the source of their academic failure were primarily one of a mismatch in communicative etiquette, the policy implication would be quite straightforward: replace Anglo teachers with those of the children’s ethnic or racial backgrounds. However, this i s not necessarily evident in communities where black children or Chicano children are taught mostly by black or Chicano teachers, respectively (see Ogbu 1978a; Silverstein and Krate 1975).

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Another major difficulty with current microethnography i s that it i s not holistic. That is, it does not deal with the interrelation between schooling and other social institutions and how such interrelationships may affect classroom processes. While the classroom is “the scene of the battle” (Roberts1971),the causes of the battle may well lie elsewhere. Differences in communicative etiquettes may be the instruments or weapons with which the battle i s fought between teachers and students. But certainly, if we want to discover the causes of these battles and how to eliminate their occurrence and reoccurrence, we will make little progress by studying primarily the actual processes of battles in the classroom and the instruments used by the combatants. We need to go beyond the battle scene and beyond the instruments of war. This leads to yet another problem, which i s that microethnographies tend to direct the attention of policy makers toward personal change without structural change. We noted earlier the appeal of microethnographic studies to policy makers and practitioners. By specifying what it i s in the communicative interaction between teachers and students in classroom, say, reading lessons that i s assumed to cause reading difficulties, that is, (1)a lack of shared communicative etiquette between teacher and student and (2)the teacher’s teaching strategies, the most obvious remedial action is to change the teacher’s strategies for teaching reading to these children, including enabling the teacher to accept the children’s language and culture (Simons 1979).This can be achieved by designing courses for in-service training of teachers and/or for college preparation of future teachers. Although some teachers and eventually some students will be helped through such remedial programs, we are skeptical that any policy that does not simultaneously address itself to the economic and other subordinations of castelike minorities will have more than a superficial and temporary impact on the problem of minority school failure. For greater theoretical and policy relevance, microethnography needs to be integrated with macroethnography through the kind of analytic framework we will suggest later. Macroethnography: Current Patterns

The best examples of macroethnographies of schooling come from studies outside the United States. These studies generally utilize traditional anthropological ethnography. Examples of such studies include Grindal’s study (1972)of schooling among the Sisala of Northern Ghana, Singleton’s study (1967) of education in a Japanese village, and Warren’s study (1967) of education in a German village. These studies took place in small communities more or less typical of anthropological research settings. The ethnographers lived in the communities for extended periods of time, learned local languages, established rapport with the people, and employed a variety of techniques to supplement participant observation for data collection. Furthermore, although the focus of each study was education, the ethnographer also examined how schooling i s linked to other institutions. In this way their studies demonstrate how societal forces, including beliefs and ideologies of the larger society, influence the behaviors of participants in the schools. For example, Singleton shows how the Japanese ideology and mechanisms of social mobility affect the process of schooling in the village;

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Warren shows the influence of industrialization and new economic role models on local educational aspirations and participation; and Grindal points to the educational consequences of changing economic and political circumstances in Ghana, especially with regard to educational attitudes of the Sisala youth. The point to emphasize is that these and similar cross-cultural studies make it clear that families and their children often utilize adaptive strategies in dealing with schools, which can only be adequately understood or appreciated if the ethnographer looks at the linkages between schooling and the larger sociocultural systems. These studies do not simply document ethnographically differences in cultural backgroundsof teachers and students as the basis for explaining differences in outcomes of teaching and learning, that is, as due to differences in teaching and learning styles or in communicative patterns. Within the United States there are only a handful of such macroethnographic studies (e.g., Collins and Noblit 1977; Ogbu 1974a; Peshkin 1978). Most macroethnographies of education i n the United States have usually taken one of two forms. On theone hand are earlystudies (Wax 1978:2), which do not focus on education per se, but nevertheless try to show how school organizational features reflect features of the local social structure, such as class, caste, and ethnicity (e.g., Davis and Dollard 1940; Hollingshead 1949; Havighurst 1962; Warner et al. 1944). These studies also do not show in detail how the correspondence between school organization and community social structure affects the process of teaching and learning within the school or classroom. Some newer ethnographies fill this gap by documenting how such organizational features affect the process of schooling. They generally describe the patterns of interaction between teachers and students or between students and their counselors, the types of skills and subjects that children acquire in school, and the informal socialization that goes on to reinforce children’s respective social background. Among the better known ethnographies dealing with “how it happens” i n some relation to the wider social forces are those of Eddy (1967), Fuchs (1966), Leacock (1969), and Moore (1967).These studies do not, however,empirically probe into the nature of the linkages between the processes they describe within the schools and the features of the larger sociocultural systems they allude to, such as was done by Singleton in his study of education i n a Japanesevillage. In other words, they do not integrate systematically micro- and macroethnographies, an integration that would have enabled them both to describe the process and to explain the patterns of cultural transmission in cultural and structural terms.

A Multilevel Approach In proposing the following framework for integrating micro- and macroethnographies, or for a more complete ethnography of schooling, we are particularly concerned with studies dealing with subordinate minorities like blacks, Chicanos, and Indians. The approach we are suggesting may be designated as cultural ecological. Four assumptions underlie this approach. The first i s that formal education is linked i n important waysthat affect people’s

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behaviors i n school with other features of society, especially with the corporate economy and economic opportunity structure. This point will be discussed more fully later. The second assumption i s that the nature of this linkage has a history that to some extent influences present processes of schooling. The third i s that the behaviors of participants are influenced by their models of social reality. Given these three assumptions, the fourth follows: that an adequate ethnography of schooling cannot be confined to studying events i n school, classrooms, the home, or playground. One must also study relevant societal and historical forces.

Economic Linkage Let us illustrate the linkage with broader societal forces with the linkage between schooling and the corporate economy. In modern industrial societies and certainly in the contemporary United States, the main preparation of children for participation in adult economic life has been delegated to the schools. During infancy and early childhood families prepare children to learn what schools will later teach them, including social-emotional skills, language skills, cognitive skills, and motivational skills. Most families do not teach children even rudimentary practical skills associated with specific subsistence techniques, because they do not know the specific jobs their children will do as adults. There are several ways in which schools prepare U.S. children for future participation i n the economy. First, schools teach the basic practical skills of reading, writing, and computation, which are required in almost every subsistence task i n the US. industrial economy. Second, schools prepare children to undertake more specialized training in practical skills required by specific subsistence tasks or jobs (Wilson 1973:236-37).Third, certain organizational features of the schools, including teacher-pupil relations, grading system, peer grouping, and the like, help to socialize children into those social-emotional skills essential for effective participation in the adutt work force (R.Cohen 1973; Y. Cohen 1971; Leacock 1969; Bowles and Cintis 1976; Parsons 1968;Scrupski 1975;Wilcox 1978).Finally, schools provide credentials for young adults to enter the work force (Jencks1972). In the latter case, schooling is more or less a culturally institutionalized device for allocating and rewarding individuals within society’s status system. And the most significant content of the status system in the United States is one’s job (Miller 1971:18; O’Toole 1974). An ethnographer in a U.S. community soon learns about the role of schooling in the economic adaptation from various sources: by asking people why they go to school, why they send their children to school, and why they pay taxes to support schools; by listening to public and private discussionsand gossips involving schooling, jobs, and related matters; by reading relevant documents from the local school system, the city and county planning agencies, and employment agencies and welfare departments. From information gathered from these sources the ethnographer learns that local people do not go to school to get an education for its own sake, to satisfy their curiosity, or for self-fulfillment. They go to school to get an education in order

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to get jobs as adults and thereby achieve full adult status as defined by their society. Moreover, the ethnographer discovers not only that the people strongly believe that those with more or “better” education should have more desirable jobs and social positions, but also that the actual life experiences of a large number of people (i.e., empirical evidence or data on education and employment) support such a belief. for example, analysis of local employment statistics will show that people with high school diplomas generally tend to have a better chance of working at more desirable jobs and earning more money over a lifetime than their peers with only elementary school diplomas; the former, in turn, have less chance of working a t more desirable jobs and earning more money over a lifetime than their peers with college degrees. This belief, a part of the native epistemology, i s based on the fact that a large proportion of the population has historically found jobs and earned wages commensurate with educational credentials (Duncan and Blau 1967; lencks 1972:181). The belief i s communicated to children and reinforced in them in a variety of ways. The ethnographer would also find that such historical and current experiences influence how local people strive to achieve an education. If, however, the ethnographer probes further, as he or she should, it will be discovered that not all groups in the community have achieved successful adaptation to the economy and in school. If the community i s made up of blacks and whites, the ethnographer may find that blacks do poorer than whites in school and are more likely to have low-status jobs and to be unemployed. Adopting a historical stance, as he or she should, the ethnographer may find that traditionally blacks have not been permittedto compete freely as individuals for any jobs they wanted and for which they had the educational qualification and ability-a phenomenon we have designated as a job ceiling (Ogbu 1978a). The wider community appears to have two sets of rules for economic self-betterment: one stresses the value of school credentials for whites; the other deemphasizes the value of school credentials for blacks. The ethnographer would do well to study how these differential rules of behavior for economic self-betterment or economic adaptation in postschool life-differential reward systems-affect the education and belief systems of local blacks and whites. This should lead to a study of school and classroom events and how they are connected to postschool economic adaptation and events in the home and community, that is, the study of the relationship among, say, black ecological structure, cognitive structure, and school behavior. By ecological structure we mean the social and economic context of schooling, and bycognitivestructure we mean how blacks perceive and interpret their schooling in relation to their own perception of their social and economic realities, that is, their cultural knowledge or ethnoecology of schooling. Although this cultural knowledge isshaped by local and national historical and current economic and social realities, not all of it i s within the conscious knowledge of local blacks. It has become a part of“their culture.” The cognitive maps, the interactional and communicative styles, and even the learning strategies black children bring to school and classroom settings are cultural i n some sense; but they are also products of their ecological structure.

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How can an anthropologist study minority schooling or classroom interactive patterns i n this broader social or ecological context? Initial steps i n such a study have already been described. One i s to map out the role of schooling in a given minority group’s economic and social realities and how these realitles influence the way the minority group members are perceived and treated by educators, that is, to study the educator’s or dominant group’s ethnoecology of minority schooling. Another task i s to study the minoritygroup members’ perceptions of their economic and social realities, their perceptions of schooling in relation to these realities, and their school behaviors and interpretations of such behaviors, that is, their own ethnoecology of schooling. The next task i s to study children’s acquisition of the ethnoecology of their group and the consequences for their school experiences. In pursuing this task the ethnographer asks questions such as the following: What are children taught and what do they learn about the economic and social realities of their group? What are children taught and what do they learn about schooling in relation to these economic and social realities? What kinds of orientations and behaviors relevant to schooling do the children acquire and why? How do the children acquire this knowledge and these perceptions, orientations, and behaviors?At what age do children begin to acquire them? How do children’s knowledge, perceptions, orientations, and behaviors influence their school experience, including classroom interaction patterns? In summary, the ethnographer seeks to describe the ethnoecologies of schooling, children’s acquisition of their group’s ethnoecology, and the influence of these ethnoecologies on school and classroom events or behaviors. The Case of Stockton Blacks

M y research in Stockton, California, did not address all the preceding questions systematically, but it came close to the multilevel approach proposed in this paper. Some results of this study have appeared elsewhere (Ogbu 1974a, 1974b, 1977); additional results will be published. In Stockton a disproportionate number of black children do poorly in school and as adults many end up with menial jobs, while some remain casually employed or unemployed. Although there i s a correlation between education and jobs in the black community, it i s not as strong as the correlation in the white community because of a job ceiling. We focused on one neighborhood pseudo-named Burgherside, but our study included blacks from other neighborhoods in South Stockton. So i n this part of our essay the black population will sometimes be referred to as blacks and at other times as Burghersiders. Although the study also included Chicanos and other groups, the focus of the present discussion will be on blacks. Our decision to study the connection between school and classroom events and black job and economic opportunity structure was made after we discovered that the linkage between schooling and jobs is an important element in the epistemology or ethnoecology of local blacks. We also found that the ethnoecology of the people who control local schools, mainly middle-class whites, i s different from the ethnoecology of blacks and that

JEACHING/LEARNING

.

ALTERNATIVE “SURVIVAL” STRATEGIES

“(3

DISILLUSIONMENT/

’

INTERACTION COMMUNITY-SCHOOL RELATIONS: Degree of Cooperation and

Figure 1. Ecological Framework for Ethnography of Minority Education

1

OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURE: Perceived NATIVE THEORY Experience interc)OF “MAKING IT” preted

SCHOOLING AS

ACADEMIC OUTCOMES

W J R V I V A L ” KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDES AND SKILLS

A

ACADEMIC j ATTITUDE AND EFFORT

OTHER SCHOOL FACTORS

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the former tend to assume that rules of behavior for economic and social selfbetterment are the same for blacks and whites. Figure 1 summarizes the framework and scope of our study from that point. A detailed account of our field techniques has appeared elsewhere (Ogbu 1974a, 1974b). Here we present only those aspects relevant to the present paper, the multilevel approach. A detailed description of the different dimensions of minority education represented in the diagram i s beyond the scope of this paper. We focus only on the four factors that we believeinfluence school and classroom processes directly and/or indirectly: minority access to education (no. 1 in the diagram) and theethnoecology upon which it is based; minority responses to subsistence and other opportunities based on school credentials in adult life (nos. 2 and 3); and the relationship between school and minority community (no. 4). One of the central themes we studied is the ethnoecologies of schooling held by various groups involved in local education and how these ethnoecologies affected black education. Ethnoecology of schooling refers to people’s epistemology about schooling, which influences their participation in and interpretation of school events. However, thestudy of ethnoecology of schooling includes also a study of school, societal, and historical forces influencing perceptions, knowledge of, and responses to schooling among a given group. The ethnoecology of middle-class Stocktonians (the taxpayers in their “emic” categories of Stockton’s groups), who control schooling in Burgherside, a low-income black and Chicano neighborhood, directly as schoolboard members and school personnel and indirectly as pressure groups, has strong influences on local education politics and policies. As used in this essay, taxpayers and nontaxpayers are “emic” categories based on perceptions of Stockton’s middle-class people, who use these categories to order reality in dealing with low-income and minority peoples. Thus, those who classify themselves as taxpayers are generally middle- and upper-class whites, although they also include the more affluent minorities. To be a taxpayer a Stocktonian must not only pay taxes (e.g., property, income, sales) but must also receive public recognition as a taxpayer. To receive that honor the person must live in a neighborhood that does not have many welfare recipients, especially recipients of aid to families with dependent children, or AFDC; the person should be middle class or “working class’’; and, preferably, he or she should be white. A nontaxpayer is one who does not have some combination of these attributes, particularly a person who i s a ‘welfare recipient. By this classification, Burghersiders are nontaxpayers (Ogbu 1974a:50-51). Taxpayers’ perceptions of their community, the functions of schooling, and of Burghersiders as nontaxpayers greatly influence their conception of Burghersiders’ educability and their management of the latter’s schooling. The taxpayers view their city as a community of equal opportunity. They insist that formal education offers everyone the same opportunity to become a taxpayer, that is, to achieve middle-class status. By this they mean that, like everyone else, blacks can get more desirable jobs, earn higher wages and salaries, and gain promotions on the basis of training and ability and move into

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more desirable neighborhoods when they can afford to do so financially. Taxpayers believe that they are true representatives of Stockton’s “mainstream culture” into which they were either born or have assimilated. They believe that anyone who wants can assimilate into the mainstream culture. They see a relationship between nontaxpayer status and a resistance to assimilation. And those who “resist” assimilation are viewed as people who are not willing to adopt the values that can transform them into “useful” and “responsible” taxpaying citizens. A study commissioned by a coalition of local churches summarizes taxpayers’ perceptions of nontaxpayers as follows: Over 65% of those surveyed thought that low-income people are “stupid, narrow in their view, intolerant, lacking in imagination, lacking in curiosity, and lacking in ambition”; that low-income people are immoral and dirty; and that such people do not want to get ahead. Among those who said these things are teachers, professional (people), housewives, secretaries, and young people (Hutchinson 1965:4; emphasis added) Taxpayers, including school personnel, see one of their primary responsibilities as transforming nontaxpayers like Burghersiders into taxpayers through public school education and job training. And their approach to this task, their management of schooling and training programs for Burghersiders, i s guided by their perceptions and stereotypes. Historically, Taxpayers have not given local blacks access to the same quality education given to local whites. Blacks were initiallyexcluded altogether from the public schools; they were later given segregated and inferior schools. After integration, many subtle mechanisms were used to keep their schooling inferior, thus preventing them from qualifying for more desirable jobs and reinforcing their inferior job status. We have described some of these subtle mechanisms elsewhere (Ogbu 1974a, 1974b, 1977). Here it will suffice to describe one example, which involves teaching black children in the classroom rules of behavior for achievement that are different from those taught to white middle-class children. The case involved 17 black and Chicano children whose school records we examined for a period of five years; it was found that all but one received the same annual grade of C , regardless of how hard each hadworked i n any given year and, strikingly, regardlessof whatthe teachers had to say in their written evaluations. There appeared to be little correspondence between the written assessments and the letter grades. A child that received a C rating in grade 1 continued to receive the same C rating in subsequent years, although the teacher at each subsequent grade level might write that she was “delighted” at the pupil’s “progress.” Since these children received the same average marks whether or not they worked hard, we have hypothesized that they were not being taught to associate efforts or hardwork with higher achievement (Ogbu 1974a:165; 1977:12). There i s a parallel here with their parents’ experiences of not being proportionately rewarded with jobs and wages for their education and ability. Thus we find, as we examine the way taxpayers manage Burgherside schooling, the kind of education they make available to Burgherside children, and the way teachers teach Burgherside children, that taxpayers’effortsare not directed toward enabling nontaxpayers to become taxpayers; school and classroom processes work in ways, described in various microethnographic

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studies, that reinforce school failures. Thus many Burghersiders as adults become marginally employed or unemployed, or they become “wards” of the community, maintained through public assistance, creating another role for taxpayers-that of caretakers of welfare recipients and their children (Ogbu 1974a:57). Turning to the ethnoecology of Burghersiders, we find several educational consequences that must influence classroom events. Burghersiders, for example, do not believe that Stockton is a community of equal opportunity. They point out that racial and ethnic discriminations have traditionally prevented them from obtaining more desirable jobs, higher wages, and promotions on the job on the basis of education and ability, and from buying or renting homes in better parts of thecity. Although there might be some exaggeration, some Burghersiderswould recount instances in which minority-group persons “had degrees i n their pockets” and yet could only find jobs in Stockton as manual laborers or farm laborers. One result of Burghersiders’ethnoecology i s their disillusionment and lack of effort, optimism, and perseverance. The latter is, of course, a response to the job ceiling. We learned about this from informal discussions with various peoples in the neighborhoods and from interviews with students specifically probing into the effects of the job ceiling on their responses to schooling. Observations in classrooms and in the community show that many children do not take their schoolwork seriously and do not persevere long enough at it even though they acknowledge in interviews that such efforts are necessary to do well in school. interviews with parents show that although they have high aspirations for their children they also appear t o teach them contradictory attitudes toward schooling. On the one hand, parents espouse the need to get more education than they had and to work hard and do well in school. On the other hand, they also teach their children verbally and through their own life experiences of unemployment, underemployment, and other discriminations, as well as through gossips about similar experiences among relatives, neighbors, and friends-through the actual texture of life-that even if they do well in school they may not do so as adults in the wider society. Eventually, Burgherside children not only become disillusioned and “give up,” but they also learn to blame “the system” for their school failures, as their parents blame “the system” for their own failures to achieve desirable jobs and other positions. Another response to the job ceiling that has serious implications for classroom and school processes is what blacks call “survival strategies.” These fall into two categories. One consists of strategies directed toward increasing the conventional economic and social resources of the black community and in obtaining conventional jobs and other social rewards. These strategies include collective struggle or civil rights activities (Newman et al. 1978; Scott 1976), clientship or UncleTomming (Dollard 1957; Myrdall944; Powdermaker 1968; Farmer 1968; Ogbu 1980b), and mutual exchange (Stack 1974). The other category includes hustling, pimping, entertainment-hustling and the likestrategies directed toward exploiting nonconventional economic and social resources, or “the street economy” (Bullock 1973; Foster 1974; Heard 1968; Milner 1970; Wolfe 1970). Within the community, then, success in obtaining conventional jobs and

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other social resources often requires collective struggle (at least to make them available) and/or clientship in addition to educational credentials. Furthermore, alternative survival strategies provide ways of making a living and achieving status other than the conventional ones. Peoplewho succeed in the conventional economy and status system, either with school credentials only or by combining school credentials with clientship and collective struggle, as well as those who make it i n the street economy through hustling and related strategies, are all regarded as “successful people.” Their qualities or skills are admired, and they influence the ways others, including children, try to succeed. We have suggested that the survival strategies may require knowledge, attitudes, and skills that are not wholly compatible with those required for white middle-class type of classroom learning and teaching. We have also suggested that children probably begin to learn the survival strategies in preschool years as a normal part of their cultural learning; consequently, the potential for difficulties i n school learning may already exist when children begin school. However, whether or not and to what extent learning difficulties occur depends on the children’s encounter i n school. Unfortunately, we came upon this form of response rather late in our research and did not trace the effects of the survival strategies down to the classroom. Yet we suspect that some classroom behaviors of black children reported in some microethnographies are due to the incongruence between learned survival skills and attitudes and the demands of school learning. The remaining factor indicated i n the diagram to affect school and classroom learning of black children adversely i s the conflict and mistrust between blacks and the schools. Burghersiders believestrongly that the public schools cannot be trusted to educate their children or to give them “the right education.” Their mistrust of the schools is an outgrowth of a long history of struggle against discriminatory treatment. For example, they first “fought” against total exclusion when local public schools opened in 1853; then they “fought” against separate and inferior schools until 1879, when they were admitted to the same schools attended by whites “amidst the protestation of many (white) citizens” (Martin 1959:155). Stockton blacks and Chicanos s t i l l maintain that their children attend segregated and inferior schools. This has led to protests, boycotts, and legal actions against the school district in recent years. In the latter case the court ruled in their favor, ordering the schools to be more integrated in 1977 (Litherland 1978; Ogbu 1974a:Chapter 7). We have suggested that mistrust reduces the extent to which Burgherside parents and their children genuinely accept the goals, standards, and instructional approaches of the schools as legitimate and, hence, the need to cooperate with the schools and follow school rules of behavior for achievement. The conflict and mistrust also force the schools into defensive approaches to Burghersiders in the form of control, paternalism, or both, or even into “contest,” all of which divert the attention of both blacks and the schools from the real task of educating the children. In summary, the economic and social positions of Burghersiders do not require much education, and there i s not much reward for educational achievement. Their menial position influences the ethnoecologies of both the

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middle-class Stocktonians, who control their schools, and the Burghersiders themselves in their perceptions of and responses to schooling. Among the former it produces an ethnoecology that leads them to offer Burghersiders inferior education and to treat them in school and classroom in such a manner as to facilitate a disporportionate school failure, thereby reinforcing their menial position in adult life. Among Burghersiders it produces an ethnoecology that generates disillusionment and a lack of perseverance toward schoolwork; it produces survival strategies requiring knowledge, attitudes, and skills that might not be congruent with school learning requirements; and it produces mistrust and conflict that limit Burghersiders’ acceptance of and adherence to school rules and standards, which places the school in a defensive posture toward blacks. How each of thesecontributes in shaping classroom events i s a matter that needs further study. We have tried to describe some of these school and classroom events elsewhere (Ogbu 1974a, 1974b, 1977). They include miscommunication between teachers and parents and between teachers and students; teachers’ grading; counselors’ clinical definitions of children’s academic problems; children’s disruptive behaviors in the classroom; poor school and classroom attendance; and children’s lack of serious attitudes and efforts in their academic tasks. These events are i n large measure shaped by a combination of forces originating autside the school and classroom. Conspicuously absent i n our study is how children acquire their knowledge of these forces and events.

Conclusion We have proposed a framework that we believe would enable a researcher to study problems of minority school failure in many different settings. These settings include the classroom and school premises; the home, church, playgrounds, and neighborhoods; community meetings and workplaces; and community and state agencies concerned with formal education, as well as employment and the like. The framework also encourages a researcher to recognize the complexity of factors underlying minority school failure, which cannot be captured by focusing on children’s “home environment,” on their unique cultural background, or on their genetic makeup or idiosyncratic personal attributes. Nor can it be adequately dealt with by focusing on school and/or classroom processes alone. Each area of investigation contributes to our understanding of the problem, but each makes most sense in termsof explanatory power and policy questions when studied in combination as suggested within the ecological framework. Microcosmic studies (microethnographies) of classrooms, for example, may enrich our knowledge concerning how teacherpupil interaction or the politics of everyday life in the classroom acts as the immediate cause of minority-group child’s failure to learn to read. But the ecological framework suggests that these classroom events are built up by forces originating in other settings and that how they influence classroom teaching and learning must be studied if we are ever to understand why a disproportionate number of minority children do poorly in school, and if we are going to design an effective policy to improve minority school performance.

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Endnotes

1. Preparation of this paper was made possible by grants from the National Institute of Education (NIE-C-80-0045) and Faculty Research Fund, University of California, Berkeley, California. Earlier versions of the paper were read at the AERA annual meeting symposium on “Values imposed by Anthropology: Implications for Educational Research and Development,” San Francisco, California, April 1979, and at the fifth Annual College of Education Symposium, “Ethnographic Research in the Schools: What’s It All About?,” University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware, May1980. References Cited

Beattie, john 1965 Understanding an African Kingdom: Bunyoro. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Berreman, Gerald D. 1968 Ethnography: Method and Product. In Introduction to Cultural Anthropology: Essays in the Scope and Methods of the Science of Man. James A. Clifton, ed. Pp. 337-373. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Boaz, Franz 1928 Education, Conformity and Cultural Change. In Anthropology and Modern Life. Frank Boaz. New York: W. W. Norton. Bowles, Samuel, and Herbert Cintis 1976 Schooling in Capitalist Society: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. New York: Basic Books. Bullock, Paul 1973 Aspiration vs. Opportunity: “Careers” in the Inner City. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cohen, Rosalie A. 1973 School Reorganization and Learning: An Approach t o Assessing the Direction of Social Change. In Learning and Culture. Solon T. Kimball and Jacquetta HillBurnnett, eds. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Cohen, Yehudi A. 1971 The Shaping of Men’s Minds: Adaptation to the Imperatives of Culture. In Anthropological Perspectives on Education. Murray L. Wax, Stanley Diamond, and Fred Gearing, eds. New York: Basic Books. Collins, Thomas W., and George W. Noblit 1977 Stratification and Resegregation: The Case of Crossover High School, Memphis, Tenn. Final Report, NIE Contract 400-76-009. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Education. Davis, Allison, and John Dollard 1940 Children of Bondage: The Personality Development of Negro Youth in the Urban South. Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education. Dollard, John 1957 Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 3rd ed. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Duncan, 0. T. and Blau, P. M. 1967 The American Occupational Structure. New York: Wiley. Eddy, Elizabeth M. 1967 Walk the White Line: A Profile of Urban Education. Garden City, N.Y.: Dou bleday. Erickson, Frederick 1973 What Makes School Ethnography “Ethnographic”? Council on Anthropology and Education Newsletter 4(2): 10-19.

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1978 Mere Ethnography: Some Problems in Its Use in Educational Practice. Past Presidential Address delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Council on Anthropology and Education, Los Angeles, California, November 17, 1978. Erickson, F., and 1. Mohatt 1977 The Social Organization of Participant Structure in Two Classrooms of Indian Students. Unpublished paper read at AERA, New York. Farmer, James 1968 Stereotypes of the Negro and Their Relationship to His Self-Image. In Urban Schooling. Herbert C. Rudman and Richard L. Featherstone, eds. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Foster, Herbert L. 1974 Ribbin’, Jivin’, and Playin’ the Dozens: The Unrecognized Dilemma of Inner City Schools. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Publishing Co. Freilich, Morris 1970 Toward a Formalization of Fieldwork. In Marginal Natives: Anthropologists at Work. Morris Freilich, ed. Pp. 485-594. Harper & Row. New York. Fuchs, Estelle 1966 Pickets a t the Gates. New York: Free Press. Gearing, Fred 0. 1973 Anthropology and Education. In Handbook of Social and Cultural Anthropology. John 1. Honigman, ed. Pp. 1223-1249. Chicago: Rand McNally and Co. Gearing, Frederick O., and Allan Tindall 1973 Anthropological Studies of the Educational Process. In Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 2. Bernard I. Siegel, ed. Pp. 95-105. Grindal, Bruce 1972 Growing up in Two Worlds: Education and Transition among the Sisala of Northern Ghana. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Gudeman, Stephen 1978 The Demise of a Rural Economy: From Subsistence to Capitalism in a Latin American Village. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Gumperz, John J., and E. Herasimchuk 1972 Conversational Analysis of Social Meaning. In Sociolinguistics: Current Trends and Prospects. R. Shuy, ed. Pp. 99-134. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Hansen, Judith Friedman 1979 Sociocultural Perspectives on Human Learning: An introduction to Educational Anthropology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Havighurst, Robert J. 1962 Growing up in River City. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Heard, N. C. 1968 Howard Street. New York: Dial Press. Henry, Jules 1963 Attitude Organization in Elementary School Classrooms. In Education and Culture: Anthropological Approaches. George D. Spindler, ed. Pp. 192-214. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Herskovits, Melville J. 1955 Some Problems in Ethnography. In Method and Perspective in Anthropology. Robert F. Spencer, ed. Pp. 3-24. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hollingshead, August B. 1949 Elmtown’s Youth. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Huntsman, Judith 1979 Personal communication. Department of Anthropology, University of Auckland New Zealand. Oct. 8.

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Hutchinson, Edward W. 1968 Stockton Church Metropolitan Strategies: Parish Studies Report, #7: Appendix A: Characteristics of the Stockton Metropolitan Area. South Stockton Parish. Mimeo. jencks, Christopher 1972 Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effects of Family and Schooling in America. New York: Basic Books. Johnson, Charles S. 1947 Education and the Culture Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kaplan, Bert, ed. 1961 Studying Personality Cross-Culturally. New York: Harper & Row. Kardiner, Abram 1939 The Individual and His Society: The Psychodynamics of Primitive Social Organization. New York: Columbia University Press. Khleif, Bub B. 1971 The School as a Small Society. In Anthropological Perspectives on Education. Murray L. Wax, Stanley Diamond, and Fred 0.Gearing, eds. Pp. 145-155. New York: Basic Books. Koehler, Virginia 1978 Classroom Process Research: Present and Future. Journal of Classroom Interaction 13(2): 3-11. LaBelle, Thomas j. 1972 An Anthropological Framework for Studying Education. Teachers College Record, 73(4): 519-538. Leacock, Eleanor Burke 1969 Teaching and Learning i n City Schools: A Comparative Study. New York: Basic Books. Linton, Ralph 1945 The Cultural Background of Personality. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Litherland, Richard Hughes 1978 The Role of the Church in Educational Change: A Case History of a Feasible Strategy. Unpublished D. M. dissertation, San Francisco Theology Seminary. Malinowski, Bronislaw 1936 Native Education and Culture Contact. I n International Review of Missions,vol. 25. Mann, Dale 1975 Policy Decision-Making in Education: An Introduction to Calculation and Control. New York: Teachers College Press. Martin, V. Covert 1959 Stockton Album through the Years. Stockton, California: Stockton Record Mayer, Philip, ed. 1970 Socialization: The Approach from Social Anthropology, London: Tavistock. McDermott, R. P. 1977 Social Relations as Contexts for Learning. Harvard Educational Review 47(2): 198-21 3. Miller, Herman P. 1971 Rich Man, Poor Man. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Milner, Christina Andrea 1970 Black Pimps and Their Prostitutes: Social Organization and Value Systems of a Ghetto Occupational Subculture. Unpublished. Ph.D. dissertation. Department of Anthropology, University of California Berkeley. Moore, Alexander C., Jr. 1967 Realities of the Urban Classroom. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

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Myrdal, Gunnar 1944 An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper & Row. Nader, Laura, and Harry F. Todd, eds. 1978 The Disputing Process-Law in Ten Societies. New York: Columbia University Press. Newman, Dorothy K., and others. 1978 Protest, Politics, and Prosperity: Black Americans and White Institutions, 1940-75. New York: Pantheon Books. Ogbu, John U. 1974a Learning in Burgherside: The Ethnography of Education. In Anthropologists in the City. George M. Foster and V. Kemper, eds. Boston: Little, Brown. 1974b The Next Generation: An Ethnography of Education in an Urban Neighborhood. New York: Academic Press. 1977 Racial Stratification and Education: The Case of Stockton, California, IRCD Bulletin 12(3): 1-26. 1978 Minority Education and Caste: The American System in Cross-Cultural Perspective. New York: Academic Press. 1980 Ethnoecology of Urban Schooling. Unpublished ms., Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley. O’Toole, James, ed. 1974 Work and the Quality of Life: Resource Papers for Work in America. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Parsons, Talcott 1968 The School Class as a Social System: Some of Its Functions in American Society. Harvard Educational Review, Reprint Series, No. 1 : 69-90. Peshkin, Alan 1978 Growing up American: Schooling and the Survival of Community Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pelto, Pertti J., and Gretel H. Pelto 1973 Ethnography: The Field Enterprise. In Handbook of Social and Cultural Anthropology. John J. Honnigmann, ed. Pp. 241-288. Chicago: Rand McNally Co. 1978 Anthropological Research: The Structure of Inquiry. New York: Cambridge University Press. Philips, Susan U. 1972 Participant Structure and Communicative Competence: Warm Springs Children in Community and Classrooms. In Functions of Language in the Classroom. Courtney 8. Cazden, Vera P. John, and Dell Hymes, eds. New York: Teachers College Press. Powdermaker, Hortense 1968 After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South. New York: Atheneum. Redfield, Robert 1943 Culture and Education in the Midwestern Highlands of Guatemala. American Journal of Sociology 48: 640-48. Rist, Ray C. 1975 Ethnographic Techniques and the Study of Urban School. Urban Education

lO(1):86-108. Roberts, Joan 1. 1971 The Scene of the Battle: Group Behavior in Urban Classrooms. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. Roberts, Joan I., and Sherrie K. Akinsanya, eds. 1976 Educational Patterns and Cultural Configurations: The Anthropology of Education, New York: David McKay.

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Schultz, Jeffrey and Susan Florio 1979 Stop and Freeze: The negotiation of social and physical space in a kindergartenlfirst grade classroom. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 1O(3) :166-1 81. Scott, Joseph W. 1976 The Black Revolts: Racial Stratification in the USA. Cambridge Mass.: Schen kman. Scrupski, Adam 1975 The Social System of the School. In Social Forces and Schooling: An Anthropological and Sociological Perspective. Nobuo Kenneth Shimahara and Adam Scrupski, eds.: Pp. 141-186. New York: David McKay. Silverstein, Barry, and Ronald Krate 1975 Children of the Dark Ghetto: A Developmental Psychology. New York: Praeger. Simons, Herbert D. 1976 Black Dialect, Reading Interference and Classroom Interaction. Department of Education, University of California, Berkeley. Unpublished ms. Singleton, John 1967 Nichu: A Japanese School. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Spindler, George D. 1963 Education and Culture: Anthropological Approaches. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1974 The Transmission of Culture. In Education and Cultural Process: Toward an Anthropology of Education. George D. Spindler, ed. Pp. 279-310. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston. Spradley, James P. 1972 The Cultural Experience. In James P. Spradley and David W. McCurdy (Eds.), The Cultural Experience: Ethnography In Complex Society. Chicago: SRA., Pp. 1-10, Stack, Carol B. 1974 All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival i n a Black Community. New York: Harper & Row. Tindall, Allan 1976 Theory in the Study of Cultural Transmission. In Bernard 1. Siegel, ed. Annual Review of Anthropology 5:195-208. Valentine, Charles A. 1968 Culture and Poverty: Critique and Counter Proposals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Warner, W. Lloyd, Robert 1. Havighurst, and M. B. Loeb 1944 Who Sahll Be Educated? The Challenge of Equal Opportunity. New York: Harper & Row. Warren, Richard L. 1967 Education in Rebhausen: A German Village. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Wax, Murray L. 1978 Introduction. In A Fieldwork Manual for Studying Desegregated Schools. Joan Cassell. Pp. 1-2. Washington, D.C.: Kational Institute of Education. Whiting, John M. W., and lrvin L. Child 1953 Child Training and Personality: A Cross-Cultural Study. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Wilcox, Kathleen 1978 Schooling and Socialization for Work Roles. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

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Wilson, H. Clyde 1973 O n the Evolution of Education. In Learning and Culture: Proceedings of the 1972 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society. Solon T. Kimball and Jacquetta Hill Burnett, eds. Pp. 211-241. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Wolcott, Harry F. 1971 Handle with Care: Necessary Precautions i n the Anthropology of Schools. In Anthropological Perspectives on Education. Murray L. Wax, Stanley Diamond, and Fred 0. Gearing, eds. New York: Basic Books. Wolfe, Tom 1970 Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flack Catchers. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.