Educational anthropology

[3] Educational anthropology is largely associated with the pioneering work of Margaret Mead and later, George Spindler, Solon Kimball, Dell Hymes, and Jean Lave.

[5] During the 1970s, educational anthropology became more consolidated as a field of study particularly due to the influence of professors at Teachers College, Columbia University.

[6][7] Cultural transmission involves the transfer of a sense of identity, both individual and collective, between generations, sometimes via enculturation[8] and sometimes through acculturation.

Educational studies themselves have historically been critiqued for relying too heavily on statistical data and other empirical findings to make wide-sweeping claims; however, early educational anthropologists advocated for the importance of participant observation as an ethnographic method in order to contextualize schooling practices.

This approach, credited to John Ogbu, considers the broad impacts of culture, the sociocultural settings of educational institutions, and the historical ramifications of inequity in order to fully contextualize each student's encounter with schooling.

[16] Ogbu's work was centered around minority education, thinking about the internal and external reasons behind student "success" in ways that were cross-cultural and refused deficit ideologies.

[19] Although it was not until 1935 that a course entitled "Anthropology and Education" was offered, some students trained in both programs, including Elsie Clews Parsons.

[22] Although Freire's work was taken up in force by scholars such as Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren, many educational anthropologists did not engage closely with the Marxist critique of class formation in the 1970s, choosing instead to address deficit ideologies of non-hegemonic cultural and linguistic practices within schools.

[24] These coincided with the rise of European Sociology of Education, a theoretical turn that references the emerging incorporation of Bourdieu and Gramsci.

[25] This has led to educational ethnographies that take on participatory action research and other collaborative methodologies to address the reification of inequity within schooling.