Headbutting in Academe: An Autoethnography - Softcover

Anderson, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1440160538 ISBN 13: 9781440160530

Publisher: iUniverse, 2009

Synopsis

Mills College, a small college in the foothills of Oakland, where I have taught for many years, is just ten minutes by car from Fremont High, a failing inner-city school. At Fremont I volunteered to work with teachers and administrators struggling to transform the old school into six new small autonomous college preparatory high schools, the Fremont Federation.During that decade, 1999-2009, contrasts between Fremont and Mills were enormous: a public secondary school versus a private college, boys and girls versus women only, an underperforming educational program versus a top-ranked degree-granting institution, the flat lands versus the hills, poverty versus prosperity, crime versus safety. And yet, the two institutions are similar in one very important way. Teachers struggle in comparable ways with governance issues of power and control.That similarity makes comparative analysis worth doing. The two institutions provide ethnographic support for a two-system model of educational policy analysis. Teaching in those two very different places is similarly challenged by an opposition of rigid bureaucratic dominance, symbolized as a matrix, in cultural conflict with the fluid, convoluted, open-ended world that teachers grapple with, symbolized as a labyrinth. This tale of two schools was written as an autoethnography. I did not conduct formal research. I offer here a narrative ethnography based on my own life experience as a teacher who happens to be a professional anthropologist.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Anderson, PhD, MD, Professor of Anthropology at Mills College, was among the first to transfer ethnographic skills from remote tribal villages to modern urban societies. His publications include The Labyrinth of Cultural Complexity: Fremont High Teachers, The Small School Policy, and Oakland Inner-City Realities (2008).Mills College, a small college in the foothills of Oakland, where I have taught for many years, is just ten minutes by car from Fremont High, a failing inner-city school. At Fremont I volunteered to work with teachers and administrators struggling to transform the old school into six new small autonomous college preparatory high schools, the Fremont Federation.During that decade, 1999-2009, contrasts between Fremont and Mills were enormous: a public secondary school versus a private college, boys and girls versus women only, an underperforming educational program versus a top-ranked degree-granting institution, the flat lands versus the hills, poverty versus prosperity, crime versus safety. And yet, the two institutions are similar in one very important way. Teachers struggle in comparable ways with governance issues of power and control.That similarity makes comparative analysis worth doing. The two institutions provide ethnographic support for a two-system model of educational policy analysis. Teaching in those two very different places is similarly challenged by an opposition of rigid bureaucratic dominance, symbolized as a matrix, in cultural conflict with the fluid, convoluted, open-ended world that teachers grapple with, symbolized as a labyrinth. This tale of two schools was written as an autoethnography. I did not conduct formal research. I offer here a narrative ethnography based on my own life experience as a teacher who happens to be a professional anthropologist.

About this edition

• Publisher: iUniverse
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1440160538
• ISBN 13: 9781440160530
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280