Roundtable Participant: Teresa McCarty, editor, Anthropology in Education Quarterly

DR. MC CARTY: Anthropology in Education Quarterly is by definition, an interdisciplinary journal. It's an interdisciplinary field with a focus on the relations among language, culture, and education, but education very broadly conceived. Schools and schooling in the United States are an important focus of the work of educational anthropologists.

In particular, the discipline has concerned itself over the years with issues of educational equity and inequities, "minority" schooling, and those types of things, but schools and schooling in the United States is not the total or sole focus of our work by any means, nor are practitioners and policymakers in the United States the sole audience for the work. I want to come back to this later as we get into this further -- audience, purpose, all of these kinds of things.

I also want to preface my remarks by saying that prior to this workshop I did a little bit of research myself, and I researched our own journal back to its inaugural edition actually as a newsletter in 1970, to its various transformations into this kind of a journal. This is 1974, no abstracts. There is a tradition for that. And through its various sort of metamorphoses.

And I found the first abstract actually in 1978. And this is what our journal looks like today. We have been trying to add color to the outside and the inside of the journal in terms of addressing issues of diversity.

I also did research in the sense of polling or querying the readership of AEQ. I sent out the questions that we were asked to address here at this workshop to our list serve, which I believe is about 750, 800 people on that list serve. And so, I'm going to be sharing some of those perspectives as we go along today.

AEQ is the primary outlet for research in the field of educational anthropology. It is published by the American Anthropological Association of which the Council on Anthropology in Education is the significant body, and actually the editorial board comes out of the Council on Anthropology in Education.

The first thing I want to say here with regard to this, and I think Catherine you are leading us to really question four, the nature of inquiry across subfields and methodologies in education research, and how that influences our response as producers of knowledge, both as researchers and as editors to the proposal for structured abstracts.

In educational anthropology the problems are very complex. There is a rootedness in local context, in local cultures. The acknowledged relationship of power to education, the geographical breadth which is global, all of this influences of course how research is carried out, which in our case is through primarily ethnography and naturalistic designs.

And by the way, this is a little footnote to that. Naturalistic designs, I think we tend to think of those as purely qualitative, but they are used in the physical sciences as well. But also how all of this then influences how that research is reported.

Would it be appropriate just at this point, Catherine, for me to share a few abstracts from AEQ?

DR. EMIHOVICH: Why don't we come back to that as we hear the other panelists, and then come back and frame, and look at it in relation to just some examples then?

DR. MC CARTY: Okay, so I will stop there, but it seems to me that that kind of background is essential for us to kind of springboard into this more technical issue of structured abstracts, what they mean, are they appropriate, when they might be appropriate, and how that might be a useful proposal or not in different fields.