EXAMINING CULTURAL PRACTICES IN GEOSCIENCES TEACHING AND LEARNING THROUGH ANTHROPOLOGY OF EDUCATION PERSPECTIVES

Attention to issues of justice, equity, and inclusion is increasing in geosciences education research, along with a continued focus on how to best design teaching and learning experiences that help students from diverse backgrounds engage with geoscience process and content knowledge. This work requires utilizing inquiry frameworks that attend to the complexities of individual and group identities in education and acknowledge how social structures prevent equal opportunities. The field of anthropology of education offers theoretical lenses that are particularly effective at examining the role of cultural practices in teaching and learning. A focus on understanding culture as repertoires of practice can help educators move away from essentializing identities (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003), and researchers who embrace an advocacy orientation can contribute to efforts to improve equity and access to resource (González, 2010). In this talk I present perspectives and knowledge drawn from the work of anthropologists of education, and briefly describe how variations on ethnographic research can inform study designs that address issues of local concern. GER can benefit from employing interdisciplinary perspectives informed by anthropological understandings of culture and attention to the impact of sociopolitical contexts on educational experiences.