TRANSCA concept book

A main aim of the TRANSCA project was to make anthropological concepts and perspectives accessible to teacher educators, teachers and pedagogues alike. The concept book found here is the result of an ongoing conversation between anthropologists and pedagogues, working together to translate key concepts and perspectives from anthropology into pertinent and useful concepts for teacher education.

This project output comprises short texts embedded in the TRANSCA homepage. Here the concepts are grouped under six categories: everyday life; education; identification and categorisation; social inequality; globalized world; and ethnographic methods; although many of them could fit in more than one category. The concepts in each category may be viewed in alphabetical order or in clusters moving from the more general to the specific.

The concepts selected provide pedagogically relevant takes on key anthropological perspectives and methods. Drawn in part from the subfield of educational anthropology, the concepts are useful for reflecting on particular educational questions, issues and settings. First and foremost, the concepts presented here are 'good to think with'. For example, the concept of community is useful for thinking about how people understand a particular kind of collectivity – smaller than the nation-state and broader than the family or kin-group. It is also useful for thinking comparatively about why there may be many, few or no terms for 'community' in a particular language zone. Thinking through the concept of community calls attention to local concepts, the historical and political conditions that have led to their present usage, and how different ways of imagining collectivity influence pedagogical ideas and practices.

The Concept Book represents a key resource for teacher training (see also Modules) and for daily teaching practice. In creating this book, our aim has been to draw on and further an educationally useful interplay of basic research, ethnography, educational anthropology, and educational studies. The book thus reflects a critical and mindful attempt to bridge the two disciplines, paying due attention to the particularities of both.