Irregular Books

In my time studying at a college of education, before I realized that the teaching profession and I didn’t mix well at all, I ran across a lot of remarkably flawed educational research. I heard someone once say that educational research is neither educational nor research.

Don’t lump the book The Ethnography of Reading into that category of shoddy work. It is a collection of educational research actually worthy of reading. I’ll go so far as to say that The Ethnography of Reading is the only worthwhile book I read as a graduate student in a College of Education. What makes it so different is that the essays in the book are mostly not written by professors of education, but anthropologists with well trained minds, an understanding of research methods and a talent for writing.

Of all the articles in the book, Keeping Slug Woman Alive: The Challenge of Reading in a Reservation Classroom by Greg Sarris is the most interesting. This essay examines the difficulties of making reading a culturally significant activity through the description of an attempt to do so on the Kashaya Reservation in California. The author describes how a non-native teacher tried to include a traditional Kashaya story in her classroom’s reading activities, but ended up creating an atmosphere of hostility among the students because she had taken a simplistic view of the nature of Kashaya culture. He points out that it is not enough to include ethnically appropriate reading material in curriculum, but that one must be sensitive to diversity within cultures and ethnicities and recognize the sometimes divisive role that traditional culture can play among both minority and majority groups.

Would such a refined and subtle discussion ever be found in a teacher-training textbook? Don’t bet on it. This book not only provides great reading for students of anthropology, it serves as an example to education departments at our universities of what could be accomplished they had the courage to deal with issues of teaching with the intellectual rigor they merit.

For education students who are tired of the watered-down fluff that they’re given to read for class, The Ethnography of Reading can serve as a solid supplemental source of ideas. However, the book will also appeal to those outside of the education profession. All those who are interested in issues of culture, language and learning will find a great deal of worth in this refreshingly serious book.