Katie Anderson-Levitt, a lecturer in the division of social research methodology at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, has been honored with the George and Louise Spindler Award by the American Anthropological Association’s Council on Anthropology and Education. The organization’s highest honor, the Spindler Award is given annually to a scholar who has made distinguished and inspirational contributions to educational anthropology.
Anderson-Levitt was recognized for her comparative work on teaching and learning in France and West Africa, work she began in the 1970s while teaching in the department of anthropology at Stanford University. She studied the teaching and learning aspects of reading in elementary schools in France and Guinea, West Africa, using her skills as an anthropologist.
“In the 1970s, as they are today, everyone was talking about kids who weren’t succeeding in school,” she says. “Prior to that, there was a lot of deficit theory in the 1960s. So anthropologists and some sociologists were saying, ‘Wait! Kids are smart, so let’s try to understand it from a cultural difference perspective instead of a deficit.’”
Anderson-Levitt says that her research in France enabled her “to make visible all the things that people take for granted. For instance, French kids in the first grade are handed fine-point Bic pens. They are learning to write in cursive between tiny lines. When I told American teachers, they said it was impossible. But teachers in France told me that six-year-olds are incapable of writing capital letters. That just illustrates that it has a lot to do with what your preconceptions are.”
Twenty years after her initial study of reading education in France, Anderson-Levitt was approached by the World Bank as an ethnographer of education to help lead a study of girls’ schooling in Guinea, West Africa. She returned to Guinea four years later to examine the country’s reading instruction practices, as well as the ministry of education and teacher training.
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