Teaching and Learning: Cross- Cultural Perspectives

I propose to develop a new Anthropology subject that will offer both a framework and a forum for applying qualitative research methods to the study of educational practices, with a particular emphasis on edX and online learning. It will introduce theories of social learning, and examine practices of socialization across a variety of cultural contexts. It will compare schooling to other forms of knowledge transmission from initiation and apprenticeship to recent innovations in online education such as MOOCs. Students will employ a range of qualitative research methods to generate original data for analysis. Offering students opportunities to participate in faculty research on education, this course will contribute to building community capacity for fundamental research on learning at MIT.