As the newly elected chair of the AEA, I want to encourage everyone to visit our new blog/website.  It includes more details about the AEA, opportunities for readers to contribute their reports from the field and easy ways to organize panels for next year’s meeting.

Our brief history has been exciting thus far.  We became a formal interest group of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) at the 2006 annual meeting and organized a number of interesting panels around the applied anthropology of education at the 2007 and 2008 meetings.  Additionally, a group of panelists at the 2007 meeting, under the guest editorial leadership of Janise Hurtig and Brinnie Ramsey have written a set of papers for the Spring 2008 Issue of Practicing Anthropology (Vol. 30, No. 2) entitled, “Exploring Anthropological Approaches to School Reform”.

With an energetic Board and an enthusiastic Advisory Council, we are look forward to a very active year.  At the 2009 annual meeting of the SfAA, we plan to unveil a new AEA logo.  We will be returning to Sante Fe, where in 2005 we had an initial planning meeting about the development of the AEA.  As we consider this the symbolic birthplace of the AEA, we will be organizing a logo contest based on the cultural images and artifacts of Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Visit this new new site and make some comments on what you see.

Sincerely,

James Mullooly, AEA Chair

We are currently soliciting panel ideas for next year’s SfAA meeting.

Add a comment if you have any ideas about a good panel of papers for next years conference.

This section is designed to accept your stories and reports from your ongoing projects.  Please volunteer a tale or two.

The Purpose and Scope of Applied Educational Anthropology

Keith M. Sturges, MAA

March 2006

Given the creation and expansion of masters-level and doctoral programs with tracks and emphasis in education in many applied anthropology departments, we see a great need for the SfAA to provide a formal venue for sharing this work. Thus, the purpose of this TIG is to develop and maintain a platform to support a network of educators, activists, researchers, evaluators, knowledge brokers, advocates and other practitioners who wish to engage in discussion and debate of theories, methods, pitfalls, opportunities and models relevant to applied anthropology in educational settings.

Building upon the high turnout (over 20 applied anthropologists interested in education) of an initial business meeting at the 2005 SfAA conference in Santa Fe , we are interested in continuing the TIG’s formalization. At that meeting, we formed a governing body consisting of a co-chair (Guy Trombley), a secretary (James Mullooly), and a chair (Keith Sturges). This website and a listserv were established to further the discussion.

At the 2006 annual meeting in Vancouver, we became a formally recognized TIG of SfAA.

TIG Activity:

The AEA TIG consists of a network of practicing anthropologists who engage in a broad continuum of educational anthropology including, but not limited to, multicultural and culturally-responsive curriculum and instruction, evaluation, school reform, transformative inquiry, policy formulation, transnational education, and education in developing regions. The AEA TIG will focus its energy on the design, implementation, and reporting of this applied work to highlight emerging issues and implications for the field. We feel that there is no shortage of work in order to promote applied educational anthropology in its contemporary intellectual, empirical, policy-relevant, and political-economic contexts.

To this end, the AEA TIG serves to organize conference session papers in a way that is meaningful to presenters and audiences. The TIG also helps identify scholars and practitioners to serve as discussants and session chairs.

Contribution to SfAA:

This TIG responds to the call for this kind of research and practice by providing a public and visible forum for networking, the development of research and practice plans, and the reporting of applied work in the SfAA tradition.  These activities promote interaction of SfAA members at the Annual Meeting and throughout the year. The TIG also provides information to the SfAA Newsletter about TIG activities at least on a biannual basis.

Board Members

2008-2009

Chair: James Mullooly

Chair-Elect: OPEN

Outgoing Chair: Keith Sturges

Secretary: Brian Lagotte

Executive Designer: Amy Moffat

Editorial Assistant/Scribe.  OPEN!!!

Past Chairs:

2006-2007: Keith Sturges

2005: Guy Trombley

Advisory Council 

Michael Brunn

Chiara Cannella

Pedrameh Manoochehri

Brinnie Ramsey

Greg Tanaka

To join the Listrerv, send an email message to James Mullooly (jmullooly@csufresno.edu) requesting to join the “anthro&ed List”. There is no obligation to join this listserv.  Thus far, the List’s primary traffic has focused upon organizing panel sessions for the next annual meeting of SfAA (i.e., not much traffic).

If you prefer, you can follow this site’s RSS feed liked in the other column.

The AEA is a Topical Interest Group (TIG) of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) that focuses upon educational issues within applied anthropology.

We have a Listserv you can join as well.