Despite international congresses and international journals, anthropologies of education differ significantly around the world. Linguistic barriers constrain the flow of ideas, which results in a vast amount of research on educational anthropology that is not published in English or is difficult for international readers to find. This volume responds to the call to attend to educational research outside the United States and to break out of “metropolitan provincialism.” A guide to the anthropologies and ethnographies of learning and schooling published in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Slavic languages, Japanese, and English as a second language, show how scholars in Latin America, Japan, and elsewhere adapt European, American, and other approaches to create new traditions. As the contributors show, educators draw on different foundational research and different theoretical discussions. Thus, this global survey raises new questions and casts a new light on what has become a too-familiar discipline in the United States.

L'avenir de l'Afrique dépend en grande partie de la manière dont elle abordera les immenses problèmes que soulèvent l'éducation et la formation de sa jeunesse. L'auteur rassemble ici, un certain nombre de ses contributions. Celles-ci s'organisent autour de trois pôles : l'école, la famille et la socialisation de la sexualité, et enfin, l'actualité de l'éducation traditionnelle.

This book focuses on African childhood and youth within the context of development and socialization where children are expected to be moulded in the image of adults. In many African societies children are generally held as passive bearers of the demands of adults, regardless of the fact that they are often exposed to a multitude of challenges that originate from the capriciousness of those adults. However, buoyed by international conventions and national legislations that offer them greater protection, and the ubiquitous internet that exposes them to childhood and youth experiences elsewhere, many of them are increasingly becoming assertive in homes, schools, and communities as well as re-invigorating their survival and self-preservation instincts. It is in this regard that this book, through the various chapters, engages with their competencies, skills and creativity to respond to experiential challenges as independent migrants or ones under coercion working in city streets and markets or cocoa farms or juggling work and schooling in pursuit of some education. Confronted with their parents' and siblings' health predicaments and the inadequacies of state and familial care, or urgent negotiation of their sexualities, they demonstrate incredible resilience. Similarly, their perceptiveness is demonstrated in a unique appreciation of politics and its actors and a capacity to assume responsibilities beyond their chronological age. Thus while highlighting some of the challenges confronting African children, the book provides gripping evidence of how they resiliently negotiate those challenges.

In developing countries across the world, qualified teachers are a rarity, with thousands of untrained adults taking over the role and millions of children having no access to schooling at all. Teacher Education and the Challenge of Development is co-written by experts working across a wide range of developing country situations. It provides a unique overview of the crisis surrounding the provision of high-quality teachers in the developing world, and how these teachers are crucial to the alleviation of poverty. The book explores existing policy structures and identifies the global pressures on teaching, which are particularly acute in developing economies.

In this book Ousman Kobo analyzes the origins of Wahhabi-inclined reform movements in two West African countries. Commonly associated with recent Middle Eastern influences, reform movements in Ghana and Burkina Faso actually began during the twilight of European colonial rule in the 1950s and developed from local doctrinal contests over Islamic orthodoxy. These early movements in turn gradually evolved in ways sympathetic to Wahhabi ideas. Kobo also illustrates the modernism of this style of Islamic reform. The decisive factor for most of the movements was the alliance of secularly educated Muslim elites with Islamic scholars to promote a self-consciously modern religiosity rooted in the Prophet Muhammad’s traditions. This book therefore provides a fresh understanding of the indigenous origins of “Wahhabism.”

Global Childhoods in International Perspective gathers a wide spectrum of contributors from Europe, the U.S., South Asia, South Africa and Latin America, who, attuned with present dilemmas in the area of childhood studies, discuss some key theoretical and empirical aspects of child scholarship, such as identity, child wellbeing, child mobility and migration, intergenerational relationships and child abuse. Through these expert contributions, the book explores the many ways in which the relationship between universality and particularities of childhood plays an important role in describing global childhoods. The book highlights childhood as a cross-cutting issue in global sociology with chapters on globalization and schooling in Burkina Faso, child abuse and neglect in India, identity and integration among children of African immigrants in France, social class mobility of Filipino migrant children in Italy and France, and an investigation into Kyrgyz childhoods. Ideal reading for researchers, practitioners and students interested in both childhood studies and the other areas including community research, sociology of education, social stratification, and the sociology of migration.