Hugh Mehan
Biographic Data
| ID | 77307 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hugh Mehan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hugh |
| FAMILY NAME | Mehan |
| SIGNATURE | MEHAN H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 394 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Understanding Inequality in Schools
Der Text gibt einen instruktiven Überblick über Forschungsergebnisse und Perspektiven einer sinnverstehenden Bildungsforschung, die sich gegen ein Verständnis von Bildungslaufbahnen als Effekt struktureller Zwänge und institutioneller Festlegungen wendet. Die im Jahr 1992 erstmals publizierte Argumentation plädiert für die Notwendigkeit einer Berücksichtigung der Motive und Praktiken junger Menschen in Erziehungs- und Bildungsprozessen. In diesem…
Discourse in a religious mode
This study of the politics of representation illustrates the Bush Administration’s use of a religious mode of representation to make sense of the 9/11 events, to legitimize military actions against the Taliban, Afghanistan, and terrorism in general. The religious mode of representation is enabled by the construction and application of what we call the “War on Terrorism script,” which is grounded in the institution of “American civil religion.” We…
Peter Hall's Contributions to Public Policy Research
University-Partnered New School Designs
This commentary suggests that new school design is a fertile policy context for advancing research–practice partnerships. The authors represent four public universities that have created new school designs in partnership with urban school districts. Unlike the laboratory schools of previous generations, these university-partnered public schools were intentionally designed to disrupt persistent patterns of inequity and prepare low-income students …
Evidencing international threat
By studying the discourse utilized by the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) and its chief officers during 2003–2004, we show the methods by which U.S. government-appointed experts helped to affirm the existence of an Iraqi threat even in the absence of physical evidence for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) stockpiles or active weapons programs found in Iraq during U.S. ground search. Their data collection and interpretation work illuminates the principle …
Reducing Inequities by Linking Basic Research and Political Action
In this comment, on Terri McCarty's Presidential Address, I focus on her dynamic approach to investigation that contributes to a vibrant and constructively critical exploration of the place of basic research, critical policy analysis, and activism in the anthropology of education and the social sciences more broadly. [basic research, critical inquiry, social activism, language policy
Why we must attack Iraq
This three-part article describes the reasoning practices and argumentation system deployed by the Bush administration to build a case for the war on Iraq initiated in 2003. First, it analyzes the elaborate description of Saddam Hussein's evil character presented by the Bush administration and the political implications that followed from it. Then, it analyzes the methods by which these understandings were utilized to argue that Saddam Hussein's …
Engaging the Sociological Imagination
I chronicle the changes in my research, especially those that have moved me closer to C. Wright Mills's call for a "sociological imagination" and Dell Hymes's reinvented anthropology. As I spend more time attempting to create and describe equitable educational environments and less time documenting educational inequality, I have adopted a version of "design research." I describe the possibilities and limitations of trying to conduct research whil…
Aaron Cicourel's contributions to language use, theory, method, and measurement
Aaron Cicourel's contributions to sociology and other disciplines are discussed. Cicourel brought to sociology the philosophical and linguistic principle that language plays an active role in creating and sustaining social interaction and social reality; Cicourel and his colleagues pioneered the use of videotape as an analytic tool, which enabled them to vividly illustrate the importance of organizational and interpersonal constraints on social i…
Whole-School Detracking
The Preuss School on the University of California, San Diego campus is dedicated to preparing all 700 of its students to be eligible to attend college when they graduate if they choose. Students, who must be from low-income families, are enrolled in a single college-prep track. Because students who enter the school as 6th graders may not have the academic preparation necessary to succeed in rigorous college-prep classes, the school provides a wid…
People of the Bomb
Reconstructing Equality on New Political Ground
Attacks on the legitimacy of affirmative action pose new challenges for public universities committed to creating a diverse student population without considering race or ethnicity as factors in admissions. On the basis of a case study of the controversy surrounding the building of a charter school at the University of California, San Diego, in response to the elimination of affirmative action in University of California admissions, the authors d…
Features
Le contructivisme social en psychologie et en sociologie
Le constructivisme social" est un thème commun aux études cognitives en sociologie et en psychologie. Le constructivisme social postule que les structures sociales et les structures cognitives se composent et se situent dans l'interaction entre les gens. En sociologie cette perspective constructiviste remonte à la phénoménologie constitutive; actuellement, elle se développe avec t'ethnométhodologie. De récentes études qui analysent les structures…
Thinking the Nation
Preview this article: Thinking the Nation: Representations of Nations and the Pacific Rim in Latin American and Asian Textbooks, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/ni.11.1.08meh-1.gif
Race and Reform
Historically, racist attitudes and policies among officials and citizens in the United States have influenced the effectiveness of educational reform efforts. Given that reality, this article describes an implementation of the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program within a broad sociopolitical context that includes a community's beliefs about intelligence, race, and academic achievement. AVID, designed to help low-income and min…
The Study of Social Interaction in Educational Settings
The study of face-to-face interaction in educational settings is placed in historical context. The major themes of interactional analysis – that social and cognitive structures are constructed in social interaction, human behavior is context-specific, cultural discontinuity helps explain educational inequality, and learning is a sociocultural process – are reviewed, and the contributions of these findings to theory, methodology and pedagogy are a…
The Discourse of the Illegal Immigration Debate
It is the proposition of this paper that our search for enemies is turning inward now that the Cold War is over. The State, in alliance with business and other elite interests, is encouraging citizens to treat the immigrant, the poor, the unfortunate as the enemy. The discourse strategies that fabricated the immigrant as the enemy are analyzed in the debate over California's Proposition 187, which would exclude undocumented immigrant children fro…
Constructing School Success
How can we bolster the academic success of low achieving students and provide a more egalitarian classroom setting? This book describes the process of 'untracking', an educational reform effort that has prepared students from low income, linguistic, and ethnic minority backgrounds for college. Untracking offers all students the same academically-demanding curriculum while varying the amount of institutional support they receive. Helpful instituti…
Constructing School Success
How can we bolster the academic success of low achieving students and provide a more egalitarian classroom setting? This book describes the process of 'untracking', an educational reform effort that has prepared students from low income, linguistic, and ethnic minority backgrounds for college. Untracking offers all students the same academically-demanding curriculum while varying the amount of institutional support they receive. Helpful instituti…
A New Reproduction of Inequality Under the New Capitalism
Constitutive Processes of Race and Exclusion
This commentary summarizes and reflects on the articles in this theme issue, in terms of three themes: (1) macro-micro relations, (2) the politics of representation, and (3) the role of schooling in social improvement. The articles suggest that a central task for anthropological research is to examine the processes by which truth is constructed in the political economy, science, and everyday life
Resisting the Politics of Despair
Understanding Inequality in Schools
Nuclear Discourse in the 1980s
The power and importance of discourse conventions in the cold war are revealed through their breach. The Reagan Administration talked publicly about nuclear weapons as a way to win a nuclear war. This new mode of representing nuclear weapons breached the deterrence convention, i.e. the purpose of nuclear weapons is to avoid war, not fight war. Humanists fearful of nuclear destruction, moralists condemning the sinful nature of nuclear war, and pea…
What time is it, Denise
1979). ‘What time is it, Denise?”: Asking known information questions in classroom discourse. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 18, Communicating with Young Children, pp. 285-294
Understanding Inequality in Schools
The Discourse of the Illegal Immigration Debate
It is the proposition of this paper that our search for enemies is turning inward now that the Cold War is over. The State, in alliance with business and other elite interests, is encouraging citizens to treat the immigrant, the poor, the unfortunate as the enemy. The discourse strategies that fabricated the immigrant as the enemy are analyzed in the debate over California's Proposition 187, which would exclude undocumented immigrant children fro…
The Competent Student
The question asked in this paper, "What do students need to know in order to participate effectively in the classroom?" is answered in terms of the synchronization of students' behavior with interactional contexts and the interactional work in the display of academic knowledge, where "social contexts" consist of mutually ratified and constructed environments, and "competence for interaction" is assembled in concert with others. Teachers and stude…
The role of language and the language of role in institutional decision making
The relationship between linguistic processes, cognitive activities, and social structures is explored by examining the decision making of committees of educators as they decide to place students into special education programs or retain them in regular classrooms. Often, different committee members enter committee meetings with different views of the student's case and its disposition, e.g., classroom teachers and parents provide accounts of the…
Why we must attack Iraq
This three-part article describes the reasoning practices and argumentation system deployed by the Bush administration to build a case for the war on Iraq initiated in 2003. First, it analyzes the elaborate description of Saddam Hussein's evil character presented by the Bush administration and the political implications that followed from it. Then, it analyzes the methods by which these understandings were utilized to argue that Saddam Hussein's …
Nuclear Discourse in the 1980s
The power and importance of discourse conventions in the cold war are revealed through their breach. The Reagan Administration talked publicly about nuclear weapons as a way to win a nuclear war. This new mode of representing nuclear weapons breached the deterrence convention, i.e. the purpose of nuclear weapons is to avoid war, not fight war. Humanists fearful of nuclear destruction, moralists condemning the sinful nature of nuclear war, and pea…
Mend
While the argument about the meaning of nuclear weapons has been fluid and dynamic for the past forty years, it is fair to say that, at the present time, the prevailing definition of the nuclear situation is “deterrence policy.” Some of the fundamental premises of this doctrine are (1) that the Soviets are an unambiguous and non-negotiable threat to U.S. interests, (2) that Soviet expansionism must be contained, and (3) that nuclear weapons are d…
Features
Metacognition and Passing
A paradox appears in the lives of students with learning disabilities: on the one hand, they go to great lengths to avoid difficult tasks while trying to appear competent (i.e., they display many of the characteristics associated with people who are attempting to conceal a tarnished identity while "passing" as bona fide). On the other hand, they check, monitor, and evaluate their actions (i.e., they display many of the characteristics associated …
Language and Schooling
This article examines the sociological significance of sociolinguistic research in the area of education. The goal of my examination is to demonstrate that the study of language use in naturally occurring situations (I) contributes to an understanding of the role of language in education, (2) contributes to an understanding of the role of schoolng in social stratification, and (3) contributes to sociological theory by revealing issues not otherwi…
Resisting the Politics of Despair
Whole-School Detracking
The Preuss School on the University of California, San Diego campus is dedicated to preparing all 700 of its students to be eligible to attend college when they graduate if they choose. Students, who must be from low-income families, are enrolled in a single college-prep track. Because students who enter the school as 6th graders may not have the academic preparation necessary to succeed in rigorous college-prep classes, the school provides a wid…
Engaging the Sociological Imagination
I chronicle the changes in my research, especially those that have moved me closer to C. Wright Mills's call for a "sociological imagination" and Dell Hymes's reinvented anthropology. As I spend more time attempting to create and describe equitable educational environments and less time documenting educational inequality, I have adopted a version of "design research." I describe the possibilities and limitations of trying to conduct research whil…
Microcomputers in Classrooms
Microcomputers were given to four elementary school teachers and changes in classroom organization, teacher-student relations, and curriculum were observed. Teachers fit their new microcomputers into previously established classroom organizational practices; they seldom modified spatial and temporal arrangements. Teachers had two students work together at a computer; a different participation structure emerged in which students assisted each othe…
Real and non‐real time interaction
Recent analyses of discourse have focused on recurring sequential structures. An examination of discourse in different communication media has shown that strict sequentially is not universal. Instead, discourse in some media is structured with “multiple threads.” The significant property of the media producing this difference in discourse was identified as the temporal delay between turns. Discourse in “non‐real time” media, such as electronic me…
University-Partnered New School Designs
This commentary suggests that new school design is a fertile policy context for advancing research–practice partnerships. The authors represent four public universities that have created new school designs in partnership with urban school districts. Unlike the laboratory schools of previous generations, these university-partnered public schools were intentionally designed to disrupt persistent patterns of inequity and prepare low-income students …
Reconstructing Equality on New Political Ground
Attacks on the legitimacy of affirmative action pose new challenges for public universities committed to creating a diverse student population without considering race or ethnicity as factors in admissions. On the basis of a case study of the controversy surrounding the building of a charter school at the University of California, San Diego, in response to the elimination of affirmative action in University of California admissions, the authors d…
Race and Reform
Historically, racist attitudes and policies among officials and citizens in the United States have influenced the effectiveness of educational reform efforts. Given that reality, this article describes an implementation of the Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program within a broad sociopolitical context that includes a community's beliefs about intelligence, race, and academic achievement. AVID, designed to help low-income and min…
Educational Handicaps as a Cultural Meaning System
Language and power in organizational process
Recognizing that “the core of the problem is to link (inter)action and structure without reducing one to the other “ (DiTomasi, 1982, p. 15), the language of groups of educators as they make decisions about how to classify students is examined. Circumstances which originate outside the institution (governmental policies, fiscal and legal considerations) interact with local circumstances (the practical project of processing cases, getting done wit…
An Image of Man for Ethnomethodology
The morality of ethnomethodology
Le contructivisme social en psychologie et en sociologie
Le constructivisme social" est un thème commun aux études cognitives en sociologie et en psychologie. Le constructivisme social postule que les structures sociales et les structures cognitives se composent et se situent dans l'interaction entre les gens. En sociologie cette perspective constructiviste remonte à la phénoménologie constitutive; actuellement, elle se développe avec t'ethnométhodologie. De récentes études qui analysent les structures…
Thinking the Nation
Preview this article: Thinking the Nation: Representations of Nations and the Pacific Rim in Latin American and Asian Textbooks, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/ni.11.1.08meh-1.gif
Knowledge from What? Theories and Methods in Social Research. Derek L. Phillips
An Image of Man for Ethnomethodology
The reality of ethnomethodology
The morality of ethnomethodology
The Reality of Ethnomethodology
Language Use and School Performance
The Reality of Ethnomethodology
Structuring School Structure
In this article Hugh Mehan calls for a new approach to the study of schooling. He notes that the research methods that dominated the study of school effects in the last two decades—large-scale surveys and field observation—have failed to examine the processes by which school participants create school structures. The approach Mehan advocates, "constitutive ethnography," would give equal attention to the processes as well as the outcomes of struct…
Learning Lessons
What time is it, Denise
1979). ‘What time is it, Denise?”: Asking known information questions in classroom discourse. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 18, Communicating with Young Children, pp. 285-294
Learning Lessons, Social Organization in the Classroom
The Competent Student
The question asked in this paper, "What do students need to know in order to participate effectively in the classroom?" is answered in terms of the synchronization of students' behavior with interactional contexts and the interactional work in the display of academic knowledge, where "social contexts" consist of mutually ratified and constructed environments, and "competence for interaction" is assembled in concert with others. Teachers and stude…
Socialization
Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction.Jim Schenkein
Real and non‐real time interaction
Recent analyses of discourse have focused on recurring sequential structures. An examination of discourse in different communication media has shown that strict sequentially is not universal. Instead, discourse in some media is structured with “multiple threads.” The significant property of the media producing this difference in discourse was identified as the temporal delay between turns. Discourse in “non‐real time” media, such as electronic me…
The role of language and the language of role in institutional decision making
The relationship between linguistic processes, cognitive activities, and social structures is explored by examining the decision making of committees of educators as they decide to place students into special education programs or retain them in regular classrooms. Often, different committee members enter committee meetings with different views of the student's case and its disposition, e.g., classroom teachers and parents provide accounts of the…
Language and Schooling
This article examines the sociological significance of sociolinguistic research in the area of education. The goal of my examination is to demonstrate that the study of language use in naturally occurring situations (I) contributes to an understanding of the role of language in education, (2) contributes to an understanding of the role of schoolng in social stratification, and (3) contributes to sociological theory by revealing issues not otherwi…
Handicapping the Handicapped
Handicapping the Handicapped
The Ethnographic Context of the Study
Metacognition and Passing
A paradox appears in the lives of students with learning disabilities: on the one hand, they go to great lengths to avoid difficult tasks while trying to appear competent (i.e., they display many of the characteristics associated with people who are attempting to conceal a tarnished identity while "passing" as bona fide). On the other hand, they check, monitor, and evaluate their actions (i.e., they display many of the characteristics associated …
Language and power in organizational process
Recognizing that “the core of the problem is to link (inter)action and structure without reducing one to the other “ (DiTomasi, 1982, p. 15), the language of groups of educators as they make decisions about how to classify students is examined. Circumstances which originate outside the institution (governmental policies, fiscal and legal considerations) interact with local circumstances (the practical project of processing cases, getting done wit…
Reykjavik
This document examines the fundimental changes innegotiating techniques and posturing by the US and USSR that appeared in the days following the Reykjavik conference on nuclear arms. Predictions and prospects follow
Handicapping the Handicapped
Mend
While the argument about the meaning of nuclear weapons has been fluid and dynamic for the past forty years, it is fair to say that, at the present time, the prevailing definition of the nuclear situation is “deterrence policy.” Some of the fundamental premises of this doctrine are (1) that the Soviets are an unambiguous and non-negotiable threat to U.S. interests, (2) that Soviet expansionism must be contained, and (3) that nuclear weapons are d…
Sociology (41 works) · Political science (24 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Social science (16 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Mathematics education (11 works) · Pedagogy (11 works) · Politics (11 works)