Harry Wolcott
Biographic Data
| ID | 78453 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Harry Wolcott |
| GIVEN NAMES | Harry |
| FAMILY NAME | Wolcott |
| SIGNATURE | WOLCOTT H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oregon, Eugene, |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 89 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 5 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 10 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Tribute to Egon Guba
Validating Reba: A commentary on ''Teaching about validity
Context and Isolation: The Teaching Experience in an Elementary School
The thesis of this study is that teachers evolve responses to all levels of their occupational experience-ideological, organizational, and interpersonal-in relative isolation. This isolation is seen as a function of the discontinuity between our facility in articulating norms and values appropriate to teaching and our inability to intervene effectively to make such norms and values operable. The thesis is developed through an analysis of data org…
The Anthropologist as Hired Hand
Anthropologists have traditionally occupied a field role that offered considerable autonomy. This essay explores the salient components of a new role-set, that of the anthropologist as a minor functionary in a research bureaucracy. A major component of this role-set is accountability: the fieldworker is held accountable by a funding agency, an employer, a profession, and a research population. All of these units exercise various devices to ensure…
Bureaucrats, Budgets, and the BIA: Segmentary Opposition in a Residential School
The search for principles of social organization which satisfactorily explain circumstances and phenomena in a wide range of societies is not new. The following discussion describes the political system which operates in an American Indian school, and discusses the striking analogy between the school's bureaucratic structure and operation and the structure and operation of a segmentary lineage system. Sahlins (1968) sees the segmentary lineage sy…
Educational Innovation and Desegregation: A Case Study of Symbolic Realignment
Major changes in the ethnic and racial composition of American schools have been accompanied by a period of group disturbances throughout the nation. During this time, there has been a spurt of educational innovations intended to reorganize schools so that all pupils may receive a quality education. This paper presents a case study of a major educational innovation introduced into a school at the time of pupil desegregation. It was found that the…
The Rebirth of a Grandfather's Spirit: Shumba's Two Worlds
This article examines the continuities and discontinuities which exist between home and school for a first-grade pupil in rural Rhodesia. This pupil has been possessed by his grandfather's spirit and on the surface it appears that the new world of the school produces conflict between tradition and modernity. However, upon close examination this ethnographic account shows that the classroom setting, although radically different from the home envir…
Problems of Doing Fieldwork in Educational Evaluation
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Harry Wolcott, Robert Everhart; Problems of Doing Fieldwork in Educational Evaluation. Human Organization 1 June 1975; 34 (2): 205–215. doi: https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.34.2.a7683502275vqt7w Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyB…
The Anthropologist in a Strange Land
The use of ethnography as a methodology in public policy research required negotiation of a complex contract between the federal government and a research firm employing anthropologists to conduct the research. Because of the complexity of this methodology, the presence of an interdisciplinary research team, the objectives of the federal government for this research, and lack of any major precedent, the achievement of a negotiated agreement accep…
Criteria for an Ethnographic Approach to Research in Schools
A number of issues related to conducting ethnographic research in schools are explored under four criterion headings: (1) appropriateness of the problem, (2) appropriateness of the ethnographer, (3) appropriateness of the research climate, and (4) appropriateness of expectations for the completed study. The purpose of the paper is to air some of the issues that arise between those who do ethnography in educational settings and those who commissio…
University Registration Systems: A Study of Social Process
Proposals to computerize registration procedures at a major urban university led to research focused on anticipating potential problems in implementing the new system. Registration was viewed as an act with both technical and social aspects. The data revealed that present technical procedures were not as inefficient as common belief held them to be. An analysis of registration as a social process revealed that present procedures have functional a…
Informant-Ethnographers in the Study of Schools
In the context of an anthropology curriculum, public high school students performed as informant-ethnographers of their own social milieu. Using the techniques of film and fieldwork, students demonstrated that with training and sensitivity such studies could be more than simple academic exercises. Data gathered by students at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School concerning their school's sociocultural organization provides the professional school…
President's Report
Postcard
An Ethnographic Approach to the Study of School Administrators
The ethnographer's task is the selective recording of human behavior in order to construct explanations of that behavior in cultural terms. The standard ethnography thus provides an account of the way of life of some special human process (say, law or more narrowly, divorce) or of some particular group of people, such as the Tikopia or the Children of Sanchez. My approach in this paper is ethnographic in that the purpose of the research project i…
Criteria for an Ethnographic Approach to Research in Schools
A number of issues related to conducting ethnographic research in schools are explored under four criterion headings: (1) appropriateness of the problem, (2) appropriateness of the ethnographer, (3) appropriateness of the research climate, and (4) appropriateness of expectations for the completed study. The purpose of the paper is to air some of the issues that arise between those who do ethnography in educational settings and those who commissio…
The Anthropologist as Hired Hand
Anthropologists have traditionally occupied a field role that offered considerable autonomy. This essay explores the salient components of a new role-set, that of the anthropologist as a minor functionary in a research bureaucracy. A major component of this role-set is accountability: the fieldworker is held accountable by a funding agency, an employer, a profession, and a research population. All of these units exercise various devices to ensure…
The Anthropologist in a Strange Land
The use of ethnography as a methodology in public policy research required negotiation of a complex contract between the federal government and a research firm employing anthropologists to conduct the research. Because of the complexity of this methodology, the presence of an interdisciplinary research team, the objectives of the federal government for this research, and lack of any major precedent, the achievement of a negotiated agreement accep…
An Ethnographic Approach to the Study of School Administrators
The ethnographer's task is the selective recording of human behavior in order to construct explanations of that behavior in cultural terms. The standard ethnography thus provides an account of the way of life of some special human process (say, law or more narrowly, divorce) or of some particular group of people, such as the Tikopia or the Children of Sanchez. My approach in this paper is ethnographic in that the purpose of the research project i…
Problems of Doing Fieldwork in Educational Evaluation
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Harry Wolcott, Robert Everhart; Problems of Doing Fieldwork in Educational Evaluation. Human Organization 1 June 1975; 34 (2): 205–215. doi: https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.34.2.a7683502275vqt7w Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyB…
Validating Reba: A commentary on ''Teaching about validity
Context and Isolation: The Teaching Experience in an Elementary School
The thesis of this study is that teachers evolve responses to all levels of their occupational experience-ideological, organizational, and interpersonal-in relative isolation. This isolation is seen as a function of the discontinuity between our facility in articulating norms and values appropriate to teaching and our inability to intervene effectively to make such norms and values operable. The thesis is developed through an analysis of data org…
Bureaucrats, Budgets, and the BIA: Segmentary Opposition in a Residential School
The search for principles of social organization which satisfactorily explain circumstances and phenomena in a wide range of societies is not new. The following discussion describes the political system which operates in an American Indian school, and discusses the striking analogy between the school's bureaucratic structure and operation and the structure and operation of a segmentary lineage system. Sahlins (1968) sees the segmentary lineage sy…
Educational Innovation and Desegregation: A Case Study of Symbolic Realignment
Major changes in the ethnic and racial composition of American schools have been accompanied by a period of group disturbances throughout the nation. During this time, there has been a spurt of educational innovations intended to reorganize schools so that all pupils may receive a quality education. This paper presents a case study of a major educational innovation introduced into a school at the time of pupil desegregation. It was found that the…
University Registration Systems: A Study of Social Process
Proposals to computerize registration procedures at a major urban university led to research focused on anticipating potential problems in implementing the new system. Registration was viewed as an act with both technical and social aspects. The data revealed that present technical procedures were not as inefficient as common belief held them to be. An analysis of registration as a social process revealed that present procedures have functional a…
Postcard
An Ethnographic Approach to the Study of School Administrators
The ethnographer's task is the selective recording of human behavior in order to construct explanations of that behavior in cultural terms. The standard ethnography thus provides an account of the way of life of some special human process (say, law or more narrowly, divorce) or of some particular group of people, such as the Tikopia or the Children of Sanchez. My approach in this paper is ethnographic in that the purpose of the research project i…
President's Report
Context and Isolation: The Teaching Experience in an Elementary School
The thesis of this study is that teachers evolve responses to all levels of their occupational experience-ideological, organizational, and interpersonal-in relative isolation. This isolation is seen as a function of the discontinuity between our facility in articulating norms and values appropriate to teaching and our inability to intervene effectively to make such norms and values operable. The thesis is developed through an analysis of data org…
The Anthropologist as Hired Hand
Anthropologists have traditionally occupied a field role that offered considerable autonomy. This essay explores the salient components of a new role-set, that of the anthropologist as a minor functionary in a research bureaucracy. A major component of this role-set is accountability: the fieldworker is held accountable by a funding agency, an employer, a profession, and a research population. All of these units exercise various devices to ensure…
Bureaucrats, Budgets, and the BIA: Segmentary Opposition in a Residential School
The search for principles of social organization which satisfactorily explain circumstances and phenomena in a wide range of societies is not new. The following discussion describes the political system which operates in an American Indian school, and discusses the striking analogy between the school's bureaucratic structure and operation and the structure and operation of a segmentary lineage system. Sahlins (1968) sees the segmentary lineage sy…
Educational Innovation and Desegregation: A Case Study of Symbolic Realignment
Major changes in the ethnic and racial composition of American schools have been accompanied by a period of group disturbances throughout the nation. During this time, there has been a spurt of educational innovations intended to reorganize schools so that all pupils may receive a quality education. This paper presents a case study of a major educational innovation introduced into a school at the time of pupil desegregation. It was found that the…
The Rebirth of a Grandfather's Spirit: Shumba's Two Worlds
This article examines the continuities and discontinuities which exist between home and school for a first-grade pupil in rural Rhodesia. This pupil has been possessed by his grandfather's spirit and on the surface it appears that the new world of the school produces conflict between tradition and modernity. However, upon close examination this ethnographic account shows that the classroom setting, although radically different from the home envir…
Problems of Doing Fieldwork in Educational Evaluation
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Harry Wolcott, Robert Everhart; Problems of Doing Fieldwork in Educational Evaluation. Human Organization 1 June 1975; 34 (2): 205–215. doi: https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.34.2.a7683502275vqt7w Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyB…
The Anthropologist in a Strange Land
The use of ethnography as a methodology in public policy research required negotiation of a complex contract between the federal government and a research firm employing anthropologists to conduct the research. Because of the complexity of this methodology, the presence of an interdisciplinary research team, the objectives of the federal government for this research, and lack of any major precedent, the achievement of a negotiated agreement accep…
Criteria for an Ethnographic Approach to Research in Schools
A number of issues related to conducting ethnographic research in schools are explored under four criterion headings: (1) appropriateness of the problem, (2) appropriateness of the ethnographer, (3) appropriateness of the research climate, and (4) appropriateness of expectations for the completed study. The purpose of the paper is to air some of the issues that arise between those who do ethnography in educational settings and those who commissio…
University Registration Systems: A Study of Social Process
Proposals to computerize registration procedures at a major urban university led to research focused on anticipating potential problems in implementing the new system. Registration was viewed as an act with both technical and social aspects. The data revealed that present technical procedures were not as inefficient as common belief held them to be. An analysis of registration as a social process revealed that present procedures have functional a…
Informant-Ethnographers in the Study of Schools
In the context of an anthropology curriculum, public high school students performed as informant-ethnographers of their own social milieu. Using the techniques of film and fieldwork, students demonstrated that with training and sensitivity such studies could be more than simple academic exercises. Data gathered by students at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School concerning their school's sociocultural organization provides the professional school…
Validating Reba: A commentary on ''Teaching about validity
Tribute to Egon Guba
Sociology (12 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works) · Ethnography (4 works) · Pedagogy (4 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Evaluation and Performance Assessment (3 works) · Biology (2 works) · Business (2 works) · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy (2 works)