About

Ray McDermott is an Emeritus Professor of Education at Stanford University, with a broad interest in the analysis of human communication, the organization of school success and failure, and the history and use of various literacies around the world. His work includes studies of inner-city public schools, after-school classrooms, and the function of information technologies in different cultures. Currently, he is working on the intellectual history of ideas such as genius, intelligence, race, and capital. He has held academic appointments as Professor of Education and (by courtesy) Cultural and Social Anthropology at the Stanford Graduate School of Education since 1989, and has been an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology since 2019. His professional background includes roles at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Rockefeller University, as well as experience as an elementary school teacher in New York City. His research interests encompass educational policy, literacy and language, parents and family issues, and special education, with a focus on interaction analysis, social structure, the political economy of learning, writing systems, and educational and psychological anthropology.

Research topics

• Social Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Law
• Psychology
• History

Selected publications

• The culture of poverty, again

  Diaspora Indigenous and Minority Education · 2020 · 23 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Social Science
  • Political Science

  This introduction to the special issue offers a selective account of two efforts, across a half century, to describe and alleviate the plight of poor people and their children in school: a specific train of thought called the “culture of poverty” from its origin in 1959, through its express track to prominence across the 1960s, to its research-led crash from 1968 to 1980. The reason for documenting this history is the reemergence of culture of poverty rhetoric in the last decade. Our response recommends the early critiques to the new culture of poverty, which has mostly side-stepped a potent body of social scientific and literary contestation. The papers that follow give detail to the issues raised.

  PublisherDOI

• In this issue

  Diaspora Indigenous and Minority Education · 2020-04-02

  article1st author
  PublisherDOI

• Learning “How to Mean”

  Routledge eBooks · 2020 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  PublisherDOI

• Acknowledgments

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science

  This book bears my name on its cover but it grows out of a series of projects that have each been fundamentally collaborative.Ideas always have social origins.And good ideas about youth activism depend on examples of imaginative, dedicated people working together to improve the world.In this brief acknowledgment I want to honor the contributions of many of the people who contributed to the research and writing of this book.Over the past ten years I've spent time with and learned from politi-

  DOI

• The Work of Learning from Silence

  Perspectives in cultural-historical research · 2019-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Adam, Adam, Adam, and Adam: The Cultural Construction of a Learning Disability

  2018-11-22 · 15 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Adam was born and raised in a well-to-do family. He had no trouble with America, at least in the all-important sense that he was comfortable with details of American culture. The three different ways of thinking about the continuum, namely, increase in difficulty, constraint, and vulnerability, have different implications for how one thinks about Adam. If the continuum captures cognitive difficulty, then the tasks require more mental effort and ingenuity as one moves from the ease of everyday life to the taxing questions of the psychometric test. Sensitivity to and practical consciousness of actual difficulties were not signs of Adam's self. Adam persisted in spite of the pain, and his having been born into a family that could afford the school he attended, it turned out eventually that his identification as Learning Disabled did not make much difference in his career. Being acquired culturally by Learning Disability does not make a child a Learning Disabled child in any neurological way.

  PublisherDOI

• In Praise of Schoolchildren: A commencement address to the Stanford University Graduate School of Education on 17 June 2018

  Mind Culture and Activity · 2018-10-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  I hope we can dedicate our time together today to the thousands of children incarcerated along the Mexican border over the past few weeks. My mother always said that “No one should ever be mean to ...

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• A Glimpse at Eternity

  Mind Culture and Activity · 2017-04-03

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Naoki Ueno was a keen observer of social interaction as the context for people solving problems together. He was particularly interested in how people made various problems and their solutions visible to each other. In appreciation of his work, I offer a slightly contrasting case of people handling a problem that remains mostly invisible and unsolved. He would have enjoyed bringing it into view and showing how it might be approached.

  PublisherDOI

• Does “learning” exist?

  WORD · 2015-10-02 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The word ‘learning’ has fallen in with a bad crowd: isolated cognitive skills, stockpiled knowledge, achievement by zero-sum competition, arbitrarily standardized measurement, access by aggression, confirmative action private tutoring, high tuition, neoliberal governance, more status than role, and all that correlated with race and class differentials and propagated, as Melville said of showoff intellects, with “the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always in themselves, more or less paltry and base”. To loosen it from its present environment, this paper offers three ways of rethinking learning and social structure: one, learning is ubiquitous and should not be used as a generalizable source of social hierarchy; two, learning is an unnecessary abstraction that exists only by “paltry and base” psychometric manipulations that should not be a source of social hierarchy; and three, ‘learning’ is a contested term that must always report to considerations of how and when it is used and with what intentions and consequences. The third choice might offer relief from the “external arts and entrenchments” that have been disrupting our learning.

  PublisherDOI

• Staying the Course With Video Analysis

  2014-05-01 · 26 citations

  articleSenior author

  For 35 years, video records have supplied data for careful analyses and precise conclusions in educational research. Research proposals often include a methods section calling for video records and discourse analysis, although just how behavior is to be recorded, transcribed, analyzed, and why are often left unspecified. The promise is so powerful, its mention can carry a proposal, as if video could speak for itself, as if discourse had only to be heard to make a case. This chapter tells a different story. The power of video records is not in what they make easily clear, but in what they challenge and disrupt in the initial assumptions of an analysis. They are a starting point for understanding the reflexive, patterned ways interactions develop, and often must develop, inside the structures and interpretations with which kids, teachers, and researchers establish their work.

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Frequent coauthors

• Shelley Goldman

  Stanford University

  8 shared

• Jason Duque Raley

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  7 shared

• Kimberly Powell

  Pennsylvania State University

  6 shared

• Hervé Varenne

  5 shared

• Matthew D. Thibeault

  Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts

  3 shared

• Daniel J. Levitin

  McGill University

  3 shared

• Eric Bredo

  University of Toronto

  3 shared

• Nathaniel Klemp

  3 shared

Labs

• Vice Provost for Student AffairsPI

Education

• B.A., Philosophy and Chinese

  Queens College

  1967

• Ph.D., Anthropology

  Stanford University

  1977