Ray McDermott

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

• Race and Class in a Culture of Risk

  Review of Research in Education · 2009-03-01 · 41 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  concrete other-implicating Personal Risks Of Topic self-implicating public Kinds Of Talk private matter-of-fact suppressed out loud whispered FIGURE 1 Risk and Race Talk by Topic roughly based on Pollock (2004), shows a general pattern of talk and topic. As long as a topic remains distant and abstract and implicates only those not present, people address race matter-of-factly and out loud. As a topic moves closer to home, refers to local events, and has implications for speakers, race is limited…

  PublisherDOI

• Looking Closely: Toward a Natural History of Human Ingenuity

  2011-01-01 · 34 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  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 diffe…

  PublisherDOI

• Plans, Takes, and Mis-takes

  Éducation & didactique · 2008-04-26 · 24 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper analyzes what may have been a mistake bypianist Thelonious Monk playing a jazz solo in 1958.Even in a Monk composition designed for patternedmayhem, a note can sound out of pattern. We reframethe question of whether the note was a mistake and askinstead about how Monk handles the problem. Amazingly,he replays the note into a new pattern that resituatesits jarring effect in retrospect. The mistake, orbetter, the mis-take, was “saved” by subsequent notes.Our analysis, supported by refle…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The culture of poverty, again

  Diaspora Indigenous and Minority Education · 2020 · 23 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  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 re…

  PublisherDOI

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

Similar researchers at Stanford University

• Ann Hsingh-117
• Jon A. Krosnickh-95
• Robert Weisbergh-77