Professor, Stanford University School of Education
Email: rpmcd@stanford.edu
Research
Dr. McDermott takes 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. At present, he is working on the intellectual history of ideas like genius, intelligence, race, and capital.
Read Ray’s account of LCHC in the 1970s.
Selected Writing and Publications
- Some Criteria for an Adequate Description of Mental Activities (Cole, Hood & McDermott, 1977)
- The social organization of behavior: Interactional approaches (McDermott & Roth, 1978)
- “Let’s try to make it a good day”—some not so simple ways (Hood, McDermott, & Cole, 1980)
- Linguistic indeterminacy and social context in utterance interpretation (Dore & McDermott, 1982)
- Ecological Niche Picking: Ecological Invalidity as an Axiom of Experimental Cognitive Psychology (Cole, Hood & McDermott, Unpublished Manuscript, 1994)
- Achieving school failure, 1972-1997 (McDermott, in Education and Cultural Process, 1997)
- Culture Is Not an Environment of the Mind: The Culture of Education by Jerome S. Bruner; Computers and Classroom Culture by Janet Schofield (McDermott, 1999)
- Reconstructing culture in educational research (McDermott & Varenne, in Innovations in Educational Ethnography, 2006)
- The ethnography of schooling writ large, 1955-2010 (McDermott & Raley, in Companion to the Anthropology of Education, 2011)
- The passions of learning in tight circumstances: Toward a political economy of the mind (McDermott, 2011)
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