The intersection of anthropology and education has an intellectual history that can be traced back to the socialization studies of early anthropologists. The evolution of the field can be viewed through three heuristics. Anthropology of education refers to theory building in anthropology; anthropology in education refers to theory building in education; and anthropology for education refers to the enactment of educational change.

We explore how the languaging of everyday life in classrooms promulgates conceptions of personhood. We use the term ''languaging'' to argue for a shift from conceptions of language as a noun to languaging as a verb, a view of language as inseparable from and constitutive of the actions and reactions of people in response to each other. It is through languaging that people act on each other, performative and commissive acts through which people establish their and others' personhood. All parties are involved (including students, teachers, parents, administrators, and researchers) in the languaging of daily classroom life. This languaging occurs in a dialectical process. It occurs not only in the events of daily classroom life but also in how researchers act on the classroom by languaging the classroom and in turn how this acting upon influences values, epistemologies, and the happenings of daily life in classrooms. Grounded in the microethnographic analysis of a classroom writing event, and building on the philosophy of Buber, we argue that it is through languaging that people negotiate conceptions of what it means to be human-oscillating between personhood defined as I-Thou and as I-It, with the later implying a state of alienation. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of languaging and the conceptions personhood inherent to any languaging on daily classroom life.

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Classroom ethnography is a principled approach to the study of classroom life grounded in cultural, social, and linguistic anthropology. It involves an iterative and responsive engagement with the dialectics of theoretical framing, logic of inquiry, empirical fieldwork and data analysis, and the construction of a representation of classroom life. Heuristically, classroom ethnographies can be categorized as ethnographies of the classroom and ethnographies in the classroom, with the former contributing to the knowledge base in the social sciences and the latter contributing to the knowledge base in the field of education and to educational policy and practice. Among the goals of classroom ethnography have been countering deficit models of students from nondominant communities and the problematizing and redefining of key constructs associated with classroom life.

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