Educating graduate students aims at making them competent members in a disciplinary community and culture. This chapter identifies PhD student training as a curious process in which instruction and the advancement of science go together. It examines how a PhD student was instructed to tackle a common, though often challenging, problem of science with large datasets: calibrating a new dataset and combining it with data from a different source for analysis. By following this student around over two years as she achieved this goal, the author learnt how she became a competent member in the community and culture of extragalactic astronomy. Conversely, it is possible to gain insights into what makes combining scientific datasets often so challenging. As such, this chapter applies the tactics of Chapter 2 – take a problem of data-intensive science, consider how it is “staffed” in a specific case, and follow its management ethnographically – to another setting. This account serves as a resource for the next two chapters, on uses of diagrams and mundane reasoning in research with large datasets.

The Introduction sets out from an ethnographic vignette to specify the book’s anthropological approach to data-rich science. It briefly reviews the literature on the social practices of data use in the sciences. It then argues for setting out from the tenet that humans are fundamentally evaluative and attending to social interactions and accountabilities by means of ethnography. Doing so helps making sense of data-centric socialities: forms of social coordination unfolding in the making, use, and publication of data. Adopting this view, readers discover a view of ethics that is mindful of all participants and see how researchers learn from technicians about data production, instruct new data users, use diagrams to cultivate data, engage mundane reasoning to resolve disjunctive findings, organize collaborative work, manage issues of normativity in “open science,” and seek to encode their knowledge in datasets. The Introduction concludes with a description of ethnographic fieldwork and a discussion of its representativeness and generalizability.

Chapter 4 charts the provision and/or absence of instruction in Catholicism in the cultural worlds of the Pacific, which the bishops of Popayán framed as “spiritual pasture.” It begins with an analysis of the patterns of baptism and godparentage in the small city of Cartago, far from the gold mines where enslaved labourers shored up the white elite. The chapter examines two controversies that divided the mine and slave-owning elite and the upper echelons of the Church for decades; first, a debate over the stipend system in which slaveholders had to pay itinerant clergy to travel to the mines to administer the sacraments, and second, over mineros allowing enslaved people to work on holy days, despite myriad laws and papal bulls outlawing it. Ultimately, the remoteness of the mines from towns, and the disinterest of whites in settling there, meant that enslavers continued the long-held custom of enslaved people labouring on holy days and saving up gold dust to pacify them. Condemned by the bishops as “spiritual abandonment,” the custom helped to create conditions for the growth of the large free black population and perhaps the practice of their own religions that largely remain outside of view.

Understand how children direct their own learning and learn from others; describe the importance of imitation, play, and instruction; explain how children transfer what they know across different contexts.

Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and their circle produced a series of satires in a distinctive mock-didactic mode, the mock art. Originally Swift used it to attack a ‘mechanical’ dissenting clergy. Later he adapted it to larger issues concerning the fragmentation and uncontrolled accumulation of knowledge in the modern age. John Gay broadened the theme by exploring its cognitive dimensions. It was in political polemic, however, that mock-technical satire achieved its widest circulation, as a critical trope against state-craftsmen and artificial politicians. Finally, in Peri Bathous Pope and John Arbuthnot imagined a wholly artificial poetic art. Their critical thought-experiment ends this line of development in the mock-art idea. With each successive iteration, its basis in the social denigration of skilled workers receded, and the satire became more ambivalent. Pope, at first the most abusive of the denigrators, at last produced the most balanced and experimental of all the Scriblerian mock arts.

Critics have tended to downplay the connections between Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Jane Collier’s The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, but these two experimental, high-concept satires, with their shared Swiftian heritage, in fact have much in common. Both present – with different levels of irony – as systems of instruction, written to help people negotiate straightened social settings. The art of engineering small conversational triumphs is a common concern. The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting is a pure mock art, cut back to a sequence of instructive maxims. The pseudo-didactic component in Tristram Shandy is, by contrast, only one element in a patchwork of textual features. Both are burlesques of the conventions of early modern manuals and handbooks. They represent a retreat for the Enlightenment mock arts back into the realm of satirical fiction and print-format experimentation. They also mark a new level of subtlety in their treatment of the mock arts’ cognitive themes.

This chapter opens with an introduction of a theoretical framework for understanding reading and its development, which is generally consistent across languages. In so doing, the central role of oral language development is emphasized in terms of its role in shaping later reading success. Furthermore, the complex layering of factors that shape instruction and learning is discussed in the light of the amount of variability we can attribute to teachers, by drawing on research carried out from a social policy perspective. It is shown that the answer to the question of teacher effects is hugely affected by the context in which learning occurs. In well-resourced countries, effects of teachers and teaching are important, but relatively subtle, whereas they are much more obvious in countries with few resources or substantial social challenges. In addition, the role of teachers in supporting acquisition of the language skills required for reading comprehension is discussed as we draw on a relatively small set of studies from around the world that examine the nuances of teacher-child conversations in a detailed manner.Finally, we turn to what many consider to be the heart of reading instruction – teaching children to translate printed words into meaning.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in 2015 represent an important opportunity to improve learning globally. In this light, this chapter draws on a unique set of early literacy assessment results and demographic information from six African countries (Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia) to better understand the role that language plays in influencing early reading outcomes. While these data have been published in individual country reports, the information has not been analyzed and released prominently in the narrative surrounding learning outcomes in the region, although data like those presented in this chapter have begun to reverse this tendency. Following this introduction, a brief history is provided of postcolonial trends in literacy acquisition and language policyin sub-Saharan Africa from about 1960 to the present day, documenting the current language of instruction policies for twenty countries. Key questions are also outlined to drive the interest in gaining a better understanding of the variation in literacy acquisition in a selection of target countries for which we have data; then the chapter documents the data and methods usedas well as the results. Finally, the chapter discusses the implications of this work a for future policy and planning to achieve the promises made under the SDGs.

I return to hymnography in this chapter, looking at the development of a full calendar of Marian praise between about 600 and 1000 CE. The main source of Marian hymnography is the major feasts, which include the Virgin’s Nativity, Entrance into the Temple, Annunciation, Dormition and others. The festal hymns, which include kontakia, stichera, kanons and various other forms, provide Christological teaching, although intercessory supplication to the Virgin may also play a role in short hymns known as theotokia. It is especially in the weekday services that we find intense supplication to the Theotokos, particularly on Wednesdays and Fridays. Her human lament at the foot of the cross, which was remembered on those days throughout the liturgical year, may symbolise the contrition that was expected of monks and nuns at all times; it also highlights Mary’s human qualities, which came to be understood as models for ascetics to imitate.

Meccano Ltd promoted a particular type of subjectivity: the ‘Meccano Boy’. This construction toy schooled the child in scientific education, social participation, civic roles, life within a profession and in building the material infrastructure of modernity. Playing with Meccano encouraged translation of an intangible idea represented in two dimensions into material forms through the production of three-dimensional compositions of machinery or models. We compare the legal interpretation of this form of play with its broader cultural significance in creating a base of socially connected consumers, orchestrated to extract commercial value from educational play. Meccano did not involve free play or simply making educational models. A toy for making toys, Meccano was marketed as training for adulthood. Through the establishment of Meccano guilds and the relevance of the Meccano Magazine, children, their fathers and a wider brotherhood were interpellated as active developers of Meccano. It was a brand and activity that Meccano designed for international appeal and where the child was happily engaged in play that supported a later life that contributed to international industrialisation.

I return to hymnography in this chapter, looking at the development of a full calendar of Marian praise between about 600 and 1000 CE. The main source of Marian hymnography is the major feasts, which include the Virgin’s Nativity, Entrance into the Temple, Annunciation, Dormition and others. The festal hymns, which include kontakia, stichera, kanons and various other forms, provide Christological teaching, although intercessory supplication to the Virgin may also play a role in short hymns known as theotokia. It is especially in the weekday services that we find intense supplication to the Theotokos, particularly on Wednesdays and Fridays. Her human lament at the foot of the cross, which was remembered on those days throughout the liturgical year, may symbolise the contrition that was expected of monks and nuns at all times; it also highlights Mary’s human qualities, which came to be understood as models for ascetics to imitate.

This chapter investigates the role of schooling and pedagogy in colonial expansion since the 1500s, with attention to the responses, protests, and resistance of the colonized.

Chapter 6 addresses two ways in which our minds can be constructive: either by making inferences on the basis of what’s already there – filling in gaps of information, or by transforming what’s there into something new. This twofold ability of the human mind to construct is basic to our existence, enabling us to go beyond what we encounter around us. The way we talk reflects both inference and transformation processes systematically. Inference involves taking observable facts and combining them with further knowledge or assumptions, in order to come to new insights or conclusions that aren’t directly observable. Transformation, on the other hand, involves taking observable facts or objects and turning them into something different, something that isn’t yet there but that can be accomplished using available tools and operators. Chapter 6 looks at each of these processes of cognitive constructiveness in turn.