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The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the strategy and innovation of the Faculty of Adab and Humanities in developing the quality of education in digital era by using anthropology of education approach.

In accordance with the research purpose to demonstrate the strategy and innovation of the Faculty of Adab and Humanities in developing the quality of education in the digital era using an educational anthropology approach, the method used is descriptive qualitative, which refers to data in the form of interviews obtained from the field.

The results of this research indicate that there are strategies and innovations to develop the quality of higher education at the Faculty of Adab and Humanities in the digital era. These include adjusting the curriculum with the context of the era, implementing the learning process based on research and reinforcing on aspects of digital literacy among students through the innovation of the library based on digital.

This study can be considered in the process of evaluating policies related to quality reinforcing strategies and innovations at the Faculty of Adab and Humanities in facing the challenges of the times. The study is only limited to tracing and analyzing strategies and innovations to reinforce education in the Faculty of Adab and Humanities and their impact on human resource development. For further research, it can be done in more detail and depth and on a larger scale.

In this chapter I draw on the philosophical anthropology of Bruno Latour to propose an account of the work of research ethics. Through a consideration of research ethics as text, I explore the ways in which any such text needs to be accompanied – by people, by processes, by other voices or other texts – in order to become meaningful and then impactful for the ethnographer of education. Research ethics are thus positioned as the technological outcome of a dialogue that is prone to misunderstanding and misinterpretation, notwithstanding the strictures of the processes and policies that increasingly seek to codify the work that ethnographers do in the field. Through arguing for Latour's recent philosophical anthropology as a conceptual toolkit for the exploration of research ethics, I propose that it is research ethics as object that should be the focal point for ongoing ethnographic inquiry.

This chapter examines the practical and conceptual limitations and possibilities of using ethnographic methods in the college writing classroom for the purpose of instructors’ professional development. The study is based on ethnographic research with a second-year course in Stanford University’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric. The study’s dual foci included the teacher–researcher’s pedagogical practices and students’ learning, and entailed participant-observation and the recording of ethnographic fieldnotes. It builds on the anthropology of literacy, a tradition of action research among educational ethnographers, and scholarship on composition pedagogy. Participant-observation could be helpful to other college instructors interested in improving their teaching. However, combining participant-observation with direct student feedback through interviews or surveys will be most effective in shaping educators’ professional development. Using participant-observation for professional development in the college writing classroom did not only situate me, the ethnographer, as both subject and object of research. Unexpectedly, my research also placed ethnographic methods as objects of research. By examining student learning and teaching practices ethnographically, researchers create opportunities to illuminate assumptions related to research as well as broader lessons about the study of teaching and learning.

Critical ethnography first emerged as a distinctive research approach in education studies in the late 1960s (Anderson, 1989, p. 250). It has now achieved a degree of respectability and has taken its place as part of the qualitative tradition in universities (Jordan & Yeomans, 1995, p. 399). Critical ethnography reflects what Geertz (1983) identified as a ‘blurring of genres’. As the name suggests, it is marked by a confluence of interpretivist field studies and critical streams of thought (Goodman, 1998, p. 51). These converging streams, arising from a variety of sources and pushed along by the currents of Marxist, neo-Marxist and feminist social theory, swirl together into a dynamically enriched mixture of the methods and theories of anthropology, sociology and education. Not surprisingly the streams formed in different parts of the globe, while composed of all of the elements just named, are configured slightly differently. As Priyadharshini (2003, p. 421) recently noted in comparing British and American strands of educational ethnography, the Western side of the Atlantic is marked by a much stronger tradition of educational anthropology than in the UK. And these differences make a difference.

This chapter provides an ethnographic look at higher education strategic planning through the lens of Williams College’s 2018–2020 effort to develop a 20-year plan for the institution. The critical analysis of Williams’ multi-community engagement contributes to studies of higher education and to literature in the sociocultural anthropological field of “policy as a practice of power” by applying core tenets of the field to strategic planning analysis. Drawing on 12 months of participation-observation and documentary research, the investigation brings into focus Williams’ heterarchical leadership structure and the negotiation practices that contributed to establish the legitimacy and appropriation of William’s strategic plan values. The chapter also shifts toward a contextualized perspective of strategic planning, highlighting campus community divides and the practices that contributed to bridge these fault lines and foster trust during the Fall 2019 campus-wide outreach process. Through the chapter, the analysis re-interprets beliefs of strategic planning and implementation as a top-down, normative imposition, and brings an ethnographic lens to reveal practices of negotiation, convergence, and value appropriation.

Dalia Aralas is a doctoral research student at the University of Oxford Department of Educational Studies. Her doctoral research study, ‘Investigating Mathematical Imagination’, is supported by a four-year JPA Malaysia scholarship. She is a pure mathematician by training. She is a lecturer of Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) where she was the Coordinator of mathematics and science education before she left on study leave. She had academic and administrative responsibilities for coordinating academic programmes run jointly by the two Schools (faculties) of Education and Science. She has taught many undergraduate and postgraduate courses at UMS, including mathematics education, educational foundations and issues (philosophical perspectives). She was the head of the teacher training programme in mathematics and science. She directed the first of statewide UMS mathematics camps which have been held annually. She has also tutored and examined an undergraduate class in a course in mathematics education at the University of Oxford. Besides additional training in teaching mathematics, she also has a teaching certificate in dance. Her research interests include mathematics education, particularly the philosophical strand; imagination and agency; and research methodology.