Rachel N. Throop
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Rachel Throop is an anthropologist whose ethnographic research examines how social class is
produced in and through educational institutions. Her scholarship argues that social class is best
understood not as a demographic variable but as something produced, experienced, and contested
through everyday institutional life. She shows how ethnographic attention to social class reveals
mechanisms of educational inequality that remain invisible through other approaches.
Grounded in more than two years of ethnographic research with Teach For America, her current
book project introduces the concept of narrative demands—institutional expectations that
teachers and students publicly narrate themselves in morally recognizable ways. The project
demonstrates how these expectations become mechanisms through which social class is
reproduced, negotiated, and sometimes resisted, providing a new framework for understanding
how educational institutions organize identity, morality, and social class through everyday
classroom life.
A related strand of Throop’s scholarship explores the relationship between theory and practice in
teacher education and professional learning. Her co-authored book, Practice: Keywords in
Teacher Education (2026), interrogates the contested meanings of practice in teacher education,
arguing for approaches that foreground relationships, context, inquiry, and teacher
professionalism in the face of growing marketization and privatization.
A former classroom teacher, Throop earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of
Pennsylvania and an M.Ed. from Arizona State University. She has taught at Barnard College
since 2016, where she offers courses including Educational Foundations, Complicating Class,
Marketization and Privatization in Education, Critical Inquiry, and Seminar in Urban
Education. Across her teaching and research, she collaborates with teachers as partners in
inquiry, bringing ethnographic inquiry into close conversation with educational practice.
- Articulations of race, class, and capital
- Politics and ethics of volunteerism
- Interrelationship between NGOs/non-profits, the state, and social policy
- Urban education and educational privatization
- Ethnographic and qualitative research methodologies
- EDUC BC 1510: Educational Foundations
- EDUC BC 3064: Critical Inquiry in Urban Teaching
Throop, R. (2015, November). Undoing Injustice: Methodological Dilemmas in the Study of Social Class. Executive session paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Denver, CO.
Throop, R. (2015, February). Class Matters: Ethnography, Social Class, and the Teach For America Movement. Invited Lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Throop, R. (2014, November). Problematizing Border Pedagogies: Student Voice, Community Knowledge, and Privilege. Paper presented at the National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) Conference, Tucson, AZ.
Throop, R. (2013, March). Crafting Classed Selves: The Politics and Practices of Bodily Control in the Classroom. Paper presented at the Society for the Anthropology of North America Conference, Durham, North Carolina.
Throop, R. (Accepted With Revisions). ‘You do your work, I’ll do mine’: Social Class and the Limits of Identity-Centric Pedagogical Models. Anthropology and Education Quarterly.
Schultz, K. and Throop, R. (2010). Popular Culture and Education. In B. McGaw, P. Peterson and E. Baker (Eds.). The International Encyclopedia of Education, 3rd Edition, Elsevier.
Schultz, K., Vasudevan, L., & Throop, R. (2007). Adolescent Literacy in a Global Society. In B. Guzzetti (Ed.), Literacy for the New Millennium: Adolescent Literacy (pp. 12-36). Portsmouth, NH: Greenwood.