The Interaction Cowboy

(mouse clicks) (mouse clicks) So, here we go.

When I look back at this footage of my dad, I can't help but think there were a lot of things I didn't know then.

(upbeat music) I'd started filming him because he was retiring, and I knew almost nothing about his work.

There were a lot of things I didn't even know about his life.

(keyboard typing) Ethnomethodology The sociological study of the rules and rituals underlying ordinary social activities and interactions.

(upbeat music continues) This film is not, I repeat, not, an ethnomethodological study.

(bell dings) Any resemblance to an ethnomethodological study is pure coincidence.

(bell dings) (lively music) (woman speaking foreign language) Timothy Koschmann.

I think a lot of people feel like they didn't know about what my dad did for work.

Do you guys?

(Judy laughing) Never.

Don't tell him, but no.

If you were- (Fred laughing) What does he do?

(woman speaking foreign language) Come forward, therefore, to rece the symbols of your dignity.

I think a lot of people didn't really understand what he was trying to accomplish, but I don't think he let that bother him.

I think he just went on his own way and still tried to do, you know, do the work that he wanted to do.

Greetings, most- learned gentleman.

I think that Tim is a thoughtful but sometimes lonely scholar.

Video's been used for a few decades now, and Tim took that technology to its limit.

I think your dad is a kind of a visionary.

He sees education completely differently than the rest of the education world does.

And just because there's somebody who sees something and knows something doesn't mean that people are gonna pay attention.

(audience applauding and cheering) Nobody really knows, I dont think.

Im not sure Tim does.

It just kind of... just kind of happened.

(upbeat guitar music) On a recent trip to see my parents, I learned more about where they moved after they retired.

Muskegon, Michigan was first occupied by the Ottawa Native American tribe.

It was colonized by the British, and many factories were set up after the Industrial Revolution.

(upbeat guitar music continues) You can see from the road that many of them aren't being used, and some are even coming down.

(building thundering) It's in this transitional setting where I find my dad.

(gentle music) There you are.

(chuckles) Ah, there you are.

(man chuckles) I've always been a bit of an intellectual vagabond, both in my work and in my academic preparation.

In an oddly satisfying way, however, all of the twists and turns that I've taken in my career have all contributed in useful ways to the development of my thought.

For the longest time I thought I would never know much about my dad's life, but this time I'm determined to get his story.

Plus I'm armed with a camera, so it's all on record.

(car humming) (camera clicking) He never talked that much about growing up, so I went to see his family who live in the South and the Midwest.

(gentle music continues) (woman faintly speaking) Back door.

(door thuds) My grandma's a retired school teacher, and she met my grandpa after he served in the Navy in World War II.

They had four kids, my dad is the oldest, and moved around Wisconsin and then to Kansas City.

Pilgrim Heights, Madison, Kansas City.

(gentle upbeat music) He keeps taking things, I'm gonna discover the truth.

I'm gonna find it. That's called that hunger in your soul that you're, like you're thirsty for something.

And it could be that he's earching for the answer, and I hope he gets it.

I hope he gets it.

(gentle upbeat music continues) He just kind of stoo aloof of all that grading stuff and he was kind of more about whatever he was thinking about, which was, I think, a lot of different things.

(car whooshing) We've had many conversations about my son and his disinterest in structured learning, and, you know, Tim has said over and over again, "I know, you know, where he's at on that, I was the same way.

You know, I just couldn't conform to what they were wantin' to show me or teach me."

(water sloshing) Teachers have an impossible task, and I don't know what you do with the kids that don't fit the program, the Tims and the Martys.

These two, you know, they always had their different drummer.

(gentle music) For somebody who was to focus much of his career on education, it's surprising how little interest he had in school growing up.

I was just being rebellious.

It was an immature attitude, to be sure.

He managed to graduate high school and enrolled in the college in town.

Though he thought about trying for medical school, his first real interest was in philosophy.

Philosophy was kind of where I found my home in college.

A branch called phenomenology caught his attention in particular, started by someone named Edmund Husserl in Germany.

Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh One of the catch phrases that comes from him is "back to the things themselves," that what we need to do is return to the things that we know best, which are our own experiences.

(gentle music) College seemed like the thing to do, but it was less a choice than something I fell into because I didn't have any other ideas.

This is around the time that the Vietnam War was taking place.

The draft had just been initiated.

The Draft Lottery, a live report on tonight's picking of the birthdates for the draft.

If we didn't do something about that war, I could find myself over in Vietnam shooting at somebody.

He was absolutely sure that that war was a mistake, and we shouldn't be over there, and he was willing to go to jail.

If they called him, he wouldn't go.

He'd go to jail.

I could not see any sensible argument for what we were doing there.

Every night they would show more pictures of maps or, you know, live bombings or green jungle, basically.

It was almost like they could've just played last night's again.

It's just the same thing over and over and over.

I started to cast about to locate other people to see what was going on.

And there was a network of people, and these ranged from the Women's League for Peace and Freedom to the Black Panthers in Kansas City.

We were a group that would work with people who were going the same direction we were going.

We worked with most groups that were anti-war, you know, and for Black liberation.

(gentle upbeat music) I was Huey Newton's aid in 1971 as he went to court.

1972, I ran Bobby Seale's main campaign office when he ran for mayor of Oakland.

You know, they made us out to be the boogeyman.

They made us out to be the angry Black men who hate white people.

We never hated white people.

We hated oppression.

We hated capitalism.

Some of the people who worked closely with us was like I said, SDS.

We were allies to the hippies.

So the party has a long legacy of just doing community work.

And things were starting to happen.

The FBI was hovering around, and I became a person who was marked as the anti-war guy.

COINTELPRO.

This was a program that the FBI came up with, a campaign to discredit, to destroy any group that the government felt that was a threat to them.

My dad volunteered time with the Black Panthers who ran a breakfast program for the community, and the FBI used photos of him with that group as well as with the activist group, the Weathermen, to show his parents' neighbors.

(gentle upbeat music continues) Growing up, you know, I could run into Angela Davis at a friend's house or something, you know, folks were still around.

Everybody knows that all the people don't have liberties.

We still have that legacy, but we lost most of that.

We lost who would've been our mentors.

When the FBI and COINTELPRO dismantled the Black Panthers and dismantled the power movements largely, what they also did was the dismantled community organizing.

And more than that, it sent a message to everyone else, "Beware if you're going to even think about community organizing."

The FBI was starting to harass my parents.

There was that one up there by the grassy area, and I think there was another one down the street, and they're not doing anything.

They're just standing around, and then I asked somebody, "Who's that guy?

I saw him there yesterday."

(chuckles) And they said, "Don't you know, he's watching your house because Tim has been active against the war."

There was tension.

They were probably uncomfortable having government agents snooping around.

I began to think, maybe I was a little foolish.

People who were involved were getting assaulted, just getting beat up.

All of this stuff became kind of ominous.

It didn't have so much to do with what the rules were about how you got drafted or didn't or something, it was just like, "No matter how it is, it's wrong," and he didn't like it.

And he got kind of vocal about that.

My studies were not going well.

I had so many distractions, and so I just dropped out of school entirely mid-semester and started a cross-country sojourn.

I just really didn't know what I was doing anymore.

I had lost my sense of purpose for the anti-war activities, but I didn't really have a plan B.

But then how are we gonna get it back together?

We have to replace these three rivets.

Oh.

Okay, so that's what I was gonna show you, is how you can make a poor mans rivet.

This is the first time I'm hearing many of these stories.

(hammer banging) Perfect.

And I couldn't say whethe that's my dad's fault for not te or mine for not asking.

(gentle guitar music) He spent a few months working at a camp in New York and traveling the country.

I mean, I was essentially a hobo where I was couch-surfing and camping out and did not have much money.

Now I was coming back, and for the first time in my life really buckled down and took my studying seriously.

So I graduated and immediately moved up to Madison and started looking for a job.

And I learned that they had an opening at Whitman House.

They were taking the kids that were getting kicked out of the big state mental hospital and kids who couldn't be put into the foster care program because their problems were so complex that a foster couple wouldn't be able to deal with them.

This footage from a facility out of Toronto called Warrendale shows a very similar scene to Whitman House.

One of the young ladies had had seven foster placements.

You kind of lose trust in all adults cause you just realize that it was the system that was broken.

Somehow in this unlikely environment sprang a romantic connection.

And your mother came along probably after I'd been there for a year.

We overlapped for one summer, and, you know, he had the whole thing, pink glasses and long blonde hair.

And he was so careful with his talking to the kids, no sign of anger.

What's not to fall in love with?

(chuckles) They got married the following year in Rochester, Minnesota.

My dad continued his studies but couldn't see himself sticking with philosophy, though starting over in any fiel would require more coursework, tuition money, and time.

I loved philosophy.

I didn't regret going down that path, but I couldn't imagine doing philosophy for a living.

They soon moved to Milwaukee, and he changed his major to experimental psychology.

Psychologists take the position that what you have to do is study behavior.

Behaviorism was founded o the ideas of Watson and Thorndik and then later on B.F. Skinner.

We were taking one of our kids t who did a kind of behavioral the It was a system of timeouts versus when you went for a long period without getting any timeouts, then you got to do things that were very rewarding.

And it was working.

That was something that was eye-opening for me.

He said this was particularly true for the autistic kids in the house.

Behaviorists love to study rats.

Much of that literature is based on lab rats.

These were experiments tha were conducted changing rewards.

And the same methods that they apply with rats presumably apply in more complex and not-yet studyable ways to humans, that it's all rewards and punishments.

And what we need to concer ourselves with is the behavior.

In a way, I'm surprised to see taking to this project in the way that he has.

But for the time being at least I choose not to question it.

You ready?

Let's roll.

(lively music) With all of its finding on lab rats, behaviorism played an important role in the forming of our education system in America, much to the dismay of the philosopher John Dewey, who in 1935 was at Columbia in New York.

Dewey wrote that democracy cannot succeed without a quality system of public education and that the real role of the sc is not to fill their heads like empty pitchers and then turn them loose in the world, but rather to help them build the skills to be able to learn independently once they leave the school.

Edward Thorndike was at Columbia at the same time as Dewey, but Thorndike was at Teacher's College, the education school there.

There's a quote from Ellen Lagemann.

She said, "One cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the 20th century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost."

I think she got it absolutely on the nose.

Most people that are educational researchers today agree on one thing, which is the test scores are the end-all, be-all.

You trace that back, and it goes directly to Thorndike.

We have 100 years of doing research based on a kind of Thorndikian view of what counts as learning and precious little about what a Deweyan form of instruction might be.

(lively music continues) (moves to gentle guitar music) (bell rings) (cutlery clinking) (people chattering) (plates clanging) We got involved in the Saturday morning breakfast, and that's a really valuable community activity, and were happy doing it up until the arrival of the pandemic, but it's a little bit odd to have spent 50 years of my life learning things, gathering information, doing a lot of reading, to end up washing dishes.

(cups clanging) We had some conversations with people in the neighborhood.

Jay told me about how he had once thought about running for the school board, and that set me to thinking, "Gee, I could do that."

It's probably something that I should try to find out about and see whether the claims that I've made about what education should be, whether those assertions really have merit in the work-a-day world of teachers and students.

(table taps) So I met your dad here.

He is a tax client.

When I heard that he was running, I was really, really excited for him.

I'm still excited for him for several different reasons.

One, his educational background is impeccable.

His experience, we need that in our district.

(gentle music) We know that the minority schools get the least amount of money, but we gotta figure out why.

The most cruel thing is to turn around and to blame the kids themselves.

Somehow to think of them as just not smart or that they don't value education.

The level of ignorance that's involved in that thinking is just staggering.

(lively music) The weakness of America is that we are so riven by inequity and just chasms between the haves and the have-nots.

I think it's wrong to simply say, "Well, inevitably, if you're poor, you're gonna get a lousy education.

If you're lower middle class, the cards are gonna be stacked against you.

You'll probably never get anywhere."

As generations have become more diverse, you see this peeling away where there's, you know, there's white flight, there's school district succession, they left for private schools, or magnet schools, or any other way that they could to kind of create a fiefdom and create something that was public in the sense that it was publicly supported by taxes, but essentially private for the use of privileged white people.

Among Black people, we often joke about it, we say, "How did all the white people get the memo that it was time to leave?

We didn't get it.

We just looked up. Standardized tests are an accurate measure of family income.

So in affluent districts, the test scores are high and impoverished districts, the test scores are low.

(gentle upbeat music) It is an unfair game.

It is rigged, and there is no way around it.

And if we're not going to level the the playing field in terms of education, there is no chance that we are going to decrease racial inequality to any great extent.

(people chattering) A grassroots coalition called the Journey for Justice Alliance spans across 21 cities and is led by their national director, Jitu Brown.

How many y'all know somebody in jail?

Raise your hand.

How many y'all know somebod thats been shot?

Raise your han How many y'all know somebody that's good that you love, but life has given them a hard time?

My name is Jitu Brown.

I'm a community organizer from Chicago.

When you see people throwing their lives away, it's because somebody has told them that they are something differen than who they really are, and they believe that that's what they deserve.

Y'all ever heard somebody say, "Well, I don't know if I'm gonna live to be 21?"

Y'all ever heard somebody say that?

Yes.

That's because somebody has messed with their identity where we don't even believe that we're worthy of becoming a grandfather or a grandmother.

You follow me?

The biggest evil in this country has been this baseless hatred of Black people that has been expressed over and over again through every quality-of-life institution, every reaction to us, our depiction in the media.

It's just been consistent.

Be better than that because you are better than that So pick a book, man.

Pick a book, any book.

(person clapping) Any book!

Woo!

Pick a book.

Woo!

Any book.

Pick a book!

(people clapping) Pick a book, any book.

We're coming from a place of love and saying that we want a better world.

Not just for Black people, for brown people, for Indigenous people, for white people, we want a world where we think differently.

We want a world where we see each other differently.

(students chattering) Unreflectively, we have created a two-tiered education system, and this is the education system's dirty little secret.

It is divisive, wasteful, and ultimately destructive to our society.

But even if we found somehow the resources to provide equal access to a quality education for all, we simply wouldn't know how to do it.

But I wasn't thinking about this yet back in the late 1970s.

At the time, I was contemplating yet another change in direction.

I didn't regret the two years that I spent doing experimental psychology, but I also knew I couldn't go on with it.

Around the same time they had their first kid, my brother Nate, in 1977.

(gentle music) So I now had some training in psychology and a degree in philosophy but nothing that a potential employer had any interest in buying.

(lively music) But then one day, he met a headhunter who knew of a pharmaceutical company called Abbott Labs in North Chicago.

Their researchers were having trouble communicating with their IT department, and they needed somebody who could translate between the two.

Somehow the headhunter and my dad decided this was a good fit for him.

I got tied into some really, really interesting projects, starting to do some things related to artificial intelligence.

I mean, I really drank the Kool-Aid.

I wanted to understand from an insider's perspective what that was about.

(gentle upbeat music) My parents decided to move about 40 miles south to Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Around the same time, on a camping trip in 1979, my mom felt sick and wanted to go home.

It turns out she was pregnant with my brother Carl.

In less than a year after having him, they had a similar discovery when they found out they were pregnant with me.

And eventually, I went to work for the AI group at Xerox.

That was a huge opportunity for me.

Xerox was one of the premiere places in AI in the world.

He could work from the Midwest, but the head office was in Palo Alto, California.

It looked to me like the computer science programs that were feasible were down in Chicago.

We needed to get closer to Chicago.

(gentle upbeat music) The big downside of the Xerox gig was traveling.

They told him at Xerox that he'd probably travel 50% of his job, and it was more like 70, 80%.

He was gone a lot, a lot of the time.

We had to provide technical support for the whole Midwest, and so almost every week, I was making trips.

There was a point when I was working in an office in Palo Alto and commuting from Libertyville.

So I would go out there and work for five days.

On Friday night, I would fly back.

And on Sunday night, I was staying in a hotel in Palo Alto.

So I was away a lot, which was not a good thing for a young family that had a bunch of active little kids.

It was also not a good thing for trying to pursue a graduate program, and I was doing courses that whole time.

It was really just hanging on by a very, very narrow thread.

And your mother was during the week operating like a single mom.

She didn't have anybody to give her a break, and she held that whole show together while I was pursuing this dream.

(gentle guitar music) We, I guess, developed over those years that he was gone a lot, a way of doing our marriage that worked for both of us.

This is a first for me, so you're certainly putting me on the spot.

(chuckles) So, I don't know if it was the nature of the fact that dad was traveling made it that she bought into it.

I don't know where that came from, but she just always seemed like the most like natural mom I saw out of anybody.

I mean, she really made us the center of her life.

(gentle music continues) I didn't expect really to have a career, and I think I was probably at the tail end of people who never even gave it much thought.

Once I had a kid, I had no other interest in working.

(gentle music continues) On the day when my dad was set to earn his PhD, a large portion of a tree had fallen down in our yard overnight, blocking the front door.

I went out the back of the house through the kitchen and successfully defended my thesis.

When he got back home, my mom was sitting in the front yard with a couple of friends.

And they had a chainsaw and a bottle of champagne.

So we came home and we celebrated, and then we sawed up the tree.

After years struggling with school as a kid and then sticking with it long after starting work and a family- I was now well on my way to becoming a professor myself.

My family continued to move around as my dad's job situation changed at Xerox.

The business unit was winding down.

That position was clearly gonna go away.

We moved to Springfield, Illinois after he was offered a job with the medical school there.

They needed somebody with a background in technology that could become a part of the research group in Springfield.

In 1990, I had the pleasure of attending a keynote address by the anthropologist Lucy Suchman.

At the time, she was studying, of all things, how ordinary folks learned to use a copy machine.

Her work drew heavily on the writings of a contemporary sociologist, Harold Garfinkel.

Garfinkel was born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of a furniture dealer.

A foundational problem in sociology is figuring out how orderly social activity is p When you look around at the wo it's an orderly place.

Things are happening, things are in flux.

There's change, there's... you know, stuff is happening.

But it's not chaos.

Chaos is extraordinarily rare.

That could be referred to as the problem of social order "How is order possible?"

And the old thinking is that order is based on rules, that we follow a set of rules and that when we are very young we are socialized into those rul so that even though we may no be able to articulate what the r we know how to follow the rules.

The social world that we kno around us and that we experience are not dropped on us from above but things that we build by participating on a moment-by-moment basis.

They're built from the bottom up So much of social science and philosophy and human inquiry for thousands of years has been organized around the idea that this order must pre-exist whatever is going on.

If that was true, we as people had no freedom to break from the rules.

Garfinkel's inspiration were in phenomenology.

He's interested in how people's actions become meaningful, and phenomenology, they were interested in how you recognize any kind of object.

You could take a pen and I can hold it up like this.

And we would both say "Well, we're looking at the same But any way I hold it, we're go be looking at it from different because we sit in different places in space.

And beyond that, we have different histories.

Along comes Garfinkel, and he describes how those ideas have inspired his thinking.

But his interest was not in reco He was interested in recognizing and insults and instruction.

He called his idea ethnomethodology.

"Ethno" meaning people, and "methodology" meaning a study of their methods, how we make sens of each other in social interact Ethnomethods were meant to refer to the methods that people have of making sense.

In a very personal way, this work is is not an academic discipline.

This is a lifestyle Its a way of being in the world This is a quote from Harold Garfinkel.

"The following studies seek to treat practical activities, practical circumstances, and practical sociological reasoning as topics of empirical study."

Searching for the meaning in our interactions almost feels like a riddle to me.

I had no idea that this was a question my dad was wrestling with all of these years.

That was Garfinkel's primary notion, that you do not get a world, a world created by interactions, done through interaction for the most part, because that's how the world works, without building an idea of how these guys make sense together.

That is so fundamental in Garfinkel and in some ways even more in Sacks.

Harvey Sacks, the one making conversation on the couch, learned from and worked with Garfinkel.

He put that on the table, and Sacks picked it up and ran with it, and ran with it like hell.

He established a line of inquiry, a line of research, conversation analysis, which was enormously successful.

There are thousands of articles that have been written.

Sacks was much more interested in tinkering around with how things worked.

He'd see some piece of talk, and he'd say, "Why do they put it that way rather than the other way?"

And they had the idea that we could answer these questions empirically by looking at recordings of conversations.

Conversation creates like a gigantic puzzle board in which different pieces bit by bit can be put in.

Both these people were people of true genius.

Unfortunately, his career was very short.

He tragically died in a automobile accident quite young when he was just getting going.

And to lose Sacks at the age of 40 was a real disaster.

Quite oddly, his lectures were all recorded and transcribed and ended up being widely circulated all over the world.

Usually, what takes place in an undergraduate sociology class is of no interest to anybody, but Gail Jefferson was one of Harvey Sack's students.

And his lectures were recorded because she recorded 'em.

She invented a way of transcribing conversation in detail, including pauses, stress, all of the things that impart meaning to talk.

That's an incredible thing.

In this footage of Gail Jefferson, you can see an example of her transcription where numbers show how long she pauses in between words, underlines mean the word was stressed, and arrows show whether her voice goes up or down.

So I looked at her and I said, "Cathy," I said, "I feel personally affronted that you would do it in a place that I work and put me in a position like you just put me in. She's not talking about any of that, and it's just building itself up through it.

She's telling a story.

Whatever the story is, we listen to it.

As Wood says, it's quite plausible.

We take it at face value, and we don't look for these, quotes, autistic productions that are creeping around through the matrix of the talk.

It's there.

It's there if you look for it, and you can find it.

(projector rattling) (tram rattling) So Garfinkel paved the way for others to study interaction, and in a way we've all been, if not studying, at least doing something similar.

I think everyone loves some version of that.

Whether like if you're a sports fan, that's what you're doing, you're staring at the TV, and you're like, you're second guessing and saying, "Oh, look at the replay.

Oh, you did that."

You can do it with, you know, filmed dramas and comedies too.

I think there's just something kind of joyful about everyone having a say about something.

I imagine it was my dad's enthusiasm for this subject that earned him the nickname, the "Interaction Cowboy."

And it was Reed Stevens who came up with it at a conference the two attended in Wyoming.

And it did come with a hat, so, you know.

(chuckles) Voila.

And I was steaming right along, and then this guy shows up.

He was a surgeon, and he had this idea that he was gonna study instruction in the operating room.

And I thought, "Hmm, well that's an interesting idea."

Garfinkel's notion that if you wanna understand jazz improvisation, or classroom teaching, or what goes on in the surgical theater, you have to achieve the understandings of the people you're observing.

And what's challenging is we're looking at stuff that everybody takes for granted.

There are people who study how people go in and out of buildings.

There's a guy who studies, how do we read poetry?

I mean, anything and everything is open and available.

One person working in ethnomethodology named David Sudnow, studied jazz improvisation until becoming a jazz pianist himself.

I said, "Fine, how can I help?"

Surgeons are the most highly trained people in our society.

Annes hiding under her desk until we put the cameras away.

How many cameras would it take to be able to capture enough of that event to be able to reconstruct it for scientific purposes?

(cars whooshing) (gentle upbeat music) Tim and I were working very closely together, and we had cameras mounted on the foreheads of the attending physicians.

We had them so that the person could see the entire surround, and then there was a camera on the wall.

We collected these intertwined views.

We did a recording, and when we went back to the lab and looked at it... All right, let's just give this a roll and see what we got here.

It was like a revelation.

I thought, "Whoa, somebody could really do something with this!"

When you work in a field, you start to take so much of it as normal, when in reality, what we do is pretty much as far from normal as most people could think about.

Put your fingers right in here, you can feel the promontory, and we're off to the left of midline.

We're probably gonna have to come in there and start opening that up.

Feel there.

You feel that?

Okay, now how much of that was normal procedure, and how much of that was a instructional activity of the... What do you mean?

I mean, to me it was all pretty normal.

(chuckles) Dr. Koschmann was looking at different interactions.

He wasn't just interested in watching what was going on on the surgical field, he was interested in watching the interactions of the team.

As long as you can figure out a way to get a camera into the huddle, you have this perfect view onto what everybody is talking about.

I'm sure that we were communicating in ways that we didn't consciously know.

And Tim is like, "Well, wait a minute.

He's taking in and he's looking, "What does this particular movement mean?"

And it was just very interesting to kind of try to unpack that.

If your interest is in instruction, what better place could there be to look for it?

It's gotta be there.

It's gotta be there.

I've never seen a data collection that was so careful, so precise.

In my opinion, the data set that Tim put together has no equal.

Tim had sent me a couple of his manuscripts to go through, and I have to tell you, they were hard to read.

I remember talking with him about some of the terminology because if I read the word, I would think I know what the word meant.

And he would be, "No, that's not really what it means.

In our world this means..." And so it just made that so much more difficult.

There was a fair amount of misunderstanding of what I did and what I was doing at the medical school.

I think a lot of people didn't really understand what he was trying to accomplish.

And sometimes, the easiest thing, you know, when you don't understand what someone's trying to accomplish is to kind of, you know, just not pay a lot of attention.

That can be difficult.

There's a kind of isolation.

But I don't think he let that bother him.

I think he just went on his own way and still tried to do, you know, do the work that he wanted to do.

My academic life was lived through conferences and going out and seeking colleagues, seeking like-minded souls.

And that meant I did do a lot of travel.

I got to see the sort of conferences he goes to firsthand on a trip to Germany.

(gentle upbeat music) (bicycle whizzing) When you go to a conference, you're pulled away from the everyday stuff, which keeps your mind very full.

And in that little vacation, it allows you to kind of reorder all of your beliefs about what you're doing and sort of encourages you to start to move in a different direction.

Cheers, Tim.

(glasses clink) Here we go.

(man laughing) (relaxing music) (cup whooshes) (coffee maker sputtering) The person is withdrawing from, he is withdrawing from mutual- The keynote speaker for this conference is Lorenza Mondada from Switzerland.

She's a longtime colleague of my dad's and seems to be something of an academic rockstar.

I think the advantage of the work that Tim has done, he can make sense- Typically, his presentations are about very few fragments, maybe only one fragment, which at first sight for the audience would be horribly complex, and the audience doesn't see anything.

And then progressively at the end of the talk, people begin to see details and to make sense of what happens.

These interviews feel like one-on-one lessons directly from the experts of this field.

And it seems like I have my dad's reputation to thank for that.

I was constantly surprised at how well known he seems to be here.

He's given me tons of reading and ideas and critical feedback.

And it's been great.

That's my dad you're talkin' about.

That's your dad.

Yeah.

(cars whooshing) (calm music) If I look back over my career, doing travel was a necessity.

The really big insights that led me to make decisions about what I'm going to work on next, which direction I'm going to go with my career, very often those decisions are made around a conference.

I would say I probably got to four or five conferences every year, and many of those conferences were outside the country.

(calm music continues) (cars humming) (leaves rustling) You want to clap your hands in front of your face?

(hands clapping) Okay.

Hi, I'm Tim Koschmann, I'm running for the Orchard View School Board.

Well, the first thing I told him is goals.

I gave him a set of five goals, Meet and talk with every voter, goal A.

Can you do that?

Probably not.

I think we need to put in place educational reforms that will make our students be lifelong learners.

Oh, yeah, I did recommend that he buy a list, probably from data from your county clerk, but I don't think we ever did that.

I had so little experience as a political entity.

"So little" is actually, I ha no experience, zero experience.

I had no idea what I was getting into.

I think there was some local newspaper that sent out a questionnaire for the candidates, and dad was the only one who responded.

And at that point, I think we thought, "Well, maybe he is the most engaged applicant."

You go door to door, and it's an interesting challenge as a candidate to say, "What we need to do is look for something that never has been."

And a lot of people are gonna shut the door in your face.

So some of 'em go bad, but in the process, you're learning how to talk about these things.

But I think in the end, those efforts were not enough to get over the deficit he had going into this election by being a name no one had heard of.

He didn't win the school board election, but he was never a career politician anyway.

And he still did it, doing what Dewey wanted, to become engaged citizens and lifelong learners.

(calm music) For Dewey, the success o democracy rests with our ability to achieve success with our public education.

As for the man who was favored over Dewey, in 2020, Columbia voted to take his name off of one of their buildings.

This morning Columbia is changing the name of a building named after a man who held racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic ideals.

Thorndike Hall at Columbia Teaching College was named after psychologist, Edward Thorndike, nearly 50 years ago.

The board of trustees voted last night to unanimously remove his name.

But while his name can easily be removed from a building, the question is how to remove his ideas from the school system, or if that's even possible.

In times of massive flux, we have failed to prepar students for the changing world in which they will find themselves after they leave school.

The goal of education should never be to indoctrinate, but rather to produce the next generation of lifelong learners, learners we hope who will b smarter and better problem solve than we have been.

(wood clattering) While conversation analysis has taken off in other fields such as linguistics, there's a concern that some of the original ideas of ethnomethodology, or EM for short, may be forgotten about.

The people who were hardcore EM have been marginalized within sociology.

Many of them have struggled to find work.

I think the sun is starting to set on on that field, and that's too bad.

Garfinkel died in 2011, but his papers can be found at the Special Collections Library at UCLA.

On a trip there, my dad wanted to look through those papers and wondered if he could find an email from 2004.

(calm music) To his surprise, Garfinkel had written him, praising his work.

"I'd like to send you som things I've written," he wrote, if you can send me some things, say your articles on gestures, we can get something started.

Very best regards, Harold."

What Garfinkel was trying to say, I think he was fundamentally on the right track.

My dad went to his house in LA, and they went over his work together line by line.

He said it was a highlight of his career.

Spending this time with him, I can't help but remember I didn't always feel as close to him when I was a kid.

I felt closer to my mom, and he felt more distant.

I wondered if he felt any regret for having spent so much time away from home.

Did that ever lead to feelings of regret?

Where would the regret come from?

From the people more locally, like not understanding what you're, what you're doing.

I think these were the local people I meant.

(gentle music) I don't know that I had a feeling of regret, that that was the case.

I observed that, and at some point, you just kind of accept that, that you may not be able to explain to anybody how you got to where you are or what it means to you.

Quite honestly, I always looked on that as kind of a failing on my own part, in that, when people ask me that question, "So, what is it that you do?"

My heart would always sink because I didn't have a very good answer for that for myself.

(gentle music continues) It wouldn't be fair to say that he kept his work away from us entirely.

(gentle music continues) He actually introduced me to his world of video-making yea by showing me how to edit.

(gentle music continues) Something that has made a big difference in my life.

Good.

Okay.

(people faintly speaking) (people laughing) Getting ready to head on over there, get set up.

We're having a press conference at the House Triangle to release the Equity or Else campaigns Quality of Life platform.

And we call it Equity or Else 'cause we saying, if we don't have equity, our communities will continue to lose hope.

And if we don't get equity, we're going to organize until we get it.

We are here today because we know that those closest to the pain must be closest to the power.

And the status quo has been people running institutions in our community based on their opinions of us, and they're not being accountabl when those institutions fail our communities.

You can't, you know legislate your way out of this, but you can create policies that help us to get the space we need to transform hearts and minds.

(crowd cheering and clapping) Lift every voice and sing Till earth and heaven ring Ring with the harmony Of liberty Because America's changing, we all know it, right?

America is changing, the demographics is changing, but what America either transforms into or mutates into, it's on us at the end of the day.

Give yourselves a round of applause.

Thank you for coming.

Thank you for being here.

(crowd cheering and clapping) (gentle music) In the end, I know my dad has been building towards an argument.

If I'm understanding it right, we have Thorndike and his studying of lab rats to thank for an education system that's way too focused on tests.

And my dad is saying that misses the point entirely when we don't actually know what's taking place in the classroom.

Despite the fact that there have always been teachers who have been able to engage students in critical thinking, to awaken the student's curiosity, to inspire them to achieve boldly, we've remained systematically inarticulate about how teachers and students do this in concert.

We don't know what people are doing, and that to me is a problem.

And your dad is up there saying, "That's a problem.

That's a big problem.

Hello, wake up!"

To develop this understanding, we will need a new science of instruction, one that focuses on the interactional practices through which instruction is accomplished in the moment.

It will be a science of sense making.

It seems like such a long shot to change the entire education system, but I think he's planting the seed for any future ethnomethodologists and education reformers.

What I get from a lot of people is, "How is it going to make education better?"

They're looking for a simple fix, one that might improve test scores.

I've been looking at the foundations of the field, however, trying to imagine a real science of instruction.

The contribution, if one is to be had, will be of a very different kind.

(calm music) Maybe documentary filmmaking is not so different from ethnomethodology after all.

There's an interest in observing people and their interactions with as little bias as possible.

(gentle music) But this is still not an ethnomethodological study.

(gentle music continues) You can only see things from our own perspective.

(door squeaks) The road is without end.