Accepted Panels

International migration of children and families between the US, Mexico, and Guatemala means that children from any one of these countries are often attending school in a different country than where they started and/or a different country than that were their parents attended school. This means teachers in all three of these countries need to give some thought to building/supporting/acknowledging the various ‘webs of meaning’ that these children and families bring to school in their receiving society. Much of what teachers need to know references the ‘funds of knowledge’ and ‘ways of knowing’ of those whom they are charged to teach. Fortunately, it follows that parts of teacher preparation (both pre-service and in-service) are intentionally or de facto anthropological and that this kind of deployment of anthropology for professional preparation merits scrutiny in any broader inquiry into world anthropologies. This paper considers why students in any of these three countries might have experience in another one of them and how teachers are taught to think about the relevance of students’ prior educational experiences elsewhere and/or prospective future educational experiences elsewhere as part of the guidance for their professional practice. Part of the scrutiny of anthropology education involves considering what anthropological knowledge and perspectives are deemed worth teaching to whom and under what auspices. In this sense then, considering the cases of teacher preparation in three countries fits as part of a much larger question of the various roles in various countries of anthropology education for professional preparation. This too is way that world anthropologies both overlap and differ.