07-02 Lecture 1. Cultural diversity Pauline Slot
To keep up with the literature and to be fully prepared for the seminar you could make a
summary of each article by using the following questions. Each week some background and
directions on reading the articles will be published on Blackboard to focus your studying. In
general, it is important to keep the following questions in mind, especially for empirical
articles (i.e., reporting on a study rather than a theoretical article):
What is the main (research) question?
In what way is the question answered?
Which theories and key concepts are described?
What are the main results and or conclusions?
How is the article related to the theme of the week? The theme of the course? To lectures
and other articles?
This week’s readings present different ways of looking at culture and the role of culture in
child development and childrearing. What are the commonalities across these three articles?
Rogof, B., Dahl, A., & Callanan, M. (2018). The importance of understanding children’s
lived experience. Developmental Review, 50, 5-15.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2018.05.006
The article of Rogoff and colleagues criticizes the view that culture and people are separate
entities in which culture influences people as an external factor. It’s important that you
understand the way they see culture and the role it plays in child development. Also,
consider what the implications are for (conducting) research when studying child
development and/or the role of culture in development.
We argue that the field of developmental research needs a course-correction, to focus more
on describing the cultural paradigms of children’s lived experience — children’s participation
in the settings of their lives. This is essential information for understanding child
development. We describe a sociocultural theoretical perspective that focuses on children’s
participation in the everyday practices and settings of their lives, and examine the field’s
efforts over the past halfcentury to understand children’s lives in context. Several emphases
are needed for the field to understand lived experience: It is crucial to examine (rather than
assume) generality of findings across populations and situations; to interpret findings based
on knowledge of children’s lives rather than researchers’ intuitions; and to study children’s
development in the ecologies in which it occurs. We call for research on how children
everywhere learn to navigate across and participate in the distinct cultural settings of their
everyday lives.
Introduction
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,In this article we argue that the field of developmental research needs to focus more on
understanding children’s lived experience and practices in the everyday settings of their
lives, as participants in cultural communities. Children’s development occurs within and
through their everyday experiences, which, for all children everywhere, are cultural
experiences. It is important to understand the learning opportunities and the societal
organization that are involved in what they know and do. In developmental psychology, not
much attention is given to studying children living their lives, in the places that they live their
lives. Our stance is that the portfolio of our field needs a course-correction. To understand
child development requires deepening and updating our understanding of what children are
up to in their everyday lives, in the variety of cultural settings that they navigate. A key
question that emerges is how they manage their navigation across settings.
We argue that developmental psychology needs to broaden the research portfolio to include
more research that examines children’s lived experience, in company with other approaches
such as laboratory and experimental studies. Research that directly studies children’s
everyday lives needs to be more welcome in developmental psychology journals, as it makes
a substantial contribution to understanding human development. This welcome seems to
have shrunk across a few decades in developmental psychology journals. In addition to the
direct contributions to developmental psychology from research describing children’s lived
experience, this information is important to individual researchers across this field.
Developmental researchers need information about children’s everyday lives in order to
design and interpret research of all sorts. For example, to design laboratory procedures and
interviews that mean what the researchers think they mean and to interpret findings based
on the realities of the participants requires a body of research revealing children’s lived
experience.
Children learn and develop through everyday participation in cultural practices: a theoretical
perspective
There are a number of theoretical perspectives that focus on people’s lived experience, since
the early work of Bartlett and of Barker and Wright and before. Our call for developmental
psychology to pay more attention to children’s lived experience builds from a broad
sociocultural/historical practice perspective, which posits that learning and development
occur in the process of people’s participation in the activities and events of their cultural
communities.
In participation or practice theoretical stances, culture is viewed as the ways of life of
generations of people in communities (including their ways of thinking and orienting) that
are shared in a community. Participation includes keen observation of others as well as
contributing to decisions and endeavors with ideas as well as action. Children observe,
contribute to, discuss, and are instructed about cultural practices through everyday
interactions with siblings, peers, parents, and other community members. While
participating in cultural practices, children grow and transform their ways of being.
In participation theory, individual and context or culture are not viewed as separate entities;
instead they are considered mutually constituting aspects of the process of life. The
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, participation view goes a step further than Vygotsky’s claim that what was external becomes
internal, by dispensing with the idea of internalization of external events. Instead of treating
development as a process of internalization, Rogoff, 1997, Rogoff, 2003 argues that we can
more parsimoniously view child development as a process of growth in ways of participating
in the endeavors of their communities, in a process of transformation of participation.
We emphasize that cultural aspects of children’s development are essential to
understanding their lived experience. Children’s cultural participation is not limited to the
aspects of their lives that vary across communities. Their cultural participation also involves
features that are held in common across communities, which include some aspects of
children’s daily routines, their caregivers’ efforts to guide them, and community values.
Still working to integrate contextual and cultural aspects of children’s lives in the study of
development
Our call for greater attention to children’s lived experience (which includes the “cultural
nature of human development,” Rogoff, 2003) continues a discussion that heated up a half-
century ago, about the importance of context (including cultural context) in understanding
human psychology.
In the 1960s and 1970s, psychology went through a crisis, when researchers and scholars
realized the limitations of the field that stem from ignoring the role of context in human
development.
A key debate arose from many cross-cultural studies that indicated that Piaget’s constructs
(‘having’ object permanence or concrete operational thinking, for example) appeared at
quite different ages in different cultural communities, and even in the same individual,
depending on the task context. The issue of variation across cultural communities, especially
in formal operations, led Piaget to change his theory to acknowledge the central role of
schooling and other experience in people’s response to formal operations tasks.
In the face of overwhelming evidence of the importance of context, especially across varied
cultural communities, developmental psychology self-examined. The result was a growth in
interest in two directions, one that looked more at the contexts of children’s lives, and
another that reduced the generality of the psychological constructs:
1.
One direction focused on understanding children’s development in contexts of their lives.
This included increased interest in including school learning and informal learning in the
study of cognition, for example by examining memory development in contexts such as child
testimony in legal settings and in narrating personal events, and studying spatial cognition as
people plan routes or navigate in real spaces, and so on. Inspired in part by cultural research,
Vygotsky’s theory, and sociolinguistic research and scholarship, this direction spawned
theoretical advances that comprise various sociocultural theoretical approaches mentioned
in the previous section.
2.
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