Summary articles cultural diversity
Lecture 1 articles
1) The importance of understanding children’s lived experience
Abstract:
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.
Introduction:
The article emphasizes the need for developmental research to shift its focus towards understanding
children's lived experiences and practices in their everyday cultural settings. The authors argue that
children's development occurs within and through these everyday experiences, which are inherently
cultural. 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.
The article draws attention to the theoretical and empirical significance of understanding children's
everyday lives, citing Jerome Bruner's shift in research methodology. Bruner's move from a controlled
laboratory setting to observing children in their homes revealed the importance of communication in
familiar routines. The articles argues for broadening the field’s portfolio of research by examining
(rather than assuming) generality of findings across situations and populations, interpreting findings
based on knowledge of children’s lives rather than researchers’ intuitions, and studying child
development in the ecologies in which it occurs.
Children learn and develop through everyday participation in cultural practices: a theoretical
perspective:
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 this theoretical framework, culture is seen as the ways of life of generations of people in
communities (including their ways of thinking and orienting) that are shared in a community. Children
observe, contribute to, discuss, and are instructed about cultural practices through interactions with
family, peers, and community members. . While participating in cultural practices, children grow and
transform their ways of being. Children’s interactions are part of the ways of life. The article argues
that theories of practice provide a way to integrate contextual and cultural aspects into the
understanding of child development.
Unlike traditional views of internalization, this perspective posits child development as a process of
growth in ways of participating in community endeavors, emphasizing the transformation of
participation rather than internalization. The article challenges the notion of a boundary between
individuals and their context/culture, suggesting that people do not simply participate but are
actively engaged in specific events, building on the ways of life of their cultural communities.
The cultural aspects of children's development are considered essential to understanding their lived
experience, including both variations across communities and commonalities in aspects such as daily
,routines, caregiver guidance, and community values. The article underscores the need to study
people's everyday lives in various communities to discern cultural differences and commonalities,
contributing to an expanded understanding of human development.
Still working to integrate contextual and cultural aspects of children’s lives in the study of
development
There was a crisis in psychology when the field realized the limitations of ignoring context in human
development. This led to a self-examination within the developmental psychology, resulting in two
directions of interest: one focusing on understanding children's development in the contexts of their
lives, and the other dividing what had been regarded as general faculties into more specific domains.
Despite theoretical progress, the article argues that the field still tends to treat cultural aspects as
external influences on individual characteristics, rather than understanding individuals in their
cultural contexts. It criticizes the limited attention given to children's lived cultural experiences and
emphasizes the necessity of a mutually constituting approach, considering culture as both ways of
living that individuals engage in and contribute to.
Generality across communities and across situations: an empirical matter
Developmental psychology’s ignorance of children’s everyday lives frequently leads to
overgeneralization. This article criticizes the field's tendency to overgeneralize findings based on
limited populations, particularly European American middle-class samples. The authors argue that
understanding children's lived experiences is crucial for accurate interpretation and application of
research findings.
Paying attention to the nature of children’s everyday lives offers ways to investigate the extent to
which we can legitimately generalize from descriptions of findings of a particular study to other
populations and situations. Although laboratory settings are part of some children’s everyday
experience, the organization of laboratory research is not representative of much of the rest of
children’s everyday lives, in any community, but especially in communities where testing is not a
common experience. The article highlights the potential pitfalls of studying children in unusual or
unfamiliar settings, such as standardized tests and laboratory experiments. It suggests that
researchers should be attuned to the cultural context and everyday circumstances of children's lives
to enhance the meaningfulness of their studies.
Theories based on knowledge of children’s lives rather than researchers’ intuitions
The article advocates for a research approach that directly explores children's everyday lives to
inform and validate developmental theories, cautioning against overreliance on controlled
experiments that may not reflect the complexity of real-world situations. (Some conclusions cannot
be settled by laboratory experiments.)
Situating child development in the ecologies in which it occurs
The article emphasizes the need for developmental psychology to situate child development within
the ecologies in which it occurs, highlighting the importance of a holistic and ecological
understanding of children's lived experiences. It argues against treating individuals and cultural
aspects as isolated variables, urging researchers to consider the interconnectedness of various
features of everyday life in different families and communities.
,The critique extends to the assumption that children are self-contained entities with context-free
individual characteristics, challenging the common practice of using off-the-shelf measures that may
lack external validity. The article calls for a reconsideration of the belief that standardized tasks
automatically tap into general individual constructs, stressing the importance of understanding the
contextual meaning of tasks in diverse cultural settings.
The authors discuss the limitations of overgeneralizing children's performance in standard tasks,
particularly when applied across cultural contexts, and emphasize the significance of considering
children's interpretations of social situations based on their own lived experiences. The conclusion
raises a fundamental question about how children across communities learn to adapt their ways to
different settings.
How do children navigate across the distinct ecologies of their lives?
The sociocultural perspective emphasizes the need for a close examination of how children, along
with their companions and communities, support their learning of appropriate practices in different
settings. It raises questions about how children develop adaptive flexibility and generative strategies
to handle incongruencies across various settings in their lives.
Sum:
To understand child development requires psychology to attend closely to children’s lived experience.
Studying children’s everyday lives entails attention to cultural similarities as well as differences among
the different communities of the world. It is important even for understanding contemporary
childhood practices in the middle-class European American communities that have for too long been
treated as generic, normal ways of growing up, rather than fitting very interesting and specific
cultural contexts. This paper calls for greater consideration of how development happens through
everyday participation in cultural practices. In considering the role of everyday interactions,
researchers should rely on direct evidence, rather than intuitions, about children’s lives. Not all
studies need to have the same level of ecological validity, but we contend that most or all
developmental theories make claims that can only be tested by studying the everyday lives of
children. Many of those claims now go untested. Developmental psychology thus needs more
research on the cultural ecologies in which children develop. The study of the everyday lives of
children inherently turns our attention to children’s participation in the cultural, social, and historical
worlds that they inhabit and traverse. At the same time, the study of children’s cultural, social, and
historical worlds contributes to understanding the basic processes of human development as
processes of participation in life.
2) The Developmental Niche: A Conceptualization at the Interface of Child and Culture
Abstract:
Anthropological approaches to human development have been oriented primarily to the socialized
adult, at the expense of understanding developmental processes. Developmental psychology, in
contrast, has traditionally been concerned with a decontextualized, 'universal' child. After a brief
historical review, the 'developmental niche' is introduced as a framework for examining the cultural
structuring of child development. The developmental niche has three components: the physical and
social settings in which the child lives; the customs of child care and child rearing; and the psychology
of the caretakers. Homeostatic mechanisms tend to keep the three subsystems in harmony with each
other and appropriate to the developmental level and individual characteristics of the child.
Nevertheless, they have different relationships to other features of the larger environment and thus
constitute somewhat independent routes of disequilibrium and change. Regularities within and
, among the subsystems, and thematic continuities and progressions across the niches of childhood
provide material from which the child abstracts the social, affective, and cognitive rules of the
culture. Examples are provided from research in a farming community in Kenya.
-Research on human development has been shaped by two contrasting images. The first is of a single
individual in a controlled setting. The second image is of a person richly attired in ceremonial
garments and surrounded by friends and kin. The first image has been the object of psychological
research. The second image has been the domain of anthropological study.
Anthropological perspectives on human development
Culture resides in the individual mind; a theory of culture must therefore include how it gets there
and how it functions there. History and environment jointly influence the maintenance systems of a
society. From the maintenance system flow elements of the child’s learning environment.
Development is influenced by the environment.
Psychology and the environment
Developmental psychology underwent a fundamental change in its appreciation of the context of
development. The limitations of a purely analytic, laboratory discipline were argued by a number of
prominent authors, the validity of a developmental model based exclusively on the individual child
was questioned and fresh theories blossomed quickly from a varity of historical roots in order to
represent psychology’s new insights.
The developmental niche
The concept of the developmental niche lies at the juncture of the theoretical concerns in psychology
and anthropology. The models of the environment for development do not acknowledge its cultural
structuring, even though this may be the most important aspect of human ecology. The
developmental niche is a theoretical framework for studying cultural regulation of the micro-
environment of the child, and it attempts to describe this environment from the point of view of the
child in order to understand processes of development and acquisition of culture. The developmental
niche has three subsystems which operate together as a larger system and each operates with other
features of the culture. 1 The physical and social settings in which the child lives. 2 culturally
regulated customs of child care and child rearing and 3 the psychology of the caretakers. The three
components form the cultural context of child development.
1 Physical and social settings:
Physical aspects of the setting can shape the growing child’s experience at the most basic level.
Settings of daily life. Societal institutions have major effect on the age and sex of children’s daily
companions, and thus on the types of social interactions experienced. You can think about
differences in sleep patterns: do you have your own room or do you co-sleep with your child. Social
settings: gender segregation in children’s peer groups, do you hang out with only boys or also girls.
2 Customs of child care
All aspects of the physical setting are mediated by cultural adaptions in child care practices. Given the
human and technological resources available, parents and other caretakers adapt the customs of
child care to the ecological and cultural setting in which they live.
3 Psychology of the caretakers
There are many beliefs and values that are regulated by the culture and that in turn regulate
