Think Locally, Act Globally: Contributions of African Research to Child Development

STRENGTHENING AFRICA’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO CHILD

DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH

SELECTED PAPERS FROM AN INVITATIONAL CONFERENCE RESULTING IN AN ACTION PLAN AND STRATEGIES TO SUPPORT CAPACITY BUILDING FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY

RESEARCH ON CHILDREN’S DEVELOPMENT, HEALTH, AND WELFARE IN AFRICA

STUDY GROUP LEADERS: Kofi Marfo, Ph.D. University of South Florida Alan Pence, Ph.D. University of Victoria

CONFERENCE SPONSORS: Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), with matching funds from the “Investigating Quality” Project, University of Victoria, Canada

CONFERENCE LOCATION: Victoria, Canada February 2-6, 2009

STUDY TEAM MEMBERS

Sara Harkness, Ph.D., University of Connecticut, U.S.A

Çiğdem Kağitçibaşi, Ph.D., Koç University, TURKEY

Robert A. LeVine, Ph.D., Harvard University, U.S.A

Kofi Marfo, Ph.D., University of South Florida, U.S.A

Peter A. M. Mwaura, Ph.D., Madrasa Resource Centers, KENYA

Robert G. Myers, Ph.D., Independent Researcher, MEXICO

A. Bame Nsamenang, Ph.D., Yaounde University, CAMEROON

Alan Pence, Ph.D., University of Victoria, CANADA

Robert Serpell, Ph.D., University of Zambia, ZAMBIA

Charles M. Super, Ph.D., University of Connecticut, U.S.A

RESTRICTED PRE-PUBLICATION RELEASE TO SELECTED AGENCIES These papers have been accepted for publication as a Special Section in Child Development Perspectives, a peer-review journal of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD). Questions about the capacity-building initiative as well as suggestions regarding potential funding avenues may be addressed to Kofi Marfo ([email protected]) or Alan Pence ([email protected]). Questions on individual papers should be addressed to the corresponding author through the e-mail address appearing at the bottom of each article’s first page.

mailto:[email protected]


CONTENTS

Strengthening Africa’s Contributions to Child Development Research: Overview and Ways Forward Kofi Marfo, Alan Pence, Robert A. LeVine, and Sarah LeVine

Strengthening Africa’s Contributions to Early Childhood Care and Development Research:

Historical, Conceptual, and Structural Challenges

Alan Pence

Think Locally, Act Globally: Contributions of African Research to Child Development

Charles M. Super, Sara Harkness, Oumar Barry, and Marian Zeitlin

Social Responsibility as a Dimension of Intelligence, and as an Educational Goal:

Insights from Programmatic Research in an African Society

Robert Serpell Bridging Culture, Research and Practice in Early Childhood Development:

The Madrasa Resource Centers Model in East Africa

Peter A. M. Mwaura and Kofi Marfo

Envisioning an African Child Development Field Kofi Marfo

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13

24

37

51

61

Strengthening Africa’s Contributions to Child Development

Research: Overview and Ways Forward

Kofi Marfo1, Alan Pence2, Robert A. LeVine3, Sarah LeVine3 1University of South Florida, 2University of Victoria, 3Harvard University

ABSTRACT: The papers in this special section were initially prepared for an invitational confe-

rence funded by the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) and held in Victoria,

Canada, in February 2009, with joint sponsorship by the University of Victoria’s Investigating

Quality project. In this lead article, we establish the rationale for focusing on Africa as part of the

broader objective of advancing an inclusive global science of child development, provide a brief

overview of the thrust of the other papers, describe two research capacity-building initiatives

culminating from our strategic planning sessions, and conclude with reflections on conceptual

and methodological considerations for advancing an African field.

KEY WORDS: Child development in Africa; research capacity-building; culture and child development re-

search; disciplinary and methodological integration; theoretical integration

The papers in this special section resulted from an invitational conference on Strengthening Africa’s

Contributions to Child Development Research held in Victoria, Canada, in February 2009. The confe-

rence was conceived in response to SRCD‘s call in late 2007 for proposals from its membership to

pursue small-group scholarly activities that could advance the Society‘s values and strategic priori-

ties regarding multidisciplinarity, cultural and contextual diversity, and international perspectives

in child development research. The group leaders welcomed the call as an opportunity to raise

awareness about the underrepresentation of non-Western knowledge contributions to child devel-

* The conference for which the papers in this special section were prepared was co-sponsored by the Society for Re-

search in Child Development and the Investigating Quality (IQ) Project at the University of Victoria, Canada. The

team leaders gratefully acknowledge members Dr. Cigdem Kağitçibaşi, Dr. Robert G. Myers, and Dr. A. Bame Nsa-

menang, whose equally important contributions are only briefly abstracted in this paper, and Dr. Veronica Pacini-

Ketchabaw, IQ Project Co-Investigator, for her participation and support throughout the conference. The team is also

thankful to Marie-Germaine Chartrand, Lynette Jackson, and Debbie Blakely of the University of Victoria for organi-

zational and logistical support. The first author is thankful to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral

Sciences at Stanford, where much of his contribution to the final version of this paper was written.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kofi Marfo, Department of Psychological &

Social Foundations, University of South Florida—EDU105, 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, Tampa, Florida, U.S.A

33620. E-mail: [email protected].


SRCD Africa Child Development Research Capacity Building Study Group Kofi Marfo, Alan Pence, Robert LeVine, and Sarah LeVine – Child Development Research in Africa

2

opment inquiry and to create a forum for an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars to ex-

amine the African context specifically. The group‘s work was cast in the larger context of advancing

a science of child development that opens up to populations and possibilities outside the Euro-

American world (Pence & Marfo, 2008).

THE CASE FOR FOCUSING ON AFRICA

As is evident from the analysis by Super, Harkness, Barry, and Zeitlin (this issue), Africa already

occupies a position of importance in the history of child development research by virtue of its attrac-

tiveness as a location for early researchers searching for universal patterns in human development

or seeking to test the generalizability of Western theories. Influential footprints from investigations

carried out on the continent by expatriate scholars, especially in the second and third quarters of the

twentieth century, are evident today not only in domain-specific theorizing — in such areas as at-

tachment (e.g., Ainsworth, 1967, 1977), socialization (e.g., LeVine, 1974, 1988, LeVine et al., 1994; Le-

Vine & LeVine, 1988; Weisner, 1987, 1989), motor development (e.g., Leiderman et al., 1973; Super,

1976), and cognition (e.g., Cole, Gay, Glick, & Sharp, 1971) — but also in broader conceptual frame-

works for understanding contextual influences on human development generally (e.g., Super &

Harkness, 1986; Weisner, 1984). These contributions, along with newer generations of itinerant re-

search, have been published extensively in North American and international journals and in specia-

lized monographs and collective volumes from major publishing houses. They are easily accessible

to scholars from all over the world, barring resource limitations.

A different picture emerges when the focus shifts to contributions by resident African scholars

approaching the study of child development through lenses and questions grounded in the conti-

nent‘s practical realities and challenges. In many regards, the power dynamics between rich and

poor societies — as reflected in differential access to research funding opportunities, publication

avenues, major conferences, and other professional/academic gate-keeping — virtually ensure the

marginalization of intellectual agendas contemplated outside the Western academy (Pence & Marfo,

2008). It is always possible to point to evidence suggesting that things are improving but indisputa-

bly scholarly perspectives on issues with conceptual and practical relevance to Africa do not find

ready acceptance in leading Western journals. This is in part because the point of reference for de-

termination of relevance in these journals is often the Euro-American worldview (Arnett, 2008).

In Africa, research funding is virtually non-existent and outlets for dissemination of the little re-

search that is produced — funded or otherwise — are sparse. With limited, often delayed, access to

current literature from other parts of the world, many scholars are rendered non-competitive in their

efforts to publish their work in reputable international journals. The net result of these conditions is

that much of the research conducted by African scholars on the continent is confined to a grey litera-

ture, the expanse and content of which should be a subject for research. The grey literature is defined

to include unpublished theses (master‘s and doctoral), working papers, technical research reports,

conference proceedings, as well as scholarship appearing in periodicals/monographs with limited

circulation beyond the issuing institution. In a paper assessing cognitive development research on

the continent, Serpell (1984) noted that as a result of challenges like those highlighted here, it was

easier to conduct a systematic survey of trends from outside Africa than from inside.


3

This picture has not changed much even with advances in information and communication

technologies, although there is a bright spot worth highlighting here. Under the auspices of the As-

sociation of African Universities (AAU), the Database on African Theses and Dissertations (DATAD;

http://www.aau.org/datad/database/), was launched in April 2003 with funding from the Ford

and Rockefeller Foundations. Along with other initiatives around the continent (e.g., Metcalfe, Es-

seh, & Willinsky, 2009), DATAD should begin to fill some of the gap, but full-text access to docu-

ments through the emerging platforms is still years away. DATAD is just one example of how Afri-

ca‘s Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are responding to the critical need for capacity building

and infrastructural development activities to advance research. This need was underscored in AAU

initiatives to position HEIs as positive change agents across the continent and enable African scho-

lars to strengthen their role in research and policy analysis. The AAU‘s 1999 Strategic Plan objec-

tives, embedded later in the core program of activities for 2005-2009, emphasized (a) strengthening

capacity for knowledge generation and dissemination, and (b) enhancing the presence and influence

of African universities on continental/international bodies (www.aau.org/coreprog/ 0509/CP2005-

09.pdf).

Our study group hoped to accomplish at least two complementary outcomes regarding research

capacity building in Africa. First, along with other initiatives on the continent — e.g., the regional

research workshops organized by the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development

(ISSBD) and the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology (IACCP) — we hoped that

the capacity building initiatives emerging from our work could serve as one model of how the

AAU‘s own strategic goals might be achieved. Second, we hoped that our work would give SRCD

enhanced representation in efforts by international research organizations to support inquiry and

research education in Africa.

It may be tempting to view Africa‘s disadvantage in knowledge production and dissemination

as an African problem, but while many of the issues raised here have been framed around Africa

because of our project‘s specialized focus, they are applicable to other parts of the non-Western

world. Thus, left unaddressed, the constraints to knowledge production and dissemination identi-

fied here will only serve to perpetuate the contextually slanted nature of existing knowledge, under-

cutting the credibility of any claims that might be made about a global knowledge base.

PROJECT GOALS AND OUTCOMES

The conference was organized to: (1) examine the status and needs of the child development field in

Africa, (2) share perspectives on the institutionalization of child development research on the conti-

nent, (3) present insights from research programs and practice initiatives on the continent, and (4)

identify networking and capacity-building needs for future action. The study group encompassed a

diverse blend of expertise and backgrounds, and included scholars from anthropology, early child-

hood care/development, economics, education, and psychology. The first three goals were ad-

dressed through working papers — prepared and distributed ahead of the conference — providing

the foundation for the scholarly deliberations, while the final goal served to ensure that a substantial

part of the group‘s time was devoted to discussion and strategic planning toward research capacity-

building on the continent. In the remaining sections, we provide a brief orienting framework for the

https://email.usf.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=b154c8fae13b43d3b09026df2048485f&URL=http%3a%2f%2fwww.aau.org%2fdatad%2fdatabase%2flogin.php

http://www.aau.org/coreprog/%200509/CP2005-09.pdf

http://www.aau.org/coreprog/%200509/CP2005-09.pdf


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other papers, introduce the central research capacity building proposal emerging from the confe-

rence, and present some reflections on ways to advance contextually grounded inquiry in Africa.

The contributions in this special section are only a subset of the working papers discussed at the

Victoria conference, but they reflect the diversity of perspectives resulting from the selection of scho-

lars. At an initial classificatory level, there are two broad kinds of contributions: those addressing the

general challenge of institutionalizing and supporting child development research on the continent

and those synthesizing empirical and theoretical insights from past and current research. Beyond

that, the following specific themes describe the collection: cultural-historical critique of the Wester-

nization of childhood and child development research in Africa (Pence); synthesis of contributions

that Africa has made to a global field through the work of expatriate scholars (Super, Harkness, Bar-

ry, & Zeitlin); integration of insights and lessons from a sustained program of research on the conti-

nent by a resident African scholar (Serpell); insights from an applied research program that could

serve as a model for building systematic inquiry into community-based services (Mwaura & Marfo),

and a visioning about disciplinary development on the continent (Marfo). The scholarly contribu-

tions constituted one aspect of the study group‘s work. The other aspect was the strategic planning

over how best to support research capacity building. In the remainder of this section we provide a

quick overview of that part of our work.

Strategies to Support Research Capacity Building

The health and developmental challenges facing the world‘s poorest children continue to receive the

attention of researchers and development assistance professionals (Walker et al., 2007). Africa has

an extremely high and disproportionate representation of children at risk for serious developmental

and health problems. Even as international agencies, donor nations, and private foundations make

fiscal investments in programs to address African children‘s problems, very little of the research that

can provide guidance on how to address these problems has been conducted on the continent (see

recent articles by the International Child Development Steering Group –Engle et al., 2007; Gran-

tham-McGregor et al., 2007).

Inquiry needed to generate the locally relevant knowledge base to guide policies and interven-

tions cannot be sustained unless there is sufficient local expertise capable of conducting conceptually

and methodologically sound research. The study group‘s deliberations on research capacity-

building culminated in a two-pronged strategy combining the institutionalization of model field re-

search programs with support for the preparation and mentoring of new generations of researchers.

A Regional Multi-Site Field Research Model:

Under the first strategy, we developed the broader outlines of what could ultimately become a pro-

posal to seek grant support from a consortium of funding agencies to establish a sustainable multi-

site longitudinal research program. The research would be designed and directed by scholars on the

continent and carried out within a network of three regional sites, one each for West, East, and

Southern Africa.


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The design of the program would be informed by insights gained from large-scale research pro-

grams that have demonstrated impressive success and sustainability in regions of the world with

similar economic and geopolitical circumstances. It would also be informed by small-scale longitu-

dinal projects emphasizing child health and development outcomes. Examples of the former include

the still-running biomedical surveillance program begun in Matlab, Bangladesh, in the 1960s (Aziz &

Mosley, 1997) and the more recent Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Study involving a co-

hort of Filipino women and their children born between May 1983 and April 1984 (Cebu Study

Team, 1991). Examples of the latter include the Institute of Nutrition in Central America and Pana-

ma (INCAP) intervention studies, 1969-1977 (Townsend, Klein, Irwin, Owens et al., 1982; Scrimshaw

& Guzman, 1997) and, closer to home, South Africa‘s Birth to Ten/Twenty study (Barbarin & Rich-

ter, 2001; Richter, Norris, Pettifor, Yach, & Cameron, 2007). The South African project is uniquely

relevant because its designers struggled through, and explicitly addressed, challenges in reconciling

recognition of culture-specific conceptions of developmental phenomena and the necessary com-

promise in using Western instruments (Barbarin & Richter, 2001).

Among other design considerations, the proposed multi-site project will follow large cohorts of

children, employing child-, context-, and systems-level variables to generate a variety of data forms.

Particular attention will be paid to child and maternal health indicators, including immunizations

and other forms of health monitoring and promotion; developmental functioning across culture-

relevant domains; psychological well-being, including supports and resources for coping with ad-

versity; changing patterns in children‘s roles and responsibilities; socialization processes within the

family and community; schooling processes and outcomes; and individual as well as community

responses to social change at the macro level. The project will be designed as an open system with

significant flexibility to support the spawning of satellite studies on any number of specific ques-

tions employing a wide range of methodologies — e.g., historical and ethnographic investigations of

children‘s adaptation to different conditions; experimental and quasi-experimental intervention stu-

dies exploring all types of interaction effects; and studies of gene-environment interaction in caregiv-

ing processes and outcomes within families raising biological children along with foster or adopted

children displaced from their own families as a result of social strife or the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

A Mentoring Model of Research Education

Under the second strategy, we envisioned a two-stage initiative for supporting research capacity-

building. Complementing existing regional initiatives on the continent, such as those sponsored by

the IACCP and the ISSBD, the first was to support in the near term a mentorship program for scho-

lars in the earliest stages of their academic careers. One approach under consideration employs a

triadic model, with each mentorship unit consisting of: (1) an early career-stage scholar in an African

university, (2) a senior African scholar in the same or another university serving as the primary men-

tor and (3) an Africa-knowledgeable senior scholar from an overseas institution who would provide

consultation and assist with resource targeting and collaborative research. When in place, the re-

gional, multi-site field research model described in the previous section will serve as one context for

the second stage of the mentorship initiative, namely research education through research intern-

ships and post-doctoral fellowship appointments on on-going projects .


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In the months following the Victoria conference, we have taken steps toward establishing the

first mentoring initiative. Taking advantage of conferences and research workshops occurring on the

continent we have begun to establish a networking process that is helping to identify scholars who

might benefit from the mentoring program. In July 2010, the first workshop under the mentoring

initiative will be convened in Lusaka by co-team Leader Alan Pence, with funding from UNICEF‘s

East and Southern Africa Regional Office. Limited at this stage to the field of early childhood devel-

opment, the workshop is framed around the two Africa-based components of the triadic model.

AFRICAN RESEARCH AND THE ADVANCEMENT OF A GLOBAL SCIENCE: SOME PROPOSALS

Running through the conference goals and the resulting scholarly contributions are two intertwined

endpoints: (1) African research that is driven by the quest for solutions to problems and issues facing

African children, and (2) African research that advances a global science of child development. We

devote this final section to a reflective discussion of issues that might guide such research. We begin

with the proposition that the institutionalization of child development inquiry in Africa provides

opportunities for the advancement of a truly global field. However, neither the indiscriminate rejec-

tion of everything Euro-American nor the wholesale importation of Western traditions would posi-

tion Africa to contribute to such advancement. If the capacity-building strategies outlined above are

to promote inquiry that is as relevant to Africa as it is to a global field, the issues framed here de-

serve consideration.

Inquiry as a Cultural Project

The values that define important problems, and the paradigmatic and methodological frameworks

that guide the resulting inquiry, are grounded in cultural conceptions and traditions (Marfo, this

issue), much the same way as conceptions of childhood and the childrearing practices they engender

are rooted in the lived experiences and worldviews of cultural communities (Dawes & Donald, 2000;

Zimba, 2002). In this sense, problems and issues relating to the lives of children in family, communi-

ty, and national contexts will be at the core of an African child development research enterprise.

Each of the papers in this special section has highlighted one or more of these issues. We highlight

here additional problem areas in need of attention.

The generation of normative milestones for various domains of development is one such impor-

tant problem area. Developmental norms and population-based indicators of health and well-being,

along with careful documentations of life circumstances and ecological assets within local communi-

ties, are crucially important not only for the advancement of basic research but also for the design

and evaluation of policies and interventions. On this as on other issues, the imperative to comple-

ment and extend, rather than supplant, what we know from Western developmental science cannot

be overemphasized. Research dedicated to the design and local validation of developmental assess-

ment tools is very important. Recent efforts in this direction can be found in East Africa where colla-

borations involving African, European, and American research institutions are producing locally

validated tools for use in Kenyan village settings (e.g., Abubakar, Hodling, Van Baar, Newton, &

Van de Vijver, 2008; Abubakar, Holding, Van de Vijver, & Baar, 2010; Abubakar et al., 2007).


7

Additional areas for potentially groundbreaking work include conceptualization, measurement,

and generation of local norms for attributes and behaviors valued by families and communities as

important developmental goals in childrearing. These developmental assets and milestones would

not register on the radar of many Euro-American developmental assessment tools, and yet they mat-

ter very much in local contexts. Examples include some of the attributes emerging from Beatrice

Whiting‘s work in Kenya as character traits that Kikuyu mothers preferred to see in their children:

confidence, inquisitiveness, cleverness, bravery, good-heartedness, respectfulness, obedience, and

generosity (Whiting, 1996; Weisner, 2000). Others include hospitality, empathy, sharing, social re-

sponsibility, a sense of belonging, and patience. Focused interviews, observations, and thorough

analysis of folk-lore, proverbs, riddles, group games, and other activities would reveal that these are

socially valued attributes within African communities. What are ways to measure these attributes?

What life outcomes (school-related or otherwise) are predictable from measures derived from any

combination of these traits? These questions could spur conceptual and empirical contributions with

local and global implications.

There are socio-political imperatives as well for the kinds of research anticipated in the preced-

ing paragraph. In an era when non-Western cultural values and traditions are under attack as bar-

riers to progress (Etounga-Manguelle, 2004; Huntington, 2000; Harrison, 2004) — when culture

change is being promoted in conservative ideological circles as a potentially more efficacious strategy

for international development aid than traditional economics-driven strategies (see Harrison & Hun-

tington, 2000), and when the winds of globalization appear to carry an implicit evolutionist view of

human advancement as progression toward Euro-American traditions and values (see Pence, this

issue) — there is no better time than now for African researchers to launch systematic empirical ex-

plorations of the complex relationships between socialization values and practices on the one hand

and child and national developmental outcomes on the other.

Regardless of the value judgments that globalization may trigger, it presents another imperative

for increased applied developmental research in non-Western societies. Our children‘s lives are now

lived at the intersection of local realities and inevitable forces of global change. Many children are

thrust into multiple worlds, in none of which they feel at home. How do formal and informal socia-

lization agents prepare children with the competencies necessary to function optimally across con-

texts? Child development research has an important role to play by forging a better understanding

of the competencies, attitudes, and emotional resources children need and use to navigate within

and across different environments.

Disciplinary and Methodological Integration It is impossible to develop comprehensive understandings about children‘s development without building into the anticipated models of inquiry relevant perspectives and methods from the broad range of disciplines concerned with children‘s development – anthropology, the cognitive and neu-rosciences, developmental and behavioral pediatrics, education, nutritional science, psychology, public/population health, sociology, etc. In his contribution to the Victoria conference, Myers (2009) addressed the challenges of disciplinary insularity and made a compelling case for multidisciplinari-ty in child development inquiry: ―… child development, like education, is a ‗field of study‘ to which many disciplines can and should be applied. If there is a ‗science‘ of child development, it sits at the meeting point of these disciplines‖ (p. 13).


8

The call for multiple methods is neither a case for sheer equitable representation of quantitative

and qualitative methods nor a simplistic advocacy for combining methodological genres. It is pre-

mised on two principles: (1) across disciplines, different epistemological and theoretical perspectives

trigger different research questions, which in turn call for correspondingly relevant methods, and (2)

the knowledge resulting from multiple inquiry forms contribute legitimately to broader understand-

ings about child development. Thus, the anticipated research and mentorship programs should em-

brace various forms of systematic, rigorous investigation employing different designs (quantitative

experimental/non-experimental; qualitative/interpretive) and different forms of data gathering

strategies: naturalistic observations, surveys, quantitative measurement, discourse analysis, self-

reports, diaries, etc. While the state of the ―science‖ of child development may not yet reflect a deep

commitment to this level of methodological pluralism, there are signs, especially within cultural and

cross-cultural psychology that this is a valued ideal (Cohen, 2007; Dasen & Mishra, 2000; Greenfield,

1997; Yoshikawa, Weisner, Kalil, & Way, 2008). If an African child development field is to transcend

the traditional boundaries of psychological inquiry to include anthropological, economic, historical,

political, and sociological perspectives, a deepening of this value is critical, and at both the discipli-

nary and methodological levels, an ethic of complementarity (Eckensberger, 2002) is axiomatic.

Theoretical Integration

Especially because much of our argument for systematic institutionalization of child development

research in non-Western societies is premised on mainstream Western psychology‘s insufficient at-

tention to cultural relativity, it is important to underscore here that African research cannot afford to

commit an error in the opposite direction and frame development as if cultural influences are all that

matter. Neither, as Nsamenang (2009) notes in his conference contribution, should advocacy for cul-

tural sensitivity pass for ―cultural essentialism, scientific isolationism, [or] dismissal of the extant

body of knowledge … gained through more than a century of child development research‖ (p. 5).

An African field with the prospect of advancing a global science is better served by an orientation

that fosters theoretical integration in all its varied manifestations. One example of such integration

is framing development as the product of constitutional (genetic or non-genetic), social, economic,

and cultural factors interacting in linear and non-linear ways throughout the lifespan, such that none

of these determinants alone can explain development satisfactorily (Horowitz, 2000).

A second example of theoretical integration particularly germane to African research is captured

by Super et al. (this issue). Through the constructs of ecocultural niche, developmental microniche, and

developmental niche, Weisner (1984), Worthman (1994), and Super and Harkness (1986, 2002) have,

respectively, synthesized bodies of research on various conceptions of the cultural environment (as a

social setting for daily life; as customary practices, and as caregivers shared beliefs/ethnotheories) into more

comprehensive explanatory frameworks. As Super and Harkness (1997) note, these meta-theoretical

frameworks contribute transcendent insights on how the various cultural environments are inter-

connected with each other and with the wider developmental ecology, including endogenous fac-

tors.

A third example of integration is seen in Kağitçibaşi‘s (2009) response to false assumptions in

debates on culture and human development: false uniqueness (depicting a phenomenon as unique to

a given culture when it may exist in other cultures) and false universality (assuming commonality


9

across cultures when there is none). To illustrate, as Euro-American psychology has depicted auton-

omy and relatedness as contrasting attributes — often privileging the former over the latter — cross-

cultural psychology has associated autonomy with individualistic societies and relatedness with col-

lectivist ones. In her contribution to the Victoria conference, Kağitçibaşi addressed the misnomer in

psychology‘s portrayal of these two attributes as incompatible and/or exclusively culture-specific.

She illustrates how research in a non-Western society (Turkey) can contribute the level of integration

evident in her theory of the autonomous related self (Kağitçibaşi, 2007), presented as a model of

healthy self across cultures. The African context is ripe for inquiry with the potential to extend such

integrative theorizing.

CONCLUSION

The Society for Research in Child Development articulated its strategic goals on multidisciplinarity,

cultural/contextual diversity, and international perspectives in research at a time of gradual awa-

kening to the reality that what we know about children‘s development is based on inquiry on a very

small percentage of the world‘s children (Arnett, 2008; Pence, this issue; Stevens & Gielen, 2007).

Our work on Africa was undertaken in the hope of helping to advance a global science of child de-

velopment. One challenge facing that ideal science today is how to support research capacity around

the developing world to advance rigorous research that grows out of the local, reflects the interests

and hopes inherent in that world, and contributes unique insights to a global discipline. It is an im-

mense undertaking, but one that must be pursued. We hope our focus on Africa adds a little bit of

momentum to existing initiatives aimed at strengthening the continent‘s contributions to scientific

knowledge.

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Strengthening Africa’s Contributions to Early

Childhood Care and Development Research:

Historical, Conceptual, and Structural Challenges

Alan Pence

University of Victoria

ABSTRACT: This paper challenges the specter of the universal child and examines historical, con-

ceptual, and structural factors that have resulted in a virtual absence of African-led contributions to

early childhood care and development research. It considers the dark side of good work, questions

who defines ‗desirable‘ and how it is measured, and considers ways forward in promoting African

capacity, leadership, identification of key issues, and scholarly engagement with ideas regarding

their own children‘s future and how best to ensure healthy, hopeful, and capable future generations.

KEY WORDS: Child development in Africa; historical, conceptual, and structural challenges; re-

search capacity building; leadership development; universalism and globalization

This article, designed to provoke discussion at the 2009 Society for Research in Child Development‘s

Africa symposium, considers various academic, sociophilosophical, and political forces that have

converged to shape a narrow range of understandings regarding children‘s care and development

that are promoted as normative, universally appropriate, and desirable in the eyes of powerful in-

ternational development agents. These Euro-Western constructions often echo the dynamics of 19th-

century social Darwinism, privileging Western perspectives and restricting the development of local

possibilities. These approaches, which exist at both child and societal levels, are linear and hierar-

chical in nature, providing intrinsic rationales for elitism and inequalities. Western child develop-

ment science, characterized by its modernist and positivist drive for universals throughout much of

the 20th century, has aided political and economic agendas that seek to universalize neo-liberal polit-

ical and economic orientations. Those children and states that fall outside such ‗normative and de-

sirable‘ constructions become targets for change under the banner of progress.

This paper will challenge the specter of the universal child as part of a globalization process,

considering the dark side of good work and questioning who defines ‗desirable‘ and how it is meas-

ured. It will also consider ways forward that have arisen through other academic orientations over

This article is based on a paper prepared for the SRCD-sponsored invitational conference “Strengthening Africa‟s

Contributions to Child Development Research” held in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, February 2-6, 2009. An earlier

version was presented in a symposium on Africa at SRCD‘s 2009 Biennial Conference in Denver, Colorado

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Alan Pence, School of Child and Youth Care, Univer-

sity of Victoria, P. O. Box 1700, Victoria, B.C., Canada V8W 2Y2. E-mail: [email protected].


SRCD Africa Child Development Research Capacity Building Study Group Alan Pence – Historical, Conceptual, and Structural Challenges

14

the past two decades. Of focal interest is Africa, a landmass larger than the United States, China, In-

dia, Western Europe, and India combined (The Times Atlas, 2006), with about 14% of the world

population and almost 20% of the world‘s children and youth under the age of 15 (United Nations

Development Programme, 2007). Despite Africa‘s size and world population share, very few indi-

genous African voices are heard in the child development literature. Both scientific and popular lite-

rature place Africa well outside ‗normative and desirable.‘ As such, Africa is a key target for change.

The form that change may take, and the role indigenous institutions, governments, and the peoples

themselves will play in determining the nature of and the need for such change concerns us here.

STARTING POINTS: MEETINGS IN BERLIN, 1884-1885—AFRICA TRANSFORMED

There are various possible starting points for a paper with this purpose—one could be November 15,

1884 in Berlin. Fourteen countries (of which all but the U.S. were European) met at the behest of

German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to ―end confusion over the control of Africa‖ (Rosenberg,

2010). (It is probably not necessary to add that no African representatives were present at these

meetings.) By February 26, 1885, lines had been drawn and the Western powers signed an initial set

of Agreements. Neither the map of Africa, nor the lives of Africans, would be the same again.

Late 19th-century Europe: Origins of Child Development Theory

This paper might also start with other activities in Europe during the latter decades of the 19 th cen-

tury that held less immediate implications for Africa and Africans at the time, but are relevant for

this essay and for those lives today. Through the social Darwinist movement, a ‗scientific‘ rationale

for why peoples around the world differ was advanced—the answer being evolution, operating

through a mechanism of natural selection, pressing from less to more developed forms from the ‗sa-

vage‘ to ‗civilized man‘ (for women too were less ‗advanced‘). The child development movement

originated at the same time, and not coincidentally children were placed on a similar developmental

continuum from less to more developed over time.

These events put in motion diverse activities that impact Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in the

present. The transformed map of SSA that emerged from the Berlin Conference is well known, along

with its problematic colonial and postcolonial legacy. However, the transformed map of childhood

that emerged at a similar point in time is less apparent, obscured by the powers of modernity,

progress, and science to suppress, and even erase, other interpretations and perspectives.

It is this second map, a Euro-Western construction of the child, with a vast literature that has fol-

lowed, that is of primary interest here. While certain areas of the world have been able to put for-

ward other constructions, and have anchored key elements of early childhood policies and programs

to those other ways of understanding (Aotearoa/New Zealand provides a particularly interesting

example: Reedy, 1991; New Zealand Ministry of Education (MOE), 1996; Te Kohanga Reo National

Trust, 2003), Sub-Saharan Africa is largely bereft of such initiatives. It has been on the receiving end

of colonial ideologies and institutions, and, more recently, those of international and donor organi-

zations, while its own capacity to generate knowledge has declined. This essay is written in the spirit

of capacity building that is not fundamentally derivative, but generative and inclusive of local as

well as Western and other knowledges.


15

Reconfiguring the Map of Childhood, From the Mid 19th Century to Late 20th Century

At approximately the same time Darwin undertook his historic voyage on The Beagle (1831-1836)

and subsequently published On the Origin of Species (1859), the most influential name in early child-

hood was Friedrich Froebel. Froebel‘s understanding of the nature of childhood was considerably

different from those who would later propose a ‗psychology of childhood.‘ His vision incorporated a

strong spiritual element and an appreciation of the child‘s innate goodness and capacity: ―Education

must be passive and protective rather than directive, otherwise the free and conscious revelation of

the divine spirit in man…is lost‖ (1826, p.34). Froebel noted that ―a child ought to be considered a

complete being during every period of life‖ (emphasis added, quoted in Bultman, 2008, p.1). The Froe-

belian child was not an empty vessel, an incomplete adult, nor was her or his development amena-

ble to coercion.

Froebel‘s ideas were not unusual in Western society at that time (Alcott, 1830), nor in many con-

temporary societies today, particularly in terms of understanding the child as spiritually endowed

and with capacities that in certain ways exceed those of adults (see DeLoache & Gottlieb, 2000, for an

interesting approach that touches on this topic). By the late 1870s, however, a quite different image

of childhood was being advanced in Europe by individuals such as Ernst Haeckel, one of the first to

propose a ‗science of psychology.‘ Haeckel connected Darwinian themes with both individual and

social evolution: ―In order to understand correctly the highly differentiated, delicate mental life of

civilized man, we must, therefore, observe not only its gradual awakening in the child, but also its

step-by-step development in lower, primitive peoples and in invertebrates‖ (1879, quoted in Morss,

1990, p.18). Sully, in his influential Babies and Science (1881), continued the theme, firmly embedding

the origins of child development theory alongside rationales for colonization: ―The modern psychol-

ogist, sharing in the spirit of positive science, feels that he must…study mind in its simplest forms…

[He] carries his eye far afield to the phenomena of savage life, with its simple ideas, crude senti-

ments and naïve habits…. Finally he directs his attention to the mental life of infancy, as fitted to

throw most light on the later developments of the human mind‖ (1881, quoted in Riley, 1983, p.47).

One sees in the ‗science of child development,‘ from its earliest formulations, a civilizing impera-

tive for the child based on an image of deficiency. A belief in the child‘s incompetence and incom-

pleteness continues as a dominant theme throughout the formative years of child study within psy-

chology. One finds its echoes in William James‘ classic description of a newborn‘s world: ―The baby,

assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin and entrails at once feels that all is one great blooming, buzzing

confusion‖ (1890, reprinted 1981, p.488). This image persists in Gesell‘s work, and an increasingly

powerful supplemental association is put in place—that of maturation as financial investment:

―Three is a delightful age. Infancy superannuates at Two and gives way to a higher estate‖ (1950,

p.40).

These understandings of the child were able to persist in part through psychology‘s failure to

incorporate culture as a key factor in child development, for, as noted, not all cultures and societies

perceive the child in such a way. Cole, in his 1996 critique of psychology‘s cultural failing, Cultural

Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline, noted Wundt‘s 1921 formulation of ―two psychologies‖: a

―physiological psychology‖ focusing on the experimental study of immediate experience, and a

―higher psychology‖ (Volkerpsychologie) that was contextual in nature and could not be studied using


16

laboratory methods, but only by the methods of the descriptive sciences, such as ethnography and

linguistics (p.28 in Cole). Cole went on to note that despite Wundt‘s standing as the founder of scien-

tific psychology, ―the only part of his scientific system to win broad acceptance was his advocacy of

the experimental method as the criterion of disciplinary legitimacy‖ (1996, p.28). With that focus one

witnesses the marginalization of culture within child development.

The experimental method, with its underpinning in positivism and a belief in an objective and

knowable ‗truth,‘ dominated psychology throughout much of the 20th century. Kessen, for example,

reflected on his introduction to psychology in the 1950s with its pursuit of ―laws of behavior [that]

were to be perfectly general, indifferent to species, age, gender or specific psychological content‖

(1981, p.27). It is noteworthy that while psychology continued throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s to

strengthen its positivist orientation towards child development, the physical sciences, which psy-

chology had sought to emulate in order to be understood as a true science (‗physics-envy‘ was the

term borrowed by Sheldon White [1996, p.xi]), were engaged in processes of poststructural and

postmodern critique and deconstruction, questioning the very possibility of separating the seer from

the seen, the subjective from the objective. That the physical sciences could engage in such critical

reflection while psychology, as a social science, could ignore its own fabric of ‗social‘ is as astonish-

ing as is its long-standing marginalization of culture. Despite such obvious problems and limita-

tions, psychology‘s hold on the field of child development remained strong throughout the 1960s

and 70s, in part because of the virtual absence of a focus on children in other disciplines, such as so-

ciology and anthropology, despite the latter‘s significant contributions during the earlier culture and

personality movement.

CHILD DEVELOPMENT, INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT,

AND THE PURSUIT OF UNIVERSAL TRUTHS

It was during this period of child development‘s positivist and universalist ascendancy under the

banner of psychology that the international development community began to elevate the child as a

key component of the development equation. Some, including this author, highlight 1989/1990 as a

pivotal point, with approval of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC, United Nations,

1989) and acknowledgement at the Jomtien, Thailand, Education for All (EFA) meeting that ―learn-

ing begins at birth‖ (UNESCO, 1990). Rather than grounding international child agendas in culture

and context, as one might expect (and hope), international development leadership accepted psy-

chology‘s largely universalist understandings of child development. Such understandings were rare-

ly challenged despite their lack of global representation and sources in Western populations and so-

ciophilosophical constructs (Arnett, 2008; Kim and Park, 2006; Levine and New, 2008; Pence and

Hix-Small, 2007). The universalist nature of the CRC and EFA complemented and reinforced the un-

iversalism inherent in the dominant discourse of general psychology at the time.

The pronouncements of such influential discourses within general psychology were quickly ab-

sorbed and transmitted broadly by international organizations hungry for direction, legitimization,

and ‗products‘ for a global community now primed as recipients for child-focused agendas. These

policy and program agendas, as is too often the case in politically and ideologically driven initia-

tives, had little time for exceptions, nuances, or counter-discourses, seeking instead to keep agendas

‗focused.‘


17

The demand for ideas, services, and products to feed newfound international development in-

terests in the young child led to the creation of what are often termed ‗best practices.‘ Rather than

arising locally, ‗best practices‘ are typically imported from Western sources, often through the sup-

port of Western donors. They tend to be seen as rising above ethical concerns of cultural imperial-

ism, but nevertheless the ‗trading dynamic‘ is a familiar one. As part of physical colonization, such a

practice was called mercantilism: ―The goal of the [colonizing or supplier] state was to export the

largest possible quantity of its products and import as little as possible thus establishing a favorable

balance of trade‖ (Random House Dictionary, 1969, p.896). The balance of trade in child develop-

ment ideas has indeed favored the West. Such processes enhance and perpetuate inequalities. It is a

system that serves neither Science nor Africa well. Such systems, proclaimed as progressive and in

the recipients‘ best interests, are often regressive, undermining the recipients‘ ability to build local

capacity in order to engage in their own problem identification and problem-alleviating activities.

Creativity, confidence, diversity, leadership, and capacity are all diminished through such processes.

The timing of the early childhood care and development field‘s entry into international devel-

opment was, arguably, unfortunate. In 1989/90 psychology‘s hold on child study was strong, de-

spite influential internal critics like Urie Bronfenbrenner, who famously noted that even within the

Western context: ―much of developmental psychology, as it now exists, is the science of the strange

behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time‖ (1979,

p.19). The timing was also unfortunate because child-focused scholarship would soon see the entry

of other social science disciplines (e.g., sociology, with a paradigm of social constructionism that

poses a significant and useful challenge to universalism [James & Prout, 1990; Qvortrup, Bardy,

Sgritta, & Wintersberger, 1994; Jenks, 1996] and anthropology, which reengaged with child issues

following a period of lower visibility after the decline of the culture and personality movement [Blu-

ebond-Langner & Korbin, 2007; Levine, Dixon, Levine, Rickman, Leiderman, Keefer, & Brazelton,

1994; American Anthropological Association, 2008]).

The 1990s also saw important culturally related developments within psychology, including a

strengthening of cross-cultural psychology (Segal, Dasen, Berry, & Poortinga, 1990; Berry, Poortinga,

Segall, & Dasen, 1992), cultural psychology (Shweder, 1990; Cole, 1996; Greenfield, 2000), and indi-

genous psychology (Sinha, 1997; Kim, Yang & Hwang, 2006). Within child development and early

childhood studies a host of poststructural and postmodern publications were forming a strong and

vibrant international literature (Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn, & Walkerdine, 1984; Morss, 1990;

Kessler & Swadener, 1992; Burman, 1994; Moss & Pence, 1994; Canella, 1997; Dahlberg, Moss, &

Pence, 1999). Indigenous and postcolonial early childhood studies, with important implications for

work in Africa, also became increasingly available throughout the 1990s and 2000s (Mutua & Swa-

dener, 2004; Cannella & Viruru, 2004; Ball & Pence, 2007; Nsamenang, 1992, 2008), and the most re-

cent handbook in the Denzin and Lincoln series Critical and Indigenous Methodologies (Denzin, Lin-

coln, & Smith, 2008) has much of value regarding research methodologies for early childhood and all

social sciences in the Majority (‗developing‘) World.

While it is unfortunate that such a broad, vibrant, and contextually sensitive literature was not

fully on hand for the initial entry of child development issues onto the world stage of international

development, the good news is that such diversity of perspectives and disciplines is increasingly

available in the 21st century, and it can be employed in strengthening African and other Majority

World contributions to child development and child study literatures.


18

Ways Forward

Pursuing new ways forward is more possible today than it was two decades ago. The conditions that

led to international organizations‘ largely unchallenged acceptance of universalist and normalizing

perspectives are less secure than they were. Other disciplines and subdisciplines, with additional

methods and understandings, have entered the child arena; critical theory and poststructuralism

have usefully problematized psychology and child development; and indigenous and local perspec-

tives are more respected and powerful than previously.

Looking forward should not preclude looking back. As Super, Harkness, Barry, and Zeitlin note

in their article (this issue), and as evidenced by the long-standing work of Serpell (also in this issue),

good work has come out of Africa in the past. Reviewing these authors‘ citations, however, one can-

not but be struck by two phenomena: the prevalence of works led by Western researchers, and the

relative absence of studies led by African scholars. This ‗failure to thrive‘ is not, this author believes,

the result of poor research leadership, a lack of commitment to indigenous development, uninterest-

ing theories, or limitations in research possibilities. Indeed some very important theoretical and em-

pirical questions have been touched on in this earlier work and deserve to be pursued further. For

example, both Serpell‘s earlier work regarding local understandings of intelligence and his more re-

cent work on schooling in Africa represent important contributions that should be extended in the

future (Serpell, 1982; Serpell, 1993). In addition, Levine et al.‘s historic and detailed work in East

Africa provides useful inspiration for other parts of Africa (Levine, Dixon, Levine, Richman, Lei-

derman, Keefer, & Brazelton, 1994). Weisner and Gallimore‘s (1977) identification of the importance

of child-to-child caregiving around the world is familiar to anyone who has spent more than a few

days in Africa, yet it has not been adequately pursued as a scholarly focus. (Note, however, the im-

portant practice-focused work of the Child to Child Trust [www.child-to-child.org] dating from

1979.) More recently, the impact of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in southern and eastern African is

leading researchers to more closely explore impacts on children, with implications for deeper under-

standings of theories of attachment, resilience and development over time. Oburu notes: ―There is a

possibility that the alarmist construction of the orphan situation in areas heavily infected with

HIV/AIDS underrates the capacity of orphans … to overcome adversities (Oburu, 2009; Abebe &

Aase, 2007). And finally, the work of Super and Harkness and related others (1986, 2002) on the de-

velopmental niche deserves continuing attention—and it may be getting some from experienced in-

ternational development specialists who are mounting useful critiques of the Convention on the

Rights of the Child (CRC) ‗in context.‘

This last reference, relating specifically to a recent white paper by Bissel, Boyden, Cook, and

Myers (2009), introduces another rich area for African-led child-related research: examining closely

the impact and implications of international conventions, declarations, and movements on families,

communities, institutions, policies, and politics in Africa as they relate to children‘s lives. These au-

thors, all experienced in international development and in work with the CRC, note: ―Researchers

and practitioners involved in child rights and protection issues are questioning the paradigms and

strategies now dominating national and international efforts…. There is a growing realization that the

real issue may have to do with universalized responses to problems having locally specific characteristics‖ (p.1,

emphasis added). Associated with such studies would be research regarding the impacts of a broad

set of interventions and programs funded by the international donor community—an acronym for-


19

est of international, governmental, non-governmental, community-based, and faith-based organiza-

tions and related groups. This aid and intervention work, ubiquitous across most of Sub-Saharan

Africa, represents an expenditure of funds supporting ‗child welfare‘ that exceeds the provision of

many services provided by governments. These familiar, foreign ‗elephants in the rooms‘ of Sub-

Saharan Africa (as unfamiliar in the West as real elephants), are an extraordinarily important part of

the lives of a large percentage of Africa‘s children and families, who are both recipients of services

and sometimes employed as service providers. However, despite their omnipresence and impor-

tance, these local organizations rarely feature in independent research, appearing, if they do, only in

project-focused evaluations of service or policy reports. This conspicuous research absence may be

changing, if a recent doctoral dissertation is an indication. Dr. Dennis Banda of Zambia focused his

study on a critical assessment of the EFA (2008), arguing that ―formal schooling education…may not

be the right vehicle to deliver EFA goals‖ and proposing that ―African Indigenous Knowledge Sys-

tems (AIKS) can enhance the achievement of EFA‖ (p.xi). In support of not losing sight of what has

come before, Banda cites educational reports from as early as 1847 flagging the importance of local

knowledge, and he also notes two reports from the 1920s with similar recommendations (Phelps-

Stokes Fund, 1922, 1925).

Banda‘s work touches on critical theory and postcolonial research—a particularly vibrant area of

recent scholarship. As noted earlier, Denzin and Lincoln‘s latest volume, co-edited with Maori scho-

lar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Denzin, Lincoln, & Smith, 2008), reminds the academy that ―the ways in

which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful re-

membered history for many of the world‘s colonized peoples‖ (Smith, 1999). Critical and indigenous

methodologies have had a limited impact on African child research to date, but the excesses of colo-

nialism are a remembered history across the continent. Their continuing presence is evident in Nsa-

menang‘s (2006) critique: ―Whenever Euro-American ECD programs are applied as the gold stan-

dards by which to measure forms of Africa‘s ECD, they forcibly deny equity to and recognition of

Africa‘s ways of provisioning for its young, thereby depriving the continent a niche in global ECD

knowledge‖ (p.296). Concerns such as those voiced by Smith and Nsamenang will find a fertile

ground in many parts of Africa in the years ahead—they are part of a broad mosaic of indigenous

and culturally sensitive studies that can inform contextually suitable ways forward for children‘s

development. Their approach and potential, as evidenced by the unique contributions of the Maori

‗500 PhDs in 5 years‘ initiative (www.maramatanga.co.nz), will open up pathways of understanding

and knowledge not accessible through Western lenses.

CONCLUSION: IMPLICATIONS FOR SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

This paper has argued that African child development and international ECD research will be best

served by a broad range of disciplines, methods, and orientations. Consideration should be given to

multi-and interdisciplinary approaches as a priority for African tertiary institutions. And in order to

maximize potential social benefits of such work, this diversity of interests and approaches should

extend beyond the academy to include perspectives from governmental, non-governmental, and

local groups, as all are key players in addressing African children‘s well-being. Ideally, such interac-


20

tions would extend beyond individual countries to include regional and subregional interactions

and networks as well.

Two such networks, one in child development led by the International Society for the Study of

Behavioral Development (ISSBD), and another in ECD, based on the SRCD supported event that led

to this special section of Child Development Perspectives (Marfo and Pence, 2009) and on the Early

Childhood Development Virtual University (ECDVU) leadership and capacity building program

(www.ecdvu.org and Pence, Habtom, & Chalamanda, 2008), are attempting to promote regional de-

velopment. Both face significant challenges in moving forward, not least of which is sufficient finan-

cial resources to activate and sustain networks over time and to fund research proposals that emerge

from such interactions. Such initiatives should be based on the principle of promoting African capac-

ity, African leadership, African identification of key issues, and African scholarly engagement with

ideas regarding their own children‘s future and how best to ensure healthy, hopeful, and capable

future generations. These ideas should be supported to grow and develop in mutually beneficial ex-

changes with ideas and research from other parts of the world.

Research colonization and mercantilist trade in child development ideas should become a thing

of the past. The ‗science of child development‘ as advanced by influential international organizations

too often has roots in colonial attitudes and social-Darwinist beliefs that carry sorrow as well as

promise. Child-related developments in academia—not only in psychology (cultural and indigenous

psychology, for example), but in other disciplines, including sociology and anthropology, and the

emergence of critical perspectives that range from issues of gender through poststructural and post-

colonial viewpoints—offer an increasing range of opportunities for African scholars.

When Gandhi was asked what he thought of Western civilization, he responded, ―I think it

would be a good idea.‖ This essay echoes his view. A truly international, inclusive ‗science of child

development‘ is a good idea—and one deserving of enhanced and appropriate international sup-

port.

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Think Locally, Act Globally:

Contributions of African Research to Child Development

Charles M. Super1, Sara Harkness1, Oumar Barry2, and Marian Zeitlin3 1University of Connecticut, USA, 2University Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal,

3Earth Rights EcoVillage (EREV) Institute, Dakar, Senegal

ABSTRACT: Research on African children has made key contributions to the emergence of a

more globalized developmental science, advancing theory and providing illuminating examples

in the domains of motor development, cognitive growth, attachment, and socially responsible in-

telligence. Because the environments for children’s development are culturally structured, local

knowledge is necessary to understand development and to devise social programs to promote

healthy outcomes, as illustrated here by a case study in Senegal. This argues for advancing the

research activities of local scholars. At the same time, action at the global level is necessary to

weave such local knowledge into a global science of human development.

KEY WORDS: Contributions to theory; motor development; cognitive growth; socially responsible intelli-

gence; emotional development; globalization and local knowledge

The aphorism “Think globally, act locally” urges one to think of the state of the entire planet as one

undertakes local actions. We titled this article with the inverse - “Think locally, act globally” - to

emphasize that only through understanding locally regulated development can one approach a

more global theory. Child development research in sub-Saharan Africa has made a significant con-

tribution in this regard. Historically, African children were the first outside Europe and the U.S. to

be studied (Kidd, 1906), and for decades reports from Africa dominated the cross-cultural develop-

mental literature (Super, 1981). Although research in other parts of the world has grown dramatical-

ly, studies of children in Africa continue to contribute unique insights to our understanding of how

children develop (Gottlieb, 2004; Lancy, 1996; Weisner, Bradley, & Kilbride, 1997). In this paper, we

review contributions from Africa that have shaped developmental science, and describe one con-

temporary application of science to practice. Our overarching goal is to demonstrate the continuing

This article is based on a paper prepared for the SRCD-sponsored invitational conference “Strengthening Afri-ca’s Contributions to Child Development Research” held in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, February 2-6, 2009 Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to: Charles M. Super, Center for the Study of

Culture, Health, and Human Development, 348 Mansfield Road, University of Connecticut Unit 2058,

Storrs, CT 26269-2058 U.S.A. Email: [email protected]


SRCD Africa Child Development Research Capacity Building Study Group Charles M. Super, Sara Harkness, Oumar Barry & Marian Zeitlin – Contributions of African Research

25

utility of African research to a global developmental science.

MULTIDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH PROJECTS IN AFRICA AND THE

ADVANCE OF DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY

Developmental research in Africa has benefitted particularly from several long-term multidiscipli-

nary projects. These include the French-Swiss investigation of Piagetian development in the Ivory

Coast (Dasen, Inhelder, Lavallée, & Retschitzki, 1978); the Kalahari project organized by DeVore and

others (Konner, 1976); the Ituri Forest studies (Tronick, Morelli, & Winn, 1987); the Harvard-Nairobi

affiliation led by John and Beatrice Whiting (Edwards & Whiting, 2004; Whiting & Edwards, 1988;

Whiting & Whiting, 1975); the Gusii (Kenya) study led by Robert and Sarah LeVine (LeVine, Dixon,

LeVine, Richman, Leiderman, Keefer, et al., 1994); and research among the Nso people of Cameroon

by Keller and her team (Keller, 2007). These projects have provided research training to dozens of

young African, American, and European scientists, and have altered our understanding of family

life and child development in cultural context.

The historical productivity of these projects reflects several key characteristics. First, they lasted

over a period of years - thus subsequent researchers, or researchers returning to their field sites,

were able to build on earlier observations and discoveries, as well as on previously established

working relationships. This helped to avoid the common mistake in cross-cultural research of mak-

ing generalizations that fail to hold up under further scrutiny. Second, many of the research teams

involved investigators from different disciplines including pediatrics and psychiatry as well as anth-

ropology and developmental psychology, and the research products were correspondingly wide-

ranging. For example, studies within the Whitings‟ Kenya project included infant motor skills (Su-

per, 1976), sibling caretaking (Ember, 1973; Weisner & Gallimore, 1977), child language socialization

(Harkness, 1977), and the development of moral reasoning (Edwards, 1975), to name only a few.

Third, local researchers were included, whether as co-investigators or fieldwork assistants, and their

perspectives were build into the structure of data collection and the interpretation of results. Finally,

African childrearing, especially in the rural communities where most of these studies were carried

out, presented American and European visitors with a vividly unfamiliar picture of children‟s daily

lives and opportunities for learning. Faced with such differences in the niches of development, and

by the obvious fact that these children were generally thriving in them, expatriate researchers were

forced (mostly willingly) to confront their own preconceptions about what constitutes optimal child

development. To be sure, the African context also presented challenges of a different sort - unac-

ceptably high rates of infant morbidity, malnutrition, and mortality, gross inequalities in the status

of women, and a population growing too fast to be sustained by its traditional economies (Wober,

1973). By studying both healthy and compromised development, however, researchers who came

from abroad to study African children found that there were plenty of “lessons” to be taken home

(LeVine et al., 1994).

The Whitings‟ African project is particularly noteworthy in laying the groundwork for the emer-

gence of three related theoretical frameworks for studying development in context: the “ecocultural

niche” (Weisner, 2002), the “developmental microniche” (Worthman, 2003), and the “developmental

niche” (Super & Harkness, 1986, 2002). All these frameworks lead the researcher to look at – and


26

actually measure – specific features of children‟s environment. In addition, they promote a breadth

of integration among measures of the individual child and of the niche, and also with functional,

historical, and thematic aspects of the larger culture that reach beyond the specifics of child rearing.

This integrative feature is the most distinctive, even as the three paradigms differ somewhat in their

empirical focus. Weisner‟s formulation of the ecocultural niche is best known for its close examina-

tion of family routines: how they are shaped by social and economic forces, how they are main-

tained, how they lead the child daily through structured activities, and ultimately, how this pattern

of experience influences development. Worthman‟s model is designed to highlight the biocultural

regulation of development. The developmental microniche is seen as the immediate interface with

the historically constituted environment, such that an individual‟s status at any moment – learning

and adaptation, social competence, emotion regulation, physiological functioning – is the product of

“bioecocultural processes.” In Super and Harkness‟ developmental niche conceptualization, the

child‟s environment is seen as consisting of three interacting subsystems: The physical and social

settings of the child‟s daily life; customs and practices of child rearing; and the psychology of the

caretakers, particularly parental ethnotheories of child development and parenting. Synergisms

among the three subsystems, in interaction with the developing child and features of the larger envi-

ronment, shape the child‟s opportunities for learning (Harkness, Super, Barry, Zeitlin, & Long, 2009).

AFRICAN PERSPECTIVES ON DEVELOPMENT

As this brief overview suggests, research in Africa has produced a variety of insights into the ways

that culture shapes children‟s development. African perspectives in particular - how African par-

ents think about their children, and how they enact these ideas in parenting - have had notable im-

pacts our understanding of motor development, cognitive growth, attachment processes, and social

development. To paraphrase from Goodnow and Collins‟ (1990) book Development According to Par-

ents, we have learned a great deal from studying child development according to African parents.

Motor development

An early focus of developmental research in Africa was infant motor development (primarily sitting

and walking) that appeared quite advanced by Euro-American standards (Géber & Dean, 1957;

Vouilloux, 1959). This “precocity” was initially interpreted as a biological, genetically driven phe-

nomenon. Subsequent investigation led in other directions (Kilbride & Kilbride, 1975; Leiderman,

Babu, Kagia, Kraemer, & Leiderman, 1973; Super, 1976, 1981; Varkevisser, 1973). First, it was dem-

onstrated that traditional methods of infant care common in sub-Saharan Africa include deliberate

teaching and practice of sitting and walking (and sometimes, crawling). These customary practices,

carried out by parents, siblings, and other relatives, reflect a local understanding of what young

children are capable of, and it is manifest from the earliest days of the infant's life outside the womb

(Super & Harkness, 2009). Further, careful observation revealed high levels of leg, trunk, and back

exercise, and also vestibular stimulation, incidental to customary methods of holding and carrying

the infant. The methods of carrying are dictated in part by physical settings (such as dirt floors) that

discourage putting a baby down, and by social settings that include older sisters and others to carry


27

and entertain. When families migrate from traditional rural areas to an urban environment such as

Nairobi, they adapt to quite different physical and social settings, and they come in contact with a

greater variety of ethnotheories; both daily life and infant motor development shift toward the Euro-

American pattern. Subsequent experimental studies in North America confirmed what the African

mothers knew through experience, namely that there is a causal relationship between even modest

levels of practice and early, robust motor development (Zelazo, Zelazo, Cohen, & Zelazo, 1993). The

initial puzzle of “African infant precocity” and its ultimate resolution provide an unusually concrete

example of how a theoretical framework focused on culturally structured environments and ethno-

theories facilitates the understanding of universal developmental phenomena.

In addition to promoting specific motor competencies such as walking, traditional infant care in

much of Africa (and other parts of the world) often incorporates vigorous body massage, in the be-

lief that it promotes strength, coordination, and general health (Hopkins, 1976). The coordination of

parental thinking in this regard was evident when two of the present authors undertook a parent

education project in Senegal (Zeitlin & Barry, 2004). In a pilot phase exploring “what children learn”

and what parents do to help in that learning, a pictorial chart was developed illustrating sequential

teaching activities in each of four domains: motor skills, speech and language, analytic thinking, and

cultural practices. Discussion started with the topic of motor skills, in part to open with something

familiar and uncontroversial, and the pictures included traditional methods of encouraging sitting,

crawling, and walking. “Yes,” said mothers when shown these pictures, “that‟s right.” They quickly

pointed out, however, that the crucial starting point, massage, was not included, and suggested that

the chart be corrected. Although largely unknown or unappreciated in the U.S. during most of the

20th century, infant massage is now an important tool in the hospital nursery (Field et al., 2004) and

has a growing presence in the popular culture for new mothers in Europe and North America (see

McClure, 2000).

Thus as research decentered from motor milestones to include African parents‟ ideas and prac-

tices, environmental influences on motor development were highlighted. This shift, from comparing

specific behaviors to investigating the developmental niche in which behaviors are preferentially

shaped, has been repeated for nearly every domain defined in the Western literature and imported

to Africa for study.

Cognitive growth

Our understanding of cognitive growth has been profoundly transformed by cross-cultural research

(Cole, Kuhn, Siegler, Damon, & Lerner, 2006), and a number of core studies in Africa helped move

the field beyond the older observation that rural, unschooled, non-Western subjects do poorly on

Western, school-oriented cognitive tests. The work of Cole and his colleagues in Liberia (Cole, Gay,

Glick, & Sharp, 1971) is a landmark in this literature, using experimental methods to demonstrate

the influence of culture on what had been assumed to be universal characteristics of thinking. Other

African research demonstrated the experiential (hence, cultural) basis for the nature and develop-

mental timing of intellectual growth. For example, Greenfield (1966) found an approach to reasoning

about agency and the conservation of volume in her Wolof subjects not evident in Western samples -

namely, the hypothesis put forward by some children that the experimenter had used “action mag-


28

ic” to transform the materials being observed. Posner and Baroody (1979) demonstrated that un-

schooled Ivorian children of merchants did as well as their schooled peers on number conservation

tasks; likewise Jahoda (1983) found that Zimbabwean children who actively assisted in market trad-

ing achieved concrete operational thinking about “profit” before their Scottish peers. Ghanaian

children who had access to their parents‟ pottery materials were shown to excel in the conservation

of quantity, weight, and volume (Adjei, 1977). Shweder and LeVine (1975) reported that Hausa

children exhibited a sequence of understanding dreams not imagined in the classic European stu-

dies. On the other hand, the demonstration that rural, unschooled Kenyan and middle-class Ameri-

cans children show similar developmental timing in some cognitive transformations highlighted the

contribution of biological maturation in shaping the interactions between the child and the niche

(Super, 1991). Finally, a number of works from Africa were influential in demonstrating the cultural

nature of the testing process (Cole et al., 1971; Harkness & Super, 1977/2008). In sum, our under-

standing of cognitive development as a cultural project has been substantially advanced by research

in Africa.

Attachment and early emotional relations

Bowlby‟s seminal work on infants‟ attachment to caretakers included the proposition that there is a

“strong bias for attachment behavior to become directed mainly towards one particular person”

(Bowlby, 1969, p. 308). Many scholars were convinced that caretaking by multiple persons would

threaten the essential attachment process, and Ainsworth‟s (1967) observations in Uganda, which

played a formative role in her later contributions, were generally taken to support this proposition.

It is ironic, then, that the first challenge to this tenet came from Leiderman and Leiderman's (1974)

research in neighboring Kenya. They found that, in contrast to an exclusive attachment to the moth-

er, infants cared for in part by older siblings also used them as a “secure base.” Other work in a va-

riety of sub-Saharan African communities also documented the important emotional as well as logis-

tical role of sibling caretakers (Hewlett, 1989; Lijembe, 1967; Munroe & Munroe, 1971; Weisner &

Gallimore, 1977; Whaley, Sigman, Beckwith, Cohen, & Espinosa, 2002).

This body of work continues to raise a variety of questions about early emotional development

that are fundamental to developmental theory but that cannot be addressed in monocultural studies.

For example, with regard to maternal sensitivity – a key construct in attachment theory – LeVine

and his colleagues (Richman, Miller, & LeVine, 1992) observed in their Kenyan project that Gusii

mothers were highly attentive to their infants‟ distress signals, quick to soothe and hold in physical

contact, but unresponsive to positive vocalizations, a pattern that reflected local conceptions of in-

fants‟ needs and capacities. “Does this qualify as maternal sensitivity in terms of attachment re-

search?” ask LeVine and colleagues (LeVine, Gielen, & Roopnarine, 2004, p. 155). Yes and no, they

answer, depending on how narrow and ethnocentric the definition. “[A]s originally conceptua-

lized,” they conclude, “maternal sensitivity captured a small part of a complex relationship; as used

in [modern] developmental and clinical studies, it reflects contemporary Anglo-American cultural

norms for evaluating maternal care.” The particular Gusii pattern is not found in all rural sub-

Saharan African societies (Super & Harkness, 1974; Tronick, Morelli, & Winn, 1987), and certainly

not across the modern range of urbanization and education on the continent. It is evident, however,


29

that the study of family interactions in Africa has prompted significant additions and elaborations to

standing theories of emotional development, and further, that the rich variety of culturally struc-

tured interactions and relationships in African cultures is likely to offer additional discoveries, even

as that reality continues to be transformed by larger forces.

Socially responsible intelligence

Insightful research often means aligning operationalized concepts with schemas used by those being

studied - that is, with indigenous concepts. There is a growing interest in the African-based litera-

ture on “socially responsible intelligence,” a concept that overlaps, but is distinct from, the American

idea of “intelligence.” The first formal consideration of this concept was by A. C. Mundy-Castle, an

English scholar who lived and worked for many years in Nigeria (Mundy-Castle, 1974). The cultural

model of socially responsible intelligence includes a quick and perceptive quality of the intellect, a

sympathetic understanding of the social world, and a readiness to act. “Social cognition translates

into responsible intelligence, not in abstraction,” according to Nsamenang (2006), “but primarily as

it enhances the attainment of social ends.” It incorporates a „„concern with responsible ways of con-

tributing to the social world‟‟ (Greenfield, Keller, Fulgni, & Maynard, 2003, p. 464).

This concept of socially responsible intelligence is well documented in the words – and hence the

ideas – used by parents in diverse African groups to describe desired qualities in their children. Ser-

pell (1993) has compiled examples of indigenous words that carry this meaning, including n'glouélé

in Baoulé (Dasen et al., 1985) and nzelu in Chi-Chewa (Serpell, 1993). Among the Kipsigis of western

Kenya, Harkness and Super (1992) found that children's "intelligence" was often judged in terms of

the ability to carry out household chores capably without supervision; a child who could be relied

on in this regard was described as ng’om. As one mother elaborated:

“For a girl who is ng’om, after eating she sweeps the house because she knows it

should be done. Then she washes the dishes, looks for vegetables, and takes good

care of the baby. When you come home [from the fields], you feel pleased and say,

“This child is ng’om.” Another girl may not even clean her own dishes, but just go

out and play, leaving the baby to cry. For a boy, if he is ng’om, he will watch the

cows, and take them to the river without being told. He knows to separate the calves

from the cows and he will fix the thorn fence when it is broken. The other boy will let

the cows into the maize field and will be found playing while they eat the maize.”

Despite the growing documentation of “socially responsible intelligence” and its importance

throughout traditional Africa, the concept has been studied primarily as a component of parents‟

thinking about their children. It has not been deeply researched as an element in family behavior, as

a measurable quality of children‟s development, as a traditional skill to be adapted and nurtured in

modern education (but see Serpell, this issue), or as a cultural resource to be drawn upon in regulat-

ing social and political institutions. There are at least two reasons to pursue these issues, however.

One is that a scientific understanding of indigenous ethnotheories and their role in constructing de-

velopmental reality, especially during times of rapid social change, is an essential building block of


30

social policy. The second reason relates to the theme of how Africa‟s strengths, its indigenous reali-

ties, can contribute to a better understanding of fundamental developmental processes. The mother‟s

description of ng’om, above, seamlessly combines qualities that U.S. scholars might differentiate as

obedience, empathy, self-regulation, goal directedness, foresight, ingenuity, resistance to temptation,

and social competence. Although their synthesis into ng’om conflicts with the definition of intelli-

gence traditional to academic psychology, the combination of traits resonates with a growing focus

in contemporary theory on the connections among these qualities, as exemplified in studies of affec-

tive social competence (Halberstadt, Denham, & Dunsmore, 2001), emotional intelligence (Salovey

& Grewal, 2005), emotion regulation (Eisenberg, Zhou, Liew, Champion, Pidada, Chen, et al. 2006),

and psychological control by parents (Chao & Aque, 2009). Notably, the socially engaged concep-

tion of intelligence also emerges from free descriptions of intelligent behavior given by laypersons in

the U.S., although not academic experts (Sternberg, Conway, Ketron, & Bernstein, 1981).

GLOBALIZATION AND LOCAL KNOWLEDGE:

A CULTURALLY INFORMED SCHOOL READINESS PROGRAM IN SENEGAL

The contributions summarized above focus on the strengths of Africa‟s children and families, and on

how African ways of life support these strengths. One outcome of these and similar contributions

from around the world is that developmental science increasingly has the potential to see local

pathways of development as particular exemplars of a more general model. This understanding, in

turn, is helpful when applied back to the analysis of local problems. It is enlightening to learn that

there are other ways to rear children successfully; and the rich variety of paradigms across cultures

alerts us to the fact that “successful” development is always relative to some set of locally defined

goals. Globalization is now rapidly changing the conditions of development for children around the

world. Along with many positive features, these changes can invite social, economic, and political

disruption. It is our experience that when developmentalists combine globalized knowledge of child

development with specific understanding of the local developmental niche, creative interventions in

the context of social change can be devised. One example of this is a program in rural Senegal that

integrated preparation for modern school with parents‟ indigenous approaches to socializing their

young children.

Childrearing practices in all cultures follow a more or less implicit agenda, a “local curriculum”

that instantiates ethnotheories about children‟s development. European and North American par-

ents use didactic language with their young children – teaching them colors and numbers, asking

them questions – in a way that lays the groundwork for success in school, with its abstract learning

and language-based curriculum (LeVine, LeVine, & Schnell, 2001). Standardized developmental

tests, such as the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (Bayley, 2006), track the emer-

gence of these Western culturally salient skills against the background of a presumed, generalized

Euro-American middle-class environment. Because of the similarity between items for three-year-

olds on the Bayley test (e.g. naming colors) and the content of school curricula, poor performance on

the former bodes poorly for success in the latter. Rural African children tend to score poorly on tests

such as the Bayley after the first 12 or 18 months of life, as the tests become increasingly based on

expressive language and on specific cognitive skills emphasized in the originating, Euro-American


31

population, and this lag is evident as they encounter the demands of school.

The Louga District of Senegal presents an illustrative case study (Harkness, Super, Barry, Zeitlin,

Long et al., 2009; Zeitlin & Barry, 2004; Zeitlin & Barry, 2008). A culturally adapted version of the

Bayley test found that three-year-olds in Louga, reared in traditional ways, perform poorly on the

Cognitive scale (n = 55, average score = 87.6, or nearly a standard deviation from the international

norm of 100). This is by no means indicative, however, of retarded development in a more general

sense. Maternal interviews revealed that local ethnotheories included ideas about a variety of teach-

ing activities for young children. Even though “teaching” was not always the word used by moth-

ers, they were clear about which behaviors deserved support and promotion. The traditional “curri-

culum” followed by parents focused on motor skills and the exercise of responsible obedience. It

taught the social skills and understanding of seniority in social relations needed to advance appro-

priately with age. Responding to picture cards, as noted above, the mothers were lively and full of

ideas with regard to motor development. They were understanding and supportive of the idea that

playing with physical objects promotes both active mastery and also thinking about mechanical op-

erations. Virtually all of the mothers taught their young children “good behaviors” such as respect-

ful greetings, as well as household tasks. Mothers and especially older siblings often engaged in

teaching vocabulary for concrete objects and actions in the context of early training for chores. A six-

month-old would have an object placed in his hand and taught “take” and “give.” With advancing

age, the child would be instructed to deliver an object to another person in the room, and later to

carry out more substantial errands. This agenda for development integrated young children into the

fabric of daily life; it also enabled them to contribute to family maintenance tasks (e.g. food prepara-

tion) by the age of three years, and to the family‟s income production by age six (usually through

assisting with cash crop agriculture). None of these later accomplishments is tested by the Bayley.

Developmental socialization for chores in this community was found to be so pervasive that it

was easy to develop a local scale of development, like the Bayley but using maternal reports about

such tasks as making deliveries, carrying water in a bowl, and tidying up. Two other domains were

added to this local test: motor development, and the social rules for good behavior and respectful

interaction. Scores on this local test, like Bayley scores, correlated with health measures such as he-

moglobin and physical growth (Zeitlin & Barry, 2008). Not surprisingly, however, the two measures

were correlated in opposite directions with maternal education: Bayley scores were positively corre-

lated with mother‟s education (r = .47, p < .05), whereas local test scores were negatively correlated

(r = -.24, p = .05). All the children were learning, but their mothers were following different “curricu-

la.”

As a result of their examination of family life and social change, utilizing both local knowledge

and a more global understanding of child development, the researchers developed a program for

“curricular change” in Louga that built on traditional ideas about teaching and learning in infancy

and early childhood, adapting them through group discussion to the existing educational demands

on these children when they reached school-age. As African societies increasingly draw on Western-

inspired schooling to prepare their citizens for the global economy, there is room to learn from tradi-

tional Western family life about how early learning can be shaped to facilitate the transition to

school. In this case, the value of Western child development research derived precisely from the rec-

ognition that it is in many ways a formalization of the indigenous beliefs and practices of Europeans


32

and North Americans, like aspects of modern schooling. As African ethnotheories contain lessons

for the Euro-American world concerning early motor skills and – we hope – socially responsible in-

telligence, so may the reverse be true for the African world regarding preparation for certain kinds

of school learning.

THINK LOCALLY, ACT GLOBALLY

The integrated nature of the developmental niche means that a particular institution or practice can-

not be simply plucked out of one culture and inserted into another with the expectation of similar

outcomes. Understanding the course of healthy development and taking effective action to promote

it require thinking about the elements of the child‟s niche – settings, customs, and ethnotheories –

and how they interact. An increasingly global developmental science, to which Africa has already

contributed so much, provides ample demonstration of this principle. In this regard, the future of

African research lies in the hands of those who have a deep understanding of Africa and will “think

locally” as they carry out child development research there. At the same time, understanding how to

do that, and appreciating the importance of what one learns, can progress only as such local research

is systematized and shared with others -- that is, when the local scientific activities connect with the

larger global enterprise. From this perspective, a robust local African research community, actively

contributing at the global level, is essential to building a true science of human development.

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Social Responsibility as a Dimension of

Intelligence, and as an Educational Goal:

Insights from Programmatic Research in an African Society

Robert Serpell

University of Zambia

ABSTRACT: Implications of multi-method research in Zambia spanning four decades are

discussed for psychological assessment, parent-teacher communication, educational policy, and

research methodology. A cultural study of indigenous ideas in a rural Chewa community in

eastern Zambia concluded that children’s intelligence was construed as an amalgam of cognitive

alacrity with social responsibility. But in Zambia, as elsewhere, the curriculum of

institutionalized public basic schooling is almost exclusively addressed to the cultivation of

knowledge and cognitive skills. The Child-to-Child approach to education resonates with

indigenous African values and practices. A case study of its application at a public primary

school in northern Zambia documented sustained increases in social responsibility alongside

strong academic outcomes. Connections with research and policy in other societies are discussed.

KEY WORDS: social responsibility; psychological assessment; indigenous conceptions of

intelligence; educational policy; child-child educational approach; Zambia

HOW CREDIBLE IS DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY IN

CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN SOCIETY?

Cultivation of children's optimal development is widely acknowledged as a shared responsibility of

their immediate family and of the wider society in which they live. The African continent is both rich

in cultural resources for this task and also confronted with extraordinary challenges arising from

poverty, disease, conflict and a history of exploitative oppression. If systematic inquiry on African

child development is to achieve recognition as a source of guidance for African families, service

practitioners and policymakers, the science that it generates must not only meet the criteria of a

community of scholarship but must also resonate with indigenous understandings (Serpell, 1990,

An earlier version of this paper was circulated for discussion at the symposium on „Strengthening Africa‟s

Contributions to Child Development Research‟ co-sponsored by the SRCD (Society for Research on Child

Development) and the University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada, February 2-6, 2009. The present version has been

influenced by insightful and constructive suggestions by a number of anonymous reviewers.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Robert Serpell, Department of Psychology, University of Zambia, Lusaka, Zambia; e-mail: [email protected]


SRCD Africa Child Development Research Capacity Building Study Group Robert Serpell – Social Responsibility, Intelligence and Education

38

1994a, 1996/97). In this paper, I review the methods and findings of several strands of

developmental research in Zambia, in search of implications for the future promotion of a field of

African child developmental inquiry that is responsive to both of these accountabilities.

In the first part of the 20th century, when the disciplinary field of developmental psychology was taking shape in Europe and North America, research on child development in Africa was almost exclusively directed and published by scholars of European cultural heritage. Despite their generally benign intentions and high levels of awareness of cross-cultural differences, the studies they conducted were predominantly 'centri-cultural' rather than 'cross-cultural' in design, posing questions of the form “how well can they do our tricks?” (Wober, 1969) or interpreting differences from Western norms through the lens of a deficit orientation (Cole & Bruner, 1971; Ginsburg, 1972). As a result, this body of research threw more light on the peculiar biases of middle-class, Western cultural practices and ethnotheories than on the meaning-systems informing alternative, endogenous approaches to child-rearing (cf Azuma, 1984; Sinha, 1986). Yet, until recently the findings of this research, along with those of child development research in Europe and the USA constituted the 'expert knowledge' base for training teachers, nurses, social workers and other professionals concerned with child development, at higher education institutions (HEIs) all over the African continent. A professional practitioner or policymaker seeking guidance on how to address a particular

problem in Africa could hardly be blamed for regarding such 'expert knowledge' with some

skepticism. Still less surprising would be the decision by an African parent struggling with a

difficult problem of child development to turn away from such university-based experts in favor of

the diagnostic advice of an indigenous traditional health practitioner. Of course, those trained in

HEIs might condemn such advice as amateurish, superstitious, or old-fashioned and point to the

underpinnings of scientific research to justify their claim that the advice they could offer to such

clients is more reliable. But, when the science on which expert knowledge is based is so deeply

infused with foreign concepts, theories and methods, an African clientele in the post-colonial era

must surely pause for thought.

These concerns prompted me to embark on two complementary lines of inquiry in the early

1970s. The first was designed to clarify the influence of recurrent experiences in children's everyday

lives on the level of skills they display in various formal test situations. The second explored the

ways in which adults responsible for the socialization of children in rural communities

conceptualize the processes and outcomes of child development. Exploring the relevance of that

perspective to formal education led to a wide-ranging study of the significance of schooling in the

life-journeys of children born into such a community. Conspicuous shortcomings of the public

education system in turn prompted me to search for alternative models of schooling that focus more

productively on some of the personal dimensions of child development that rank high among

indigenous African values. One such innovative curriculum was observed, analyzed and evaluated.

The programmatic sequence of research questions informing these investigations is outlined in Table

1. The process through which this took place resembles an evolving journey, rather than

implementation of a preconceived blueprint. Moreover, at many junctures along the way, I was

critically supported by the co-constructive participation in research design, implementation and

interpretation by various African colleagues1. In conclusion, I propose some broad

recommendations for future research on child development in Africa.


39

Table 1. Programmatic sequence of systematic inquiries in Zambia (1971 – 2008)

1. Foundational studies – initial insights:

a. How specific are perceptual skills? A cross-cultural, comparative, quasi-experimental study of

pattern reproduction in various media by urban Zambian and English schoolchildren (1971-

72). (Serpell, 1979)

b. Estimates of children's intelligence in a rural African community. A cultural, quasi-

ethnographic study based on semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of

adults in Chewa villages (1973-74). (Serpell, 1977)

2. Deepening or refining insights and exploring their scope of generalizability:

a. Development and standardization of a nonverbal cognitive test especially suited to children

in rural African environments: the Panga Munthu Test (Ezeilo, 1978; Kathuria & Serpell, 1997)

b. Endogenous dimensions of intelligence in various African cultures: qualitative analysis of

language use in Chi-Chewa and other African languages; critical review and synthesis of

other more empirically structured investigations (Serpell, 1989; 1993, Ch 2)

3. Extrapolating and investigating broader implications:

a. The significance of schooling in the life-journeys of young people born into a rural community

of a contemporary African society (Serpell, 1993)

b. How do village adult ratings and locally adapted tests relate to academic performance at

school? (Serpell, 1993, Ch 5; Serpell & Jere-Folotiya, 2008)

c. Disjunctions between indigenous socialization values and the formal educational model of

cognitive growth (Serpell, 1993, Ch 3; Serpell, 1996)

d. Challenges of bicultural mediation, institutional coordination, syncretic fusion (Serpell, 1993,

Ch 4, Ch.6).

e. Local accountability of rural schools in an African national system of public education:

implications for planning (Serpell, 1993, Ch.7; Serpell, 1999)

4. Evaluating innovative interventions to address the challenges identified:

a. Participatory appropriation of health science and technology: a case study of innovation in

basic education in a rural district of Zambia: theoretical and historical analysis (Serpell &

Mwape, 1998/99; Mumba, 2000; Udell, 2001; Serpell, 2008).

b. The Child-to-Child approach and the cultivation of nurturance in the context of health science

curriculum development: observation, interpretation and evaluation (Mwape & Serpell, 1996;

Serpell, 2008)

c. Personal dimensions and their relation to education: a follow-up study of students graduating

from the Child-to-Child program in Mpika, Zambia (Adamson-Holley, 1999). Further

evaluation of intervention outcomes.

d. Development and refinement of instruments for teachers to assess psychological attributes

relevant to indigenous values and communication with parents (Serpell & Mwape, 1998/99;

Adamson-Holley, 1999)

5. Methodological reflections:

a. Metatheoretical analysis of the rationale for particular methodological strategies in cultural

psychological research, grounded in the studies conducted in Zambia, and other studies in the

USA and Ethiopia (Serpell, 1994a, 2006)


40

Social Responsibility as a Dimension of Intelligence

Our early research on cultural bias in the assessment of intelligence rested on the metaphor of

culture as a womb (Serpell, 1994b), defining the environment that feeds and constrains child

development. Recognizing that different cultures afford different patterns of opportunity for

learning specific skills (Serpell, 1979), we went on to develop a new instrument for assessing

cognitive ability among children growing up in a rural African context (Ezeilo, 1978, Kathuria &

Serpell, 1998). This test (the Panga Munthu Test - PMT) is based in the medium of clay modeling, a

widespread play activity in most rural areas. Unlike most of the other, currently available tests for

children between the ages of 5 and 12, the PMT does not presuppose exposure to Western cultural

practices and artifacts such as storybooks, pictures, puzzles and building blocks, which is very

unevenly distributed among Africa‟s children. Thus the test may be especially suitable for the

cognitive assessment of children who, for one reason or another, have received less formal schooling

than is prescribed by official public policy, e.g. those orphaned by the AIDS pandemic or displaced

by civil war.

The commonest psychometric approach to test validity is to examine the correlation of test

scores with an external criterion such as future scholastic achievement. But the power of a test to

predict performance at school is simply beside the point for many clinical purposes of assessment in

Zambia (Serpell, 1982). Thus a second, complementary line of research initiated in 1973 addressed

the more fundamental question: what constitutes intelligence from the perspective of adults in a

rural African community? Or, as my colleague, Chikomeni Banda, put it succinctly in Chi-Chewa for

feedback to the host community: wanzelu ndani? (who is a person with nzelu ?) The term nzelu comes

up in almost any discussion of intelligence among Chewa people. Its semantic load resembles in

some important respects the English term intelligence, and the French word intelligence. But closer

examination of how the term is used suggests that it may be closer in meaning to the Luganda

concept of obugezi (Uganda), the Bemba concept of mano (Zambia), the Baoule concept of ng'louele

(Cote d'Ivoire) and the Djerma-Songhai concept of lakkal (Mali). In studies of each of these African

language groups, a distinction emerges between the notion of cognitive alacrity on the one hand and

that of social responsibility on the other, with a highly valued personality trait defined as a

combination of the two (Serpell, 1989). Our own study among the Chewa people of Zambia's Eastern

Province did not focus only on analysis of the language used to describe children's attributes. The

vocabulary of local discourse was elicited from adult informants in the context of a discussion that

focused on a group of familiar children and how an adult would choose among them in an

emergency situation. First reported in 1974 (Serpell, 1974, 1977), these findings have been revisited

from a number of different angles over the years, and gave rise to a study that followed a cohort of

50 young people for 14 years (Serpell, 1993).

This study of indigenous conceptions of child development in a rural Chewa community gave

rise to the insight that nzelu was construed as an amalgam of cognitive alacrity with social

responsibility. Since contemporary Western-style schooling in many African countries tends to

assess children‟s educational progress almost entirely in terms of cognitive skills and knowledge

acquisition, these findings have been interpreted as reflecting a serious credibility gap for public

basic education with respect to the values and aspirations of parents in rural African communities.


41

Social Responsibility as an Educational Goal

The disjunction between indigenous socialization values and those embedded in formal schooling

has been a recurrent source of concern in the literature (e.g., Mazrui, 1972; Mukene, 1988;

Nsamenang, 1992; Serpell & Hatano, 1997). Some authors have construed it as an impediment to

modernization, while others have focused on the alienating consequences of schooling. An

intermediary approach is to construe the disjunction as a challenge for bicultural integration. Banda

(2008), for instance, advocates a syncretic approach to curriculum development in Zambian schools.

Noting that the traditional agricultural practices of the Chewa people are informed by an internally

coherent African indigenous knowledge system, much of which is either ignored or challenged by

the practices of public formal schooling, he recommends the active promotion of hybridization. An

explicit method, described by Barnhart & Kawagley (2005) uses an iterative process of

communication between indigenous knowledge and cosmopolitan science to generate an integrated

body of appropriate knowledge for the school curriculum.

The policy agenda of empowering young people through formal education has been embraced

with enthusiasm by most national governments and the United Nations, and a model of

Institutionalized Public Basic Schooling (IPBS) has become increasingly standardized around the

world (Serpell & Hatano, 1997). But, at a local level, basic schools in many rural African

communities lack credibility. In my view, a key factor is the narrowing staircase model of schooling

that has become standard in most countries on the continent, and the extractive definition of success

that this promulgates. In the eyes of many low-income families in rural areas, schooling has become

a system of extracting a small minority of the youth from their local community, leaving behind little

of local value for those who do not pass the stringent selection exams, and in many cases alienating

those who do pass from their culture of origin. A corrective strategy would be for national

educational planners to treat rural primary schools as separate nodes with more explicit local

accountability. One element of this process would be to articulate and legitimize alternative

indicators of success by which the development of students can be gauged and accorded public

recognition (Serpell, 1999).

Reacting to the relativistic approach taken by many cultural psychology studies of African child

development and socialization, including my own, Kagitcibasi (2007) has issued a stern warning

against the adoption of “double standards” (p.217). As she points out, the elaboration of the Human

Development Index (HDI) by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is a significant

improvement over purely economic indices of progressive societal change such as per capita GDP,

and affords an inviting opportunity for scientific psychology to contribute to such change. However,

her claims that school learning is “more conducive to generalization and transfer” and “more

instrumental than traditional skills for advancement in urbanizing societies” (p. 219), rest on

contestable research evidence. Moreover, she acknowledges that “in most of the Majority World

schools are inadequate” (p. 224). In my estimation, to overlook the potentially alienating

consequences of poorly designed or poorly implemented IPBS is liable to undermine its

effectiveness as an instrument of social progress.

One systematic programme of educational innovation has centered around the principle of

promoting social responsibility in pre-adolescent children. The Child-to-Child approach (CtC) is

designed to mobilise the potential of children as agents of health education (Pridmore & Stephens,


42

2000). Conceptualised at a series of meetings in London in the 1960s, convened by David Morley

(1973), its momentum as an international network was sustained for two decades by Hugh Hawes

(1988). Both of these Britons were inspired in early phases of their professional careers by

observations in Africa and elsewhere in the „Majority World‟ (Kağitçibaşi, 2007), of the widespread

involvement of pre-adolescent children in the nurturant care of their younger siblings (Udell, 2001).

In 1995, we embarked on a case study of CtC practices by a team of primary school teachers in

the small Zambian town of Mpika (Serpell & Mwape, 1998/99). We observed an impressively

comprehensive, integrative approach to involving preadolescent schoolchildren in the promotion of

public health both at their school and in their home communities. One practice involved pairing

schoolchildren with selected children of preschool age, whose weight was monitored as an index of

nutritional status through regular visits to the local health centre. The growth-charts kept for these

young children were deployed as resources for learning about mathematics (cf. Gibbs & Mutunga,

1991) and biology, while reflective discussions on factors contributing to their health led into social

studies and English. Group projects were undertaken addressed to topics in demography and

sanitation, and responsibilities were distributed for practical activities such as growing nutritious

foods and bringing clean water to school. Throughout these and various other activities, the theme

of active participation was applied both to exploratory problem-solving and to the cultivation of

social responsibility (Mumba, 2000).

School-leavers completing this programme are expected to be better prepared for many practical

challenges of life in a rural community. Practical and social skills acquired were demonstrated

through role-play (Mwape & Serpell, 1996), and parents interviewed were generally positive about

the program‟s promotion of responsible participation in the nurturant care of younger children,

which they recognised as an indigenous tradition (Serpell, 2008). Over the years, my perspective on

the CtC approach has shifted from seeing it as a way of harnessing a neglected resource for

implementing the expert agenda of health education, to a way of respecting the competence of

children, and thus an opportunity to partner with children to address shared challenges.

Some critics have voiced concern that outreach activities of the type emphasised by the CtC

approach may divert students from mastery of the core curriculum. What we found in Mpika,

however, was that students enrolled in CtC classes were also significantly more successful on the

purely academic national secondary school selection examination than their peers at the same school

enrolled in more conventional, non-CtC classes. The advantage of being enrolled in a CtC class was

much more pronounced for one of the two streams, suggesting that individual differences between

the two teachers' approach to the implementation also carried weight.

The sustainability of prosocial attitudes was assessed in a follow-up study by Adamson-Holley

(1999) of ninth grade students at two highly selective national high schools and two less selective

basic schools in Mpika. Teachers unfamiliar with the CtC approach were invited to assess their

students with rating scales developed in consultation with Zambian CtC practitioners. Basic school

teachers rated girls with a CtC primary school background significantly higher on the dimensions of

Nurturance, Cooperativeness and Taking Responsibility than their current classmates. But this

finding was not replicated for boys, nor for either gender at the high schools. CtC students appeared

to have less opportunities at the high schools to apply the cooperative, prosocial skills and attitudes

they had acquired at primary school than those enrolled in basic schools.


43

CONNECTIONS WITH OTHER RESEARCH ON INTELLIGENCE,

CULTURE AND EDUCATION

Although the research programme described in this paper was developed in response to an African

context, a number of the social issues that influenced its direction in Zambia have also been

recognised in Western societies. For instance, public scepticism in American society about the

validity of psychometric tests of intelligence and resistance to the use of such tests to justify

exclusionary practices has fuelled the popularity of alternative theoretical perspectives on

intelligence such as Gardner‟s (1983) concept of multiple intelligences, the contextual subtheory of

Sternberg‟s (1984) triarchic theory, and Ceci‟s (1996) bio-ecological analysis. Sternberg et al (1981)

found that urban, European-American laypersons‟ conceptions of behaviour indicative of an ideally

intelligent person differed from those of American expert researchers on intelligence by including a

social competence dimension absent from the expert view. And in rural and urban areas of

Switzerland, it seems that different life-styles may be associated with different emphases on the

relative importance of the social and technological dimensions of intelligence (Schurmans & Dasen,

1992).

The recurrence of an emphasis on social responsibility as a valued dimension of intelligence

across several African societies may reflect the predominance of rural modes of social organisation.

But it would be unwise to conclude that the values expressed by African samples reflect an

unsophisticated or outdated perspective. Many astute social analysts have noted that the

progressivist movement of modernisation brings with it many social costs as well as material

benefits. Moreover, Western societies acknowledge the importance of prosocial behavior as a

socialisation goal, even if it only features rarely among the explicit objectives of school curricula. A

sizeable body of empirical research was reviewed by Eisenberg (1992) on the developmental origins

of cooperative and prosocial behaviour in Western societies, much of which seems consistent with

the Child-to-Child approach in education. One research question of interest is what accounts for the

relatively high level of nurturant care for younger siblings displayed by children raised in many

African families. Eisenberg (1992, p.83) draws a sharp distinction between the expectation of

reciprocity and truly “altruistic (that is, sympathetic and other-oriented)” motivation, as alternative

drivers of cooperative behaviour, implying that cultures that cultivate high levels of cooperation

may be promoting reciprocity rather than true altruism. In Africa as elsewhere, it is common to hear

calls for the goals of education to include not only technical knowledge and skills, but also

commitment to the public interest (Serpell, 2006b). If an ethic of reciprocity facilitates the integration

of those goals, it may be relevant to the political goals of many different societies.

The representation of cultural context offered by my research on child development in Zambia

gradually expanded from the metaphor of culture as a womb, to include culture as a language and

eventually also culture as a forum (Serpell, 1994b). Looking back, it is clear that the womb metaphor

reflected the influence of Gibson & Gibson‟s (1955) developmental theory of perceptual

differentiation (Serpell, 1969). The language metaphor was doubtless inspired by Pike‟s (1967) emic-

etic formulation, of which I later advanced an explicit critique and reformulation (Serpell, 1990). The

forum metaphor arose from reflection on various systemic perspectives (Serpell, 1999), including

Bronfenbrenner‟s (1979) ecology of human development, Lave & Wenger‟s (1991) apprenticeship

model and Rogoff et al‟s (1995) three-tiered account of development through participation in


44

sociocultural activity, and the elaborations by Cole, Scribner, Bruner, Wertsch and Valsiner of

Vygotsky‟s (1978) account of mind in society. Another influence on the forum metaphor was

afforded by participation in an international symposium on the impact of psychology on Third

World development (Serpell, 1984), where I was deeply impressed by Azuma‟s (1984) account of the

pivotal role played by indigenization in the evolution of psychology in Japan. Among these

influential authors, only Pike and Lave were anthropologists. Although I have emphasised the

importance of tapping into indigenous culture, my research goals have always been primarily

psychological rather than cultural. As Jahoda (1982) has explained in great detail, the disciplinary

preoccupations of anthropology and psychology have become systematically different over the

course their growth beyond common origins, yet psychology may stand to benefit from “ selective

borrowing” (op. cit., 273) of methods and constructs developed by anthropologists.

The seminal concept of the developmental niche advanced by Super & Harkness (1986) draws on

the insight of Bronfenbrenner (1979) that human development takes place within a nested set of

systemic interdependencies, and on the earlier research programme of John and Beatrice Whiting

(1963), that documented in rich ethnographic detail how different are the worlds of childhood in

different cultural settings around the world. Two dimensions of the developmental niche are cultural

practices of child-rearing and caregiver ethnotheories. The parental practice of promoting responsible

participation by preadolescent children in the nurturant care of younger siblings that we

documented in Mpika is an example of the former, while an example of the latter is the system of

ideas about nzelu and how to promote it that we documented in Katete.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

Table 2 presents in summary form some principles I recommend for guiding future research, based

on the studies reviewed in this paper. I will elaborate on just three:

Focusing on Ostensible Referents to Anchor Cross-cultural Communication

In two of the studies described above, as well as another study conducted in the USA (Serpell, Baker

& Sonnenschein, 2005), we proceeded by identifying ostensible referents in the foreground of our

discussions, and shared horizons in the background, in order to anchor an exploratory process of

negotiation with our key informants about their conceptions of intervening constructs in the middle

ground (Serpell, 2006a). For example, our study of estimates of intelligence engaged informants with

a focus on actual children as ostensible referents, and relied on shared horizons about the nature of

parental responsibility in order to secure an authentic discussion between the interviewer and

village adults about what attributes are important in children's behavior. Starting with an ostensible

referent, by naming a particular person who can be pointed out brings into play a level of

interpretation grounded in what Horton (1982) termed “primary theory” that is shared by all human

beings and “provides the cross-cultural voyager with his intellectual bridgehead” for

communication. Anchoring the communication with reference to real persons affords greater

confidence that any secondary theoretical constructs presented by the informant have real

application. Describing in detail how a conversation was initiated and conducted affords a kind of


45

audit trail, as recommended by Guba (1981), for ensuring that qualitative research is protected

against the charge of unreliability.

Table 2. Some principles for guiding future research

Researchers on child development in Africa should, whenever possible, seek to:

a. unpackage fundamental concepts from the operational forms in which they are embedded

b. deploy multiple methods for triangulating phenomena

c. invoke multiple audiences in the validation of research conclusions

d. focus on ostensible referents to anchor cross-cultural communication

e. fine-tune the extrapolation of practical implications for distinctive groups of practitioners

f. refine instruments for psychological assessment

g. involve students as bicultural mediators and apprentices

h. advocate for the cumulative construction of knowledge

Invoking Multiple Audiences in the Validation of Research Conclusions

Taking stock of what we had learned in our longitudinal study of the significance of schooling in the

lives of young people born into a rural Chewa community, we explored two different approaches to

sharing our insights with the host community. The first, although carefully prepared, was much less

successful than the second (Serpell, 1993 Ch 6). At first, we prepared documents in the local

language citing verbatim, but anonymously, a range of statements of opinion expressed by village

adults (many of them women) in the course of tape-recorded interviews. The focus was on potential

connections between the school curriculum and either agriculture or health, and the opinions cited

ranged from one extreme to another. These documents were distributed in advance in each village,

and discussions were moderated by two undergraduate students raised as children in the

neighborhood. In addition to village residents, we invited local health and agricultural extension

workers to participate. By staging these discussions on the home ground of villagers, legitimizing

their opinions by committing them to writing and leaving the agenda very loosely defined, we

hoped to generate a balanced policy debate between different positions. In practice, however, the

representatives of national health and agricultural agencies dominated the discussions, and those

women villagers who attended remained essentially passive throughout.

Our second approach involved fictional dramatization and was greatly facilitated by the late

Professor Mapopa M'tonga and Ms Tamika Kaluwa, both internationally renowned exponents of the

art of popular theatre (Etherton, 1982; Mlama, 1988). We co-constructed and staged a drama, dance

and musical performance with the active participation of local teachers and school-leavers as well as

a team of experienced animateurs, attracting a large and enthusiastic audience from several villages

in and around the neighborhood. Analysis of the informal reflections by members of the audience

during and immediately following the drama showed that it had successfully engaged a wide range

of local stakeholders, including women, who constitute a crucially important constituency both for

understanding child socialization practices and for participating in the design and implementation

of progressive social change. Formulating an effective dramatization of research results is at least as


46

challenging as writing a technical paper for publication, and calls for interdisciplinary collaboration.

For certain important audiences it may be the most viable way of engaging them with substantive

issues identified by systematic research on African child development.

Involving Students as Bicultural Mediators and Apprentices

All of the studies described in this paper involved undergraduate students of UNZA at various

stages of data collection. Student participation in research serves an important pedagogical function

of special significance in African universities, where so much of the curriculum is modeled on

foreign institutional practices and relies heavily on research conducted elsewhere, or conducted in

the student's home country by foreign researchers. Under these circumstances, participation in

research and other extra-mural projects affords students unique learning opportunities, by engaging

them in the demanding cognitive process of testing formal theories against reality, by preparing

them for practical challenges in the world of work, and by inviting them to confront indigenous

interpretations of experience (Serpell, 2007).

Student participation also brings important potential benefits to the research enterprise. Many

have been exposed in the course of their earlier socialisation to an indigenous cultural perspective

on psychological phenomena and have developed a deep understanding and commitment to certain

elements of that perspective. They are thus well-placed to resist simplistic or systematically distorted

interpretations of the culture. However, they will only share with researchers their grounds for such

resistance if they recognize as authentic an invitation to do so. Opening their minds to the possibility

of deploying indigenous concepts in the pursuit of scientific knowledge may pave the way for

creative engagement with some of the challenges and paradoxes that have baffled past researchers

on African child development.

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS

The principle of local accountability advocated above for rural primary schools is also applicable to

universities and regional academic organisations in Africa. While those institutions and networks of

scholarship form part of a larger system for the promotion of knowledge to address the grand issues

confronting humanity and the planet earth, they also derive an important element of legitimacy

from their local mandate from the people of Africa. Communicating effectively with that

constituency is not only a matter of paying one's dues. It is also an intrinsic element of the process of

scientific validation. Universities can and should include among their educational objectives the

cultivation of social responsibility among students. Co-constructive participation by university

students in applied research on child development affords many opportunities for addressing that

challenge.


47

Note 1

In addition to the various colleagues cited in the text, I wish to acknowledge important con-

tributions to the research reviewed in this paper by many African colleagues and friends

who drew on their first-hand experience of childhood in African families and village com-

munities to advise me on the design of procedures and the interpretation of results, as well

as the many UNZA students who have shared with me their reactions to both preliminary

and published reports of our findings. A number of positive responses by other African

scholars to our findings among the Chewa and Bemba peoples of Zambia further encourage

me to believe that they have some general applicability across the continent of Africa, even

though the particulars vary from one African society to another. Even more gratifying than

their endorsement of our findings has been the further elaboration they have published of

ideas springing from, but going well beyond our original observations (e.g. Dasen, Barthe-

lemy et al., 1985; Nsamenang, 1992; Ogunnaike & Houser, 2003; Mpofu, 2002).

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Bridging Culture, Research and Practice in Early

Childhood Development:

The Madrasa Resource Centers Model in East Africa

Peter A. M. Mwaura1 and Kofi Marfo2 1Madrasa Regional Research Program-East Africa, 2University of South Florida

ABSTRACT: The Madrasa Resource Centers program in East Africa has adapted features of Euro-

American theory and practice into a service delivery system responding to local cultural and so-

cio-economic realities. After 25 years of implementation in predominantly Muslim communities

with high poverty and low literacy rates, the program could serve as a model for other parts of the

continent with similar population profiles. We examine some of the program’s key features and

discuss the prospects that MRC’s integration of research into service delivery holds for develop-

mental research in the region. We propose that university partnerships with such programs could

yield productive inquiry with benefits to local universities, community-based programs, and de-

velopmental science.

KEY WORDS:

Early childhood development, early childhood education; Madrasa preschools; applied develop-

mental research; university-community partnerships; East Africa

Several forces have converged to increase the prominence of early childhood development/ educa-

tion (ECD/E) programs in Africa. Dramatic socio-cultural change is altering traditional patterns of

childcare (Njenga & Kabiru, 2001). Subsistence economies are losing viability, mobility and settle-

ment patterns are reducing the role of extended family members in child care, and enhanced school-

ing opportunities for children have diminished older siblings‘ involvement in traditional socially

distributed childcare systems (see Kipkorir, 1993). Alternative arrangements for childcare have be-

come necessary, and communities are increasingly looking to preschools as a realistic option. With

schooling perceived broadly as the ultimate panacea for socio-economic problems facing families

and communities, preschool programs have gained importance in their own right; even among poor

This article is based on a paper prepared by the first author for the invitational conference Strengthening Africa’s

Contributions to Child Development Research, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, February 2-6, 2009. The second author

is thankful to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, where his contribution to the

final version of this paper was written.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Peter A. M. Mwaura, Lead Researcher, Madrasa

Regional Research Program, East Africa, Aga Khan Foundation East Africa,, 8th Floor ICEA Building, Kenyatta

Avenue, P.O Box 40898-00100, Nairobi Kenya; E-mail: [email protected]


SRCD Africa Child Development Research Capacity Building Study Group Peter Mwaura and Kofi Marfo – Madrasa Early Childhood Program in East Africa

52

and uneducated families, there is growing conviction that children exposed to such programs have a

better chance at succeeding in school.

In East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda), governments have long recognized the impor-

tance of ECD/E for later school success, although programs have largely been funded not by gov-

ernments but by local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international philanthropic

agencies. Across all three countries, preschool centers are mostly owned and managed by communi-

ties. In recent decades, ECD/E programs have received an additional boost from international agen-

cies — especially UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank — promoting these programs as a neces-

sary part of the broader strategy for national development and poverty reduction (UNESCO, 2000,

2007; Young & Mustard, 2008, Van der Gaag, 2002).

Under the foregoing influences, East Africa has witnessed tremendous growth of ECD/E pro-

grams during the last three decades, although gross enrollment ratios (GER – number of enrolled

children as a percentage of all similar-age children) remain low. The latest Education for All (EFA)

report shows that as of 2007, the GERs for the three countries stood at 48% for Kenya, 35% for the

Republic of Tanzania, and 4% for Uganda – with boys and girls similarly represented (UNESCO,

2010). The expansion in programs has not been matched with commensurate attention to quality

beyond the formulation of national policies focusing predominantly on personnel and physical envi-

ronment standards (Republic of Kenya, 2006a, 2006b; Republic of Uganda, 2007; Revolutionary Gov-

ernment of Zanzibar, 2005). Neither have there been systematic efforts to assess these programs with

regard to their processes and outcomes.

Amidst widespread concern that the rapid expansion in ECD/E services is driven by Euro-

American program models and practices presented as universal standards of best practice (Pence, this

issue), the imperative for systematic inquiry into all aspects of ECD/E interventions cannot be over-

stated. However, the expertise and resources needed to support such inquiry are extremely limited

throughout the continent. This paper explores the potential contributions that an analysis of the mis-

sion, structure, and operations of a comprehensive cross-national, multi-site community-based

ECD/E program could make to applied developmental research on the continent. The paper ex-

plores the adaptation and integration of a North American curricular/pedagogical framework into a

locally responsive service delivery system, its attainment of an appreciably high level of program

sustainability and local ownership within resource-poor communities, and its strong valuing of re-

search. These attributes position the Madrasa Resource Centers‘ (MRC) program to make important

contributions to the science and practice of ECD/E. Consequently, the paper uses the program as a

prism to explore the prospects for advancing developmental research in the region.

THE MRC ECD/E PROGRAM

Currently, MRC supports at least 203 communities: 66 in Kenya, 53 in Uganda, and 84 on Zanzibar

Island, Tanzania. The program has benefited some 30,000 children and trained over 4,000 communi-

ty-based teachers and 2,000 school management committee members across the region. At the 2007

commemoration of the program‘s 25th anniversary, His Highness the Aga Khan described the pro-

gram as ―a story that began with the sowing of some very small but well selected seeds … seeds

which took root and now have blossomed into an educational success story which can serve as an


53

inspiring example to educators everywhere‖ (http://www.akdn.org/Content/211). In this section,

some of the key components of the program, including a brief history, are summarized briefly.

Historical and Socio-Cultural Context

The program began initially as a small pilot project on Kenya‘s coastal region in the mid-1980s with

Aga Khan Foundation funding. It became a regional initiative when programs were also established

in Zanzibar (Tanzania) and Uganda in 1990 and 1993, respectively. It evolved in response to a con-

cern in Muslim communities that appropriate and high quality education programs were not readily

available to their children. Access to local schools was inadequate and children who were fortunate

to gain admission performed poorly. These economically disadvantaged communities with large

families and high adult illiteracy rates (Zimmermann, 2004) perceived the national secular education

system as uni-dimensional and incomplete, focusing exclusively on academic skills to the exclusion

of education in the moral and spiritual values that defined the cultural and religious outlook of Mus-

lims. Conversely, traditional Islamic education, which was well accepted in the Islamic population,

was perceived to be limited because its singular focus on religious values shortchanged children on

the critical skills and competencies needed for survival and success in the secular world. In Kenya

this concern had been underscored decades earlier by the Education Commission Report, popularly

known as the Ominde Report (Ominde, 1964, p. 34-36):

Whereas education that has spread elsewhere in Kenya under Christian auspices has assumed a

secular form, Islamic education is wholly centered in Islam as a religion and as a social and cultural

system … The need for secular education was clearly recognized, as was also the danger that a neg-

lect of it would increasingly place Muslims at a disadvantage in meeting the demands of a modern

world.

Muslim communities saw the need to have their children well grounded in their faith and local

culture while also gaining skills necessary to enter and do well in secular schools. To them, ECD/E

was a critical starting point for bridging religio-cultural socialization and secular education. Thus

MRC is deeply rooted in practical historical and socio-cultural realities within the communities that

came to embrace, support, and own it.

Program Expansion: Community Entry and Participation

MRC program operations begin with the identification of communities in need of ECD/E services.

Community entry is done through community and religious leaders. The number of children with

no access to preschool and the community‘s willingness to participate are important criteria for es-

tablishing a program. Following selection, community mobilization activities are initiated to 1) raise

awareness about existing education problems, 2) sensitize the population to the importance of early

childhood development, and 3) position the community to assume collective responsibility for solv-

ing identified problems. In so doing, the program promotes self-reliance and active involvement in

local capacity building.

Once agreement has been reached to establish a center, the community‘s investment and in-

volvement are evident in all aspects of the program. The community identifies or donates land to

build a new facility or renovates an existing structure. Under an MRC community development of-

http://www.akdn.org/Content/211


54

ficer‘s guidance, community leaders then mobilize people and resources to ensure that the center

will provide high quality developmental and preschool experiences for children. Teachers are identi-

fied within the community by the community members themselves and trained by MRC trainers.

Program evaluation, a core element of MRC‘s service delivery, is a joint venture between com-

munity members and MRC staff. For the first two years the preschools are evaluated biannually by

the community members and the MRC staff independently; the MRC staff and the community‘s rep-

resentatives then come together to discuss their findings. This participatory process is intended to

build community-level evaluation capacity, sensitize communities to quality issues, and inculcate a

sense of ownership for sustainability. At the end of two years, the preschools are assessed by the na-

tional MRC board, and then by a panel of external experts, including Ministry of Education officials.

Once a preschool meets the required quality standards, it is allowed to join the Madrasa Graduated

Preschools Association, which takes over the monitoring and evaluation function with occasional

support from MRC staff.

Curriculum and Pedagogy

The MRC program addresses goals relating not only to learning but also to health and nutrition,

growth monitoring, and parenting education. The program serves all children, including those with

special needs and HIV/AIDS, and aims to facilitate the transition from home to preschool and pri-

mary school, subsequently. The program borrows its pedagogical principles and practices from the

High/Scope preschool model (Hohmann & Weikart, 1995), which is grounded in two traditions: the

Piagetian cognitive developmental view of learning as ―a process in which the child acts on and in-

teracts with the immediate world to construct an increasingly elaborate concept of reality‖ (Hoh-

mann & Weikart, 1995, p. 16), and the Deweyan progressivist view of learning as ―change in pat-

terns of thinking brought about by experiential problem-solving‖ (Kohlberg & Mayer, 1972) in the

context of natural interactions with people and the environment (Hohmann & Weikart, 1995). Thus,

the MRC‘s pedagogical foundation is the constructivist philosophy of valuing children as active

agents of their own learning and discovery (Piaget, 1970) within a socio-cultural milieu (Vygotsky,

1978). This is a profound departure from the pedagogy of recitation and memorization characteristic

of religious education in traditional Madrasas.

MRC has adopted High/Scope‘s five ingredients of active learning: abundance of age-

appropriate materials for children to use in a variety of ways; opportunities for children to manipulate

materials, choose activities and materials in line with personal interests, and use language — all with

appropriate adult support. The acronym coined at MRC to capture the centrality of these active

learning ingredients is MAMACHOLASU (MA: material; MA: manipulation; CHO: choice; LA: lan-

guage and SU: support; Madrasa Resource Center, 2000). Throughout the school day, children have

opportunities to interact with culturally appropriate materials, with the teacher‘s main role being

one of observing and asking appropriate questions to identify the developmental level of the child in

order to guide further exploration and discovery.

In the context of the raging debate on the importation of Western practices, it is instructive to

note that while constructivism and active learning are formal conceptualizations in Western educa-

tional theory, the forms of learning and instructional philosophies inherent in them are not uniquely

Western. Rogoff and her colleagues have identified attending, observing, imitating, creating, partici-


55

pating, and co-constructing as natural, participatory learning mechanisms through which children

from all cultures come to gain knowledge of their world long before their exposure to the didactic,

assembly-line instruction found in schools (Rogoff et al., 2003). In a conceptual analysis of young

children‘s play in African cultures, Marfo and Biersteker (in press) have argued that careful exami-

nation of early developmental and learning processes in African contexts reveals pedagogical in-

sights and principles that are very much compatible with constructivist, discovery, activity-based or

problem-based learning, as conceptualized in Euro-American contexts. The curricular and pedagog-

ical adaptations at MRC have not necessarily arisen out of formalized guidelines on cultur-

al/contextual relevance; nevertheless, MRC employs instructional methods that build on local ap-

proaches to teaching children, including the use of interactions around stories, songs, and concrete

as well as imaginary play objects and activities to stimulate thinking and exploration.

Grounding program operations and curricular practices in the local context

National standards guiding the operation of preschools vary across the region. However, MRC cen-

ters in all three countries use a standard curriculum with sufficient flexibility to permit local condi-

tion to dictate the selection of instructional materials and the nature of supports elicited or received

from the community. The program uses teaching aids and learning materials constructed from low-

cost materials readily available within the community. Children, teachers, parents, and the commu-

nity at large all participate in collecting safe materials for development into useful teaching and

learning aids, and parents are encouraged to collaborate with teachers to develop such materials.

MRC‘s holistic approach to curriculum content and instructional delivery revolves around three

kinds of ‗integration‘. First, by virtue of the socio-cultural values and circumstances that gave birth

to the program, the curriculum content integrates secular academic education and Islamic religious

education. Second, the two types of content are taught not in isolation from each other but as an in-

tegrated whole; lessons are planned around themes fusing instruction in secular academic skills and

religious values. Third, the program integrates skills and competencies across all dimensions of

child development, along with educational activities for parents and the community emphasizing

childrearing skills, including healthy nutrition care and hygiene practices, as well as knowledge fa-

cilitative of parents‘ ability to complement the program‘s instructional efforts.

MRC RESEARCH ON PROGRAM PROCESSES AND OUTCOMES

Even in resource-rich regions, such as North America, it is unusual for community-based programs

to have in-house research units. It is significant, therefore, that the MRC program has a research di-

vision headed by a Lead Researcher with formal training in research methodology and statistical

analysis. This feature of MRC‘s organizational structure underscores the program‘s commitment to

using research to continually inform practice and policy within and outside the program. The Re-

gional Research Program was inaugurated in 1998 ―to undertake studies and create systems that

would assist in the identification of gaps, as well as provide information that would help in the deci-

sion-making process at all levels‖ (Zimmerman, 2004, p. 95). That mandate now includes ―assess-


56

ment of pre-schools, the study of context and features of program effectiveness, and the develop-

ment of the capacity of staff to undertake monitoring and evaluation‖ (p. 95).

To illustrate the promise that MRC‘s research program holds for the ECD/E field on the conti-

nent, we consider two specific research initiatives. The first utilized qualitative methodology ―to

identify and describe the content, contexts, and processes that go into the creation of projects that

enable children and their families to achieve better lives‖ (Zimmerman, 2004, p. 98). The extensive

report, published by the Bernard van Leer Foundation (Zimmerman, 2004) reveals a meticulous and

creative use of culturally sensitive tools and protocols to obtain evaluative feedback in communities

with relatively low educational attainment. For example, the metaphor of the African dish (as entail-

ing ingredients/inputs, the cooking process, the finished dish, and those who partake in the dish)

was used to prime respondents to think about a program as having multiple components. Similarly,

the tree in a shamba (garden) metaphor was used to prime respondents to think about the program as

a tree (its roots, branches, leaves, and fruit being analogous to components of the program) and to

consider what might go wrong or well for the program to produce positive or negative outcomes.

Using such ecologically appropriate protocols, qualitative interviews were conducted in 24 centers

(8 from each country) with seven participants from each center: two children, two parents, a teacher,

a school management committee member, and a community member. From the analysis of these

interviews 10 conditions deemed to contribute to effectiveness and sustainability were extracted to

guide future quality improvement decisions and policies (Zimmerman, 2004).

A second study employed a quasi-experimental design to assess short-term program impact on

cognitive outcomes (Mwaura, Sylva, & Malmberg, 2008). The design included 8 MRC and 8 non-

MRC centers from each of the three countries (total of 48 centers, less one drop-out). Each pair of

MRC and non-MRC centers was chosen from the same community, with a minimum of one to three

kilometers between them. Centers had to have been non-profit and in operation for at least two

years at the time of pre-testing to be included. Within each school, one classroom was selected from

which 10 to 17 children were randomly drawn into the sample. A non-preschool control group in-

cluded at least 10 children from the communities surrounding each selected center (see Mwaura et

al., 2008 for other methodological details).

Reflecting the dearth of locally developed instruments, the cognitive measures used in the study

were based on selected subscales from the British Ability Scales II – Early Years (BAS II, Elliot,

Smith, & McCulloch, 1996) and the African Child Intelligence Test (ACIT, Drenth et al., 1980)

adapted from a Dutch instrument (Bleichrodt, Drenth, Zaal, & Resing, 1984). The BAS II scales

measured verbal comprehension, picture similarities, number concepts, and block building, while

the ACIT scales measured class principle/concept, visual cognition, and verbal meaning. The ana-

lyses reported by Mwaura et al. (2008) were based on 423 children for whom both pre-test and post-

test data were available (Zanzibar—45%, Kenya—33%, Uganda—22%).

The study‘s findings are consistent with what has been typically reported in North America.

First, even after controlling for child and family characteristics at pre-test, preschool programs (MRC

and non-MRC alike) had a significant positive influence on cognitive outcomes; gains from pre-test

to post-test were significantly larger for children from the two preschool conditions than they were

for non-preschool control children. Second, cognitive gains were stronger for the MRC program

children than they were for non-MRC children. Classroom learning environment data from another

study (Malmberg, Mwaura, & Sylva, in press) may help to explain the difference in cognitive out-


57

comes for MRC and non-MRC children. Using an adaptation of the Early Childhood Environment

Rating Scale (Sylva, Siraj-Blatchford, Taggart, & Coleman, 2003), the study found a higher quality

learning environment in MRC centers.

While the MRC‘s research unit is young, and the scope of its outcomes research needs to expand

substantially beyond the cognitive and academic domains, it is a model worth considering as deve-

lopmental intervention programs emerge across the continent. In the next section, we explore re-

search challenges on the continent and share a few thoughts on ways forward.

ECD/E PROGRAMS AND APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL RESEARCH IN AFRICA:

CHALLENGES AND PROSPECTS

Twenty-five years ago — amidst growing international attention to early childhood developmental

interventions in developing nations — Wagner (1986) observed that unless research specialists are

involved very early in the planning of such programs, substantial investments may be lost. Consi-

dering the combined activities of the World Bank, UNICEF, UNESCO, and major international phi-

lanthropic agencies — among them the Bernard van Leer Foundation, the Aga Khan Foundation,

and Save the Children — it is safe to contend that significantly more investments are being made in

ECD/E in developing countries today than has been the case in the past. Wagner‘s caution is there-

fore still relevant, but meeting that ideal remains elusive in African.

Much of what informs programs in Africa continues to come predominantly from Euro-

American research (e.g., Hyde & Kabiru, 2003; Nsamenang, 2008; Pence & Hix-Small, 2009). Indeed,

in establishing the rationale for investments in ECD/E in developing countries advocates frequently

cite American research as if there are no constraints to the extrapolation of findings across societies

with different cultural values and socio-economic fortunes. Unfortunately, there is limited research

expertise on the continent to take advantage of what we know from the West to launch programs

that appropriately reflect local needs and circumstances. Where research expertise exists, it is under-

cut by numerous challenges, including limited access to current literature on advances in the field

locally and abroad. University libraries are under-resourced and inaccessible to community-based

ECD/E research professionals. The advent of electronic literature databases promises to ameliorate

this problem; however, access to such databases requires internet connectivity, which is not readily

available to large numbers of research professionals. Even when connectivity is not a problem, ob-

taining literature from electronic sources can be extremely expensive, and many universities either

lack the resources to acquire access to databases or do not give adequate priority to them in their

budgetary planning.

The need for research capacity building on the continent is thus clear, and we devote this final

section to a selective discussion of some practical steps toward that end. We begin with the critical

role that African universities can play. The proliferation of ECD/E programs across the continent

presents unprecedented opportunities for creativity in contemplating programs of inquiry to gener-

ate knowledge that is directly pertinent to the African context. One way to harness these opportuni-

ties, despite the enormous resource challenges facing the continent, is for African universities to

build university-community partnerships that simultaneously advance the academy‘s research mis-

sion and support community-based programs in their efforts to deliver high quality services. Such


58

partnerships have the prospect not only of promoting better engagement between universities and

their various publics but also building research capacity in related disciplines and fields. As poten-

tial vehicles for undergraduate and graduate research training, these partnerships could be institu-

tionalized as part of a university‘s curriculum for preparing future researchers. In turn, community-

based programs will benefit by tapping into the expertise of research faculty to undertake research

that is likely to contribute to program enhancements.

To illustrate how some research challenges can be addressed in the context of such partnerships,

consider the pervasive problem regarding measurement tools. Research with local relevance is se-

verely hampered by excessive dependence on imported instruments, often adopted with little or no

adaptations. The MRC‘s program impact research summarized above is a case in point. The study‘s

instruments were not selected because they were the most appropriate for the context but because

they were a convenient ―next best choice‖ in the absence of locally validated tools. Collaborative re-

search partnerships in which university faculty and their research assistants are actively involved in

the design of ecologically valid instruments for a broad range of developmental and learning out-

comes could (1) reduce dependence on foreign instruments and (2) expand the scope of outcome

assessments beyond the academic and cognitive domains. Regarding the latter, it is important that

programs pay attention to culturally defined measures of social competence, social intelligence, and

general astuteness in out-of-school contexts. Ample conceptual and empirical work exists on some of

these constructs (Serpell, this issue; Super et al., this issue) to provide guidance on instrument de-

sign.

Beyond what individual universities can do, there are also ways for the higher education estab-

lishment at large to cultivate and/or better harness institutional synergies for research capacity de-

velopment. For example, as noted in the introductory paper (Marfo et al., this issue), the Association

of African Universities (AAU) has made research capacity building one of its top priorities. The chal-

lenge lies in finding the appropriate mechanisms and the resources to attain this goal. One reasona-

ble approach may lie in small steps that are not overly costly, especially those that take advantage of

existing, but largely uncoordinated efforts. In the child development field, regional workshops

sponsored by the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, the International Society

for the Study of Behavioral Development, and the International Union of Psychological Sciences are

contributing in significant ways to regional research capacity building (Marfo et al., this issue). If the

AAU were to cultivate collaborative partnerships with similarly responsive international research

organizations the multiplier effects on research capacity across disciplines could be quite substantial.

Additionally, international organizations and donor agencies would be contributing significant-

ly to the development of research expertise on the continent if they drew more local professionals

into their country-level contractual research programs. The prototypical practice within the donor

community is one in which donor-funded research projects are routinely contracted out to itinerant

expatriate researchers. With a little bit of creativity, these research contracts could be structured de-

liberately to contribute to research capacity building. Advocacy for movement in this direction has

to come from the continent‘s universities and professional research organizations.


59

CONCLUSION

A cross-national multi-site program delivered within local communities under the auspices of one

agency is quite rare and even rarer when it integrates research. The MRC program should thus be of

interest to those engaged in research capacity building in Africa. In addition to serving as a model

for comparable populations in other parts of Africa, MRC is positioned to spawn applied research

with local and global implications. However, such lofty expectations are perhaps unrealistic for an

agency with limited financial and personnel resources. Our suggestion that MRC is the ideal ―ma-

terial‖ out of which productive university-community partnerships are made deserves close consid-

eration by universities across the region. With the high profile attention that ECD/E enjoys in the

international donor world, universities exercising leadership in partnering with programs like MRC

might succeed in obtaining funding from international sources to build collaborative research pro-

grams that will help fulfill the community engagement mission of the African academy and simul-

taneously advance scientific knowledge with policy and practice benefits.

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Envisioning an African Child Development Field

Kofi Marfo

University of South Florida

ABSTRACT: Institutionalization of an African child development field is a necessary aspect of

strategies for strengthening the continent’s contributions to a global knowledge base. A discipli-

nary structure advances inquiry as it facilitates professionalization and provides space to formu-

late the canons and conventions that will guide knowledge production and the preparation and

socialization of future researchers. Using the term disciplinary development to denote the process

of bringing such a field about, this paper outlines a pathway to disciplinary development, em-

phasizing important lessons that must be learned from (a) internal challenges to knowledge pro-

duction in African universities, (b) Euro-American psychology’s disciplinary development histo-

ry, and (b) the movement to institutionalize psychology in non-Western countries. The issues ad-

dressed have relevance to other non-Western societies.

KEY WORDS — cultural contexts; disciplinary development; African child development field;

global developmental science; paradigmatic/ methodological issues

In the late 1920s, anthropological linguist Edward Sapir – a pioneer advocate for interdisciplinarity

among anthropology, psychology, and linguistics – affirmed that ‗‗the worlds in which different so-

cieties live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels‘‘ (Sapir, 1929 cited in

Shweder, 1991, p. 362). Far from ignoring commonalities in the human experience across cultures,

Sapir‘s observation reminds us that cross-cultural variability in the conceptions and conventions that

shape human behavior limits the generalizability of knowledge from one culture to another. Not-

withstanding the long-standing exhortation for anthropological researchers entering other societies

to be cognizant of cultural differences, psychological research in non-Western societies emerged

within a Western ―transplant‖ orientation and has proceeded largely as if cultural differences be-

tween societies are not significant.

This article is based on a paper prepared for the SRCD-sponsored invitational conference “Strengthening Africa’s

Contributions to Child Development Research” held in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, February 2-6, 2009. An earlier

version was presented in a symposium on Africa at SRCD‘s 2009 Biennial Conference in Denver, Colorado. I am

thankful to Robert Serpell for his thorough and thoughtful feedback on the initial draft and to the Center for Ad-

vanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, where revision work on the manuscript was com-

pleted during my residential fellowship.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kofi Marfo, Department of Psychological & Social

Foundations, University of South Florida—EDU105, 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, Tampa, Florida, U.S.A 33620. E-mail:

marfo@ usf.edu.


SRCD Africa Child Development Research Capacity Building Study Group Kofi Marfo – Envisioning an African Field

62

Cross-cultural psychology‘s emergence signaled hope that culture would be ―drawn‖ into psy-

chology‘s scientific program and thus open the discipline up to other cultural conceptions and help

expand the nexus of psychological knowledge. Cross-cultural psychology was soon to be criticized

on the grounds that its preoccupation with attaining a level of methodological sophistication accept-

able to scientific psychology had led it to project culture as a qualifying variable, paying insufficient

attention to cultural processes underlying differences in behavior across cultures (Cole, 1996; Miller,

1997; Price-Williams, 1980; Shweder, 1991). Cultural psychology — the much heralded ―second psy-

chology‖ that was to put culture back into psychological research more substantively — is seen as

charting an uncertain trajectory of maturation (Ratner, 2008; Valsiner, 2009a). Even so, in its various

manifestations — e.g., as a sub-discipline supplementing traditional psychology‘s experimental fo-

cus with ―a theoretically informed applied psychology that is sensitive to the complex historical-

cultural locations of psychological processes‖ (Greenwood, 1999, p. 506) or as a methodologically

pluralistic field (Cohen, 2007) in transition — it has inspired important theoretical and empirical

contributions in ecological, socio-cultural, and cultural-historical approaches to the study of devel-

opment (Cole, 1996; Greenfield, 1997a, 2009; Greenfield, Keller, Fuligni, & Maynard, 2003; Rogoff,

1990, 2003; Super & Harkness, 1986, 2002; Weisner, 2002). These contributions, along with influences

from cross-cultural psychology, are helping to open Euro-American developmental science up in

ways that pave the way for research conducted through other cultural lenses to contribute to a glob-

al discipline.

Outside American psychology, the indigenous psychologies movement became the platform for

Western-trained scholars from developing countries to advocate for a culturally appropriate psy-

chology (Adair & Kağitçibaşi, 1995; Azuma, 1984; Serpell, 1984a; Sinha, 1997). The movement was

powered by at least two forces, one reactive and the other generative. The former, reflected in post-

colonial critiques, underscored psychology‘s limited relevance to, and imperialist image in, non-

Western countries. The generative force, on the other hand, found expression in efforts to conceptual-

ize and fashion the form and content of indigenous psychologies. Such ―generative‖ work has pro-

ceeded in diverse intellectual directions (Kağitçibaşi, 1996, 2000, 2002; Kim, Yang, & Hwang, 2006).

In Africa, it is manifested in empirical work on indigenous conceptions of intelligence (e.g., Kathuria

& Serpell, 1998; Serpell & Jere-Folotiya, 2008), in philosophical analysis and theory-building on in-

digenous understandings of development (e.g., Nsamenang, 1992, 2004, 2006), in contributions to

dialogue on disciplinary development (e.g., Mpofu, 2002; Nsamenang, 1995; Serpell, 1984a), and in

advocacy for contextually relevant developmental services (e.g., Pence & Marfo, 2004, 2008; Pence &

Nsamenang, 2008).

Notwithstanding these trends, research by resident native African scholars remains limited (see

Super and colleagues, this issue, for a review of expatriate research), and no clear disciplinary

framework exists to advance inquiry or contemplate the preparation of future researchers. This pa-

per explores a pathway to an African child development field grounded in local contexts but simul-

taneously open to knowledge systems from other cultures. Scholars contemplating an African field

have the benefit of a rearview mirror through which to examine and learn from: (1) historical/ insti-

tutional forces in Africa impeding the advancement of contextually relevant inquiry; (2) challenges

inherent in prevailing reactions to Western knowledge, and (3) pitfalls in Euro-American psycholo-

gy‘s disciplinary development.


63

PAST AND PRESENT CONSTRAINTS: THE ROLE OF AFRICAN UNIVERSITIES

Africa‘s challenges are frequently blamed on colonialism and Western imperialism. While historical-

ly justifiable, this narrative sometimes overstates the importance of the past, making realistic as-

sessment of some contemporary problems difficult. One such problem is how poorly African uni-

versities have served to bridge the gulf between local realities and academic knowledge production.

Figure 1 illustrates the relationship between inquiry and cultural values/traditions. Euro-American

research knowledge is a product of Western cultural conceptions of childhood and prevailing epis-

temological/methodological traditions. Privileged traditions within that knowledge base reflect the

values of dominant groups within the culture. Thus, white middle-class ethno-theories and values

about childrearing drive the conceptions of childhood that inform research (Figure 1; left pane). Part

of the African challenge is the disjuncture (missing links in Figure 1) between the continent‘s own

culture-level knowledge traditions/values and the conceptions that drive inquiry. In the place of local

traditions, ethno-theories, and ecological realities, Western influences have driven developmental

research on the continent. Figure 1 (right pane) illustrates three such exogenous influences (links A,

B, and C), two of which, I argue, are very contemporary and thus at best only distally grounded in

colonial era policies.

Figure 1. Past and contemporary influences on child development research and scholarship in Africa

Treating the left pane of Figure 1 as a rough approximation of the culture-inquiry connection in

the Euro-American context, link A depicts colonialism‘s influence and the associated traditions pro-

viding the foundational edifice for Africa‘s socio-political institutions. Some of the traditions driving

research in Africa today stem from colonial-era legacies, including the inherited European-style ter-

tiary education system. Long after colonial rule, and decades into independent educational plan-


64

ning, research education continues to be under the dominant influence of Euro-American institu-

tions.

Link B depicts a less direct colonial influence, entailing factors at the intersection of development

aid, international bi-lateral cooperation, and academic free-lancing. Research within Africa‘s univer-

sities is shaped significantly by extensive reliance on expatriate expertise from all forms of arrange-

ments and by overdependence on foreign textbooks and curricular content. As necessary as they

have been to the sustainability of African universities, expatriate scholars and foreign textbooks are

also conveyors of idea systems that might have limited relevance in Africa. There are of course ex-

ceptions to this observation; while expatriate faculty may bring their own biases to Africa, some are

even more sensitive to matters of contextual fit than local scholars.

Finally, link C highlights the dominant approach to the preparation of future researchers. This is

perhaps the most intriguing of the three influences. Even as Africanists complain about Euro-

centrism‘s debilitating effects on the continent‘s cultural traditions and institutions, African nations

continue to send large numbers of their future academics for advanced graduate education in Euro-

pean and American universities. As costs have increased – and as overseas training exacerbates the

brain drain – there has been a trend toward bi-lateral arrangements with partner universities in Eu-

rope and North America. These programs permit African scholars to complete some of their degree

requirements through distance learning or shorter-term residency abroad. Full-time overseas study

and partnership programs have one thing in common, however. In either case, African scholars re-

ceive their research education around curricula established to prepare scholars primarily for the

provider nation. Thus, through type C influence, large numbers of Africa‘s scholars are trained in

settings where the unique needs of their own societies are not likely to feature in any appreciable

way in the curricula to which they are exposed. The emersion model of full-time overseas research

education may indeed increase the likelihood that returning scholars‘ research programs would be

less responsive to local realities (Adair & Kağitçibaşi, 1995; Serpell, 2007).

The influences depicted in Figure 1 suggest that advanced research education may not be ap-

propriately orienting African scholars for creative research on locally important issues. This calls for

a rethinking of graduate education and a shift in the higher education institutional culture. With

conceptions of excellence so closely entwined in Euro-American academic traditions, African uni-

versities need to strengthen their determination to project local relevance as an explicit institutional

mission. This shift should, in turn, translate into personnel development policies and institutional

practices that socialize future faculty to approach advanced graduate education, at home or abroad,

not as an exercise in uncritical assimilation and transportation of ideas but as preparation to use ac-

quired knowledge and competencies to solve local problems. These concerns are shared by many

scholars who work with aspiring African academics in Euro-American institutions. Therefore, part

of the solution lies in shaping bi-lateral arrangements to increase the probability that the curricula of

these programs will be better aligned with the needs and demands of the contexts to which return-

ing graduates will be applying their knowledge.

FRAMING THE FIELD

The preceding section addressed the institutional culture shift and capacity-building that must take

place for African universities to advance locally relevant inquiry and buttress disciplinary develop-


65

ment. This section turns to the task of framing the form and content of an African field in the larger

context of the movement to domesticate fields of inquiry rooted within Euro-American traditions.

Drawing on the discourse on indigenous psychologies, I offer one perspective on disciplinary devel-

opment.

At the height of the indigenous psychologies movement, exhortations for Western psychology to

open up to other cultural conceptions of reality soon triggered a debate over the form that the dis-

cipline should take in non-Western societies. Is it possible to broaden Euro-American theories and

approaches to accommodate indigenous perspectives or would consideration of such perspectives

require the development of concepts and tools that may be so idiosyncratic to local cultural realities

as to render cross-context comparisons and generalizations meaningless (see Miller & Chen, 2000)?

In framing this tension, Kağitçibaşi (2000) distinguished between an indigenous orientation to psy-

chology and the indigenization of psychology. She saw the first as an approach embracing the idea of

―one psychology which benefits from indigenous knowledge‖ (p. 7). Indigenization, on the other

hand, required the development of a psychology for each culture based on each culture‘s construal

of psychological phenomena. Thus, while an indigenous orientation contributes to a unified discipline

and allows for generalization and cross-cultural comparisons, indigenization presumably anticipates

a multiplicity of psychologies producing ―an unwieldy and basically incomparable body of know-

ledge‖ (Kağitçibaşi, 2000, p. 7) in which universals are perhaps irrelevant.

The position taken in this paper is that it is possible to think about these two visions in a way

that removes the appearance of a tension. The critical question may not be whether ―specific cultural

mentalities‖ are ―so unique that each cultural group needs its own psychology‖ (Gielen, 2000, p. 37).

It is whether we can conceive of a truly global discipline in which pursuit of uniquely culture-

specific understandings is not antithetical to pursuit of understandings with cross-cultural generali-

ty. What is needed, therefore, is a discipline as welcoming to scholarship focusing exclusively on

―indigenous‖ constructs within specific cultures as it is to scholarship guided by ―generalist‖ orien-

tations or universal principles.

Extrapolating this unified vision to the central concern of this paper, an inclusive and open

pathway to disciplinary development is proposed, one that recognizes diversity of orientations and

visions as a sine qua non to the development of a meaningful and healthy intellectual culture. In prac-

tical terms, an African child development field would have a place for different forms of inquiry. It

should be appropriate for scholars with a relatively more global view of developmental research to

focus their inquiry on how local, culturally inspired understandings of developmental phenomena

contribute to a global knowledge base with high relevance for Africa. It is similarly appropriate for

scholars with a more focused commitment to indigenous content as an important end in itself to de-

dicate their efforts to such inquiry. Ideally, the field should grow in the direction of integration such

that questions on universal and culture-specific issues can be addressed within singular lines of in-

quiry.

What is proposed, then, is an African field conceived not as a culturally insulated enterprise co-

cooned in its own traditions and designed exclusively to address questions of local relevance, but as

a field that is mindful enough of the interconnectedness of the human condition across cultures to be

able to benefit from and contribute to other understandings. It should be informed by an orientation

that accentuates local relevance and pays priority attention to mechanisms for building a knowledge

base on indigenous conceptions of childhood. After all, one way for an African field to contribute to


66

a global knowledge base is in showing how research conducted across cultures on the continent

helps to distinguish uniquely local and culture-bound developmental processes from those that are

universal but expressed differently in particular cultural contexts. In a later section, examples of

possible lines of inquiry reflecting the diverse foci suggested here are provided.

Paradigmatic and Methodological Issues

Epistemological and methodological issues are at the heart of disciplined inquiry. Some of the most

incisive critiques of Western psychology have been directed at the discipline‘s extreme positivist

heritage. Intriguingly, the vision for the new discipline, toward the end of the nineteenth century,

was not one of a monolithic science. Even Wilhelm Wundt, psychology‘s founding father blamed

sometimes for laying the foundations for a largely experimental discipline, did not consider experi-

mentation as the only method for the discipline (Giorgi, 1970). Wundt also advocated for Volkerpsy-

chologie (folk psychology). Experimental psychology was best suited to the study of the mental life

of individuals, while Volkerpsychologie was appropriate for studying the cultural development of

higher mental processes (Greenwood, 1999; Shamdasani, 2003). Importantly, Wundt appears to have

conceived of psychology as a discipline through which the causal-experimental methods of the natu-

ral sciences could be integrated with the historical-cultural methods of the human sciences for a

more meaningful study of psychological phenomena (Greenwood, 1999).

Thus, but for the repudiation of this ‗synthetic‘ view of psychology by Wundt‘s own American

students (Greenwood, 1999) and, perhaps more pivotally, the success of Watson‘s behaviorist revo-

lution, Euro-American psychology could have emerged as a much broader discipline open to the

methodological canons of the natural as well as the human sciences. Under behaviorism, pragmatic

hegemonic thought triumphed over epistemological and methodological pluralism, sending psy-

chology down a narrow path for close to half a century.

This historical assessment is relevant because it highlights the dangers of building a new field on

any form of hegemony – cultural, epistemological, or methodological. More important, there are in-

dications from the indigenous psychologies discourse that some of the pitfalls of American psychol-

ogy‘s disciplinary development could be repeated in other parts of the world. As Adair (1999) notes,

researchers advocating for culture-specific inquiry in developing countries have tended to espouse

the view that ―holistic, qualitative, and phenomenological‖ methods are more compatible with, and

thus more appropriate for, non-Western cultures (p. 404). This viewpoint may be further reinforced

for scholars who see cultural psychology‘s association with an interpretive/qualitative framework in

some formulations of the field (e.g. Shweder, 1991; Ratner, 2008; Ratner & Hui, 2003) as a repudia-

tion of quantitative methods. However, it is important to note, for example, that Cole‘s (1996) fram-

ing of cultural psychology embraces interpretive as well as causal-experimental methodologies, and

the field has evolved in a methodologically diverse direction over the years (Cohen, 2007). Green-

field‘s (1997a, 2009) combined use of descriptive-qualitative analysis and structural equation model-

ing is illustrative of cultural psychology‘s increasing methodological hybridization. Above all, even

within general psychology, experimental quantitative techniques are increasingly being used in

combination with qualitative ones (Yoshikawa, Weisner, Kalil, & Way, 2008). In short, an emergent

African child development field should be open to different paradigmatic and methodological ap-

proaches drawn from multiple disciplines.


67

Other Problematic Legacies

Non-Western critiques of psychology often address the limited relevance of American research for

non-Western settings. Frequently overlooked is its limited generalizability even within the American

cultural mosaic. Knowledge generated predominantly through studies of White, middle-class sam-

ples from populations around major research centers may provide limited answers to problems

within other sub-populations. Tulkin and Konner‘s (1976) classic assessment of ethnocentrism in

developmental research provides important lessons on the handling of diversity. Their analysis of

comparative parent-child interaction research revealed that when researchers found differences in

the behaviors of American parents and parents from other industrialized nations, they consistently

explained the differences in terms of cultural variations in the parents' conceptions of childrearing.

However, when differences were observed between middle-class parents and lower-income or eth-

nic minority parents within the U.S., the latter‘s behaviors were interpreted as problematic and

needing intervention. Researchers seemed ―reasonably tolerant of child-rearing practices observed

in cultures of other industrialized societies which would be devalued if reported in a minority group

in the United States‖ (p. 137). Exemplifying differential cultural relativism (Marfo & Boothby, 1997),

this comparative bias illustrates the problem of framing optimal developmental conditions within a

culturally heterogeneous society around White middle-class values and practices and interpreting

deviations ―not as alternative pathways for normal development but as conditions of deficit or de-

privation‖ (LeVine, 1989, p. 54).

Differential cultural relativism and the imputation of deficiency from difference are quite ram-

pant in American intervention research (Marfo, Dedrick, & Barbour, 1998; Marfo & Boothby, 1997)

and possibly stem from evolutionist perspectives on diversity. According to Shweder (1991), evolu-

tionists approach difference from a hierarchical perspective, one in which ideas, belief systems, and

practices other than one‘s own are viewed as ―really incipient and less adequate‖ (p. 114). Interven-

tions are thus designed to move the incipient up to the level of a normative standard erected on the

basis of one worldview.

These are not inherently Euro-American problems. Wherever socio-cultural hierarchies exist, the

danger of differential cultural relativism and cultural imposition can be real. Africa is a huge conti-

nent with numerous countries, each with multiple sub-cultures rooted in centuries of traditions

shaped, to varying degrees, by indigenously African, Islamic, and Western institutions (Nsamenang,

1992). So-called modernization influences, including schooling and urbanization, are uneven even

within individual nations. This complex diversity has profound ramifications for framing a field and

for generating and applying research. This challenge is exacerbated when the elite class, to which

researchers are likely to belong, also happens to be part of ―dominant‖ sub-groups within given so-

cieties. The prospect that the conceptions of childhood and optimal development within some cul-

tures would be privileged over others is very real. Advancing a field that is free of these problems is

an arduous task, but research education that anticipates and sensitizes scholars to these problems

could make a difference.


68

NEEDED INQUIRY: ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES

Africa offers fertile ground for multidisciplinary, methodologically pluralistic inquiry in which indi-

genous as well as changing conceptions of child development inform theoretical and applied ques-

tions with local and global significance. In this final section, three illustrative examples of relevant

inquiry are presented.

Inquiry into Indigenous Conceptions

There is a dearth of knowledge from theoretical analyses of cultural constructs regarding indigenous

conceptions and expectations about child development. Nsamenang (1992, 2006) has begun to pro-

vide aspects of this important knowledge. Grounding understandings about development within

indigenous conceptions of the human life cycle, Nsamenang has proposed stages in the develop-

ment of social selfhood with corresponding developmental tasks that are yet to be validated empiri-

cally. The stages include newborn, pre-social, social novice, social entrée, social intern, adulthood,

and old age. Setting aside the issue of generalizability, Nsamenang‘s work on the Nso of Cameroon

is illustrative of needed ―indigenous‖ inquiry on sub-cultures across the continent. Foundational

work of this nature is necessary in its own right but also sets the stage for normative and idiographic

inquiry on the mechanisms of developmental change. It is also pivotal to addressing applied ques-

tions, such as whether and/or how indigenous socialization processes prepare children adequately

for ―modern‖ institutions like schooling.

Inquiry on Prototypically African Issues

Episodic sibling caregiving and prolonged childrearing by older siblings are common forms of socia-

lization across Africa, yet we know very little about their processes and outcomes across African

subcultures. This is a subject on which research in Africa can add significantly to a global know-

ledge base. Weisner‘s cross-cultural work on socially distributed ‗parenting‘ (e.g., 1989a, 1997;

Weisner & Gallimore, 1977) and his Kenyan research on sibling caretaking (e.g., Weisner, 1987,

1989b) provide an important foundation for future research. What elements of socialization prepare

children to provide caregiving to younger siblings? What are the cultural markers for maturation

toward sibling caregiving? What differences exist in the ethnotheories and caregiving behaviors of

parenting adults and care-providing siblings? Are there short- or long-term differences in develop-

mental outcomes for parent/adult-reared versus sibling-reared children, and what dynamics ac-

count for such differences? Inquiry addressing these questions should expand our knowledge of so-

cialization beyond what is known from the Western parent-child socialization model.

Validating Relevant Theories with Euro-American Origins

Relevance is a central theme in critiques of psychological research in Africa. As Nsamenang (1992)

notes, research focus ―has almost exclusively been on issues that are more pertinent to Western so-

cial realities than to the harsh realities of life in African communities‖ (p. 192). As an example of in-

quiry addressing pressing African issues, consider the implications of rapid social change for child-


69

ren‘s development. While Africa is one of the least urbanized regions of the world, it has the highest

rate of urbanization globally (Clancy, 2008; UN Population Fund, 2007), and is projected to be only

20 years away from reaching the tipping point at which more people will live in urban than in rural

areas (UN Human Settlements Program, 2010). Social change comes with corresponding changes

not only in the goals and processes of socialization but also in how children develop, learn, and re-

spond to their transforming world (Marfo & Biersteker, in press). How is urbanization altering socia-

lization goals and practices in hitherto traditional settings? As the broader ecology of development

undergoes restructuring, what is the nature of the resultant changes in trajectories of development?

What continuities and discontinuities are observable between socialization in school versus commu-

nity settings; how are these related to developmental differences across groups of children with va-

rying exposure to schooling, and what are the implications for education design? These questions

have high contemporary relevance and should prime programmatic research generating theory-

informing data on trajectories of developmental change across age levels, social groups, and sub-

cultural contexts.

These questions also present opportunities for researchers to test exogenous theories linking so-

cial change to changes in developmental trajectories. For example, Greenfield (2009) posits two so-

cio-demographic complexes as prototypical environments with distinct cultural pathways through

universal development: rural/folk community versus urban society. As society shifts from a rela-

tively traditional rural, subsistence economy to an urban, commercialized character, corresponding

shifts occur in trajectories of cognitive development. Empirical support for this proposition includes

evidence that adolescents in more commercial and technological family environments demonstrated

greater abstraction in visual representation and cognitive style (see Greenfield, 2009).

Tests of such theories must be guided by research on the ecological validity of psychological in-

struments. Greenfield (1997b) has addressed the cultural constraints of ability tests generally, and

Serpell (1979, 1984b) has demonstrated in the African context the danger of drawing invalid conclu-

sions when tasks used to assess cognitive skills are not ecologically appropriate relative to the prior

experiences of research participants. Thus, validation work on theories such as Greenfield‘s also

requires the development and validation of ecologically appropriate tasks that measure similar un-

derlying processes across contexts under comparison.

CONCLUSION

An authentically global child development field must not be the handmaiden of any one knowledge

tradition within a single culture. It should be the product of multiple traditions across societies and

should bring diverse paradigmatic perspectives to the complex task of forging inquiry in which con-

sideration of the culturally situated nature of human functioning is the rule rather than the excep-

tion. Premised on the perspective that non-Western societies have important contributions to make

to the evolution of such a global field, this paper has presented one vision for institutionalizing child

development research in Africa. A case has been made for an African field that responds to local

realities and contributes simultaneously to a global knowledge base. Disciplines do not develop by

design, but I hope an emergent African field guided by the cautions and lessons highlighted in this


70

paper will better position researchers to approach the study of children as natural and cultural beings

best understood in their local contexts.

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