All educators approach teaching equipped with 'folk psychologies' and 'folk pedagogies' (Bruner, 1996):
- Folk psychologies are personal beliefs about how the mind learns and grows
- Folk pedagogies are '... practices that emerge from deeply embedded cultural beliefs about how children learn and how teachers should teach...
Educators must understand their underlying folk
theories about children's learning and development in order to make sense
of and change their pedagogical practices.
Lee and Johnson,
2007
Perspectives on children's development have different focuses depending on culture:
- Children as community members vs children as individuals;
- Children prepared for later full community participation vs children fully involved in their community from birth;
- Much learning takes place out of context (for example, in school) vs community life as the context for learning;
- Family interdependence and reliance are highly valued vs personal independence, self-expression and autonomy.
Even defining child's play and a child's other activities differ depending
on one's culture. For example, many families with Asian ethnic cultural
influences tend to see play and academic activity separately.
In contrast, in the Reggio Emilia schools in Italy, after WWII, a curriculum emphasising
community and responsibility was based around the child's interests and conducted
through exploration and discovery Many US educators and researchers with Euro-American
perspectives strongly
believe that child-initiated play and other experiences are already related
to the child's development of later academic experiences.
Hyun, 1998
Cross-cultural explorations suggest the endpoint of child development is
participation in their community, with participation being differently defined
by culture (Rogoff, 2007). If the opportunities offered for participation
(for example, learning experiences in educational settings) are not culturally
relevant, the result is disenfranchisement of the child (Lee and Johnson,
2007).
Culture includes not only hereditary culture, but other cultural
dynamics (for example, digital youth culture) (Lee and Johnson, 2007). Relevant
cultural experiences stimulate children to observe keenly, 'pitch in', and
collaborate (Rogoff, 2007).
Bird Claiborne, L. (2007) Beyond readiness: new questions about cultural
understandings and developmental appropriateness. In: J.L. Kincheloe and
R.A. Horn (eds) (2007) The Praeger Handbook of Education and Psychology (vol.
2). Westport,
CT: Praeger Publishers.
Bruner, J. (1996) The Culture of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Hyun, E. (1998) Making Sense of Developmentally and Culturally Appropriate
Practice in Early Childhood Education. New York: Peter Lang.
Lee, K. and Johnson, A. S. (2007) Child development in cultural contexts:
implications of cultural psychology for early childhood teacher education,
Journal of Early Childhood Education, 35, 233-243.
McConachie, H., Colver, A.F., Forsyth, R.J., Jarvis, S.N. and Parkinson,
K.N. (2006) Participation of disabled children: how should it be characterized
and measured?, Disability and Rehabilitation, 28 (18), 1157-1164.
Rogoff, B. (2003). The Cultural Nature of Human Development. New York, NY:
Oxford University Press.