Effective Early Childhood Education

Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Lotty Eldering, Paul P.M. Leseman, Lotty Eldering, Paul P.M. Leseman, Lotty Eldering, Paul P.M. Leseman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135581015
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

This work examines international strategies of early education and literacy for disadvantaged children, from a cross-cultural perspective. It brings together theoretical insights, the results of empirical research, and experiences with early educational intervention programmes.

CHAPTER ONE: Enhancing Educational Opportunities for Young Children

Lotty Eldering and Paul P.M.Leseman

This book examines child development and early educational intervention strategies from a cross-cultural perspective. In an attempt to answer the core question of how educational opportunities and literacy acquisition for young disadvantaged children all over the world can be enhanced, it brings together recent theoretical insights, the results of empirical research, and experiences with well-evaluated early educational intervention programs. Its purpose is to critically examine current strategies of early education and literacy for disadvantaged children and to offer building blocks for constructing culture-sensitive approaches.

At the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien, Thailand, in 1990, the international community, including virtually all of the world’s governments, made a commitment to increase significantly the educational opportunities for over 100 million children who have no access to literacy and basic education. High-quality education is a major concern to developing and industrialized countries alike. Even in the latter countries, where school systems are accessible and schooling is compulsory up to adulthood, education fails to equip about a quarter of students to be literate and numerate for everyday life (for a discussion of findings, see Calamai, 1987; Kirsch & Jungeblut, 1986; MacGinitie & MacGinitie, 1986; Ortiz, 1989). It is the disadvantaged children who are most likely to drop out of school prematurely or end their school careers with lower qualifications.

THE FIRST GENERATION OF EDUCATIONAL INTERVENTION PROGRAMS

Early educational interventions on a large scale started in the United States more than 30 years ago. The 1960s were imbued with a spirit of political change. Young men and women—the teachers, researchers, policy makers, and politicians of the near future—railed against the establishment. The famous war on poverty in the United States initiated under the Johnson administration was imitated by many other countries. There was a strong faith in socially engineering society. In developmental and educational psychology there was a parallel pedagogic optimism, which provided a scientific basis for the social movement (Hunt, 1961). This optimism was rooted in converging lines of theorizing in neo-behaviorism and neuropsychology that stressed the importance of rich stimulus environments in periods critical for intellectual development. There was also a new, exciting conception of intelligence. Although Piaget never intended his genetic epistemology to be a developmental theory, let alone a psychological theory, many saw it as the foundation for a new theory of intelligence surpassing the traditional approaches based on individual differences and psychometric assessment that had a strong scent of nativism and hereditarianism (Ginsburg, 1972). With only a few months of preparation, the project Head Start was introduced in over 3,000 communities in the United States in 1965, involving more than 150,000 children at risk of educational failure.

The high expectations accompanying Head Start and similar programs inevitably led to disappointment. The Westinghouse evaluation in 1969 showed that Head Start’s one-year program had only modest short-term effects that had largely disappeared within two years after the intervention. A more thorough meta-analysis of the various Head Start projects until 1982 by McKey et al. (1985) came to similar conclusions.

The disappointing results of Head Start led to a revival of the nature-nurture debate with Jensen’s (1969) article in the Harvard Educational Review entitled “How much can we boost IQ and scholastic achievement?” The bottom line of Jensen’s argument is well-known. Since 80 percent of the variance in intellectual abilities in a given population is attributable to genetic variance and probably less than 10 percent is attributable to environment (Scarr & Kidd, 1983; Scarr, 1992), very little potential impact remains for compensatory educational programs. This would, in Jensen’s view, explain Head Start’s failure to meet expectations. Other authors, however, notably Urie Bronfenbrenner, a member of the Head Start planning committee in 1965, concluded that the intervention strategy of Head Start was not sufficiently tailored to the ecological context of child development; that is to say, the home environment and the wider social and cultural context, including the school (Bronfenbrenner, 1975; see also Zigler, Styfco, & Gilman, 1993). Bronfenbrenner’s early plea for context-sensitive intervention programs is at the heart of the present book.

The lessons learned from the first generation intervention programs led to recommendations for two changes in basic intervention strategy. The first recommendation was to increase the intensity and duration of programs. An example is the program Success for All by Slavin and Madden and their colleagues, which is extensively discussed and evaluated in this book. The second recommendation entailed shifting the focus to include the parents, the families, the communities, and socioeconomic circumstances as targets of an intervention. Examples of programs in which children, parents, family, and community are addressed in a comprehensive approach are the Turkish Early Enrichment Program, the Dutch HIPPY program, and the ICDS program in India, all of which are discussed in this book. Family support programs, including empowerment strategies and parent basic education, complementing child-focused educational interventions in a strict sense, are currently seen as the catalysts for change (Weiss & Kagen, 1989; Yoshikawa, 1994). However, the evidence on effectiveness is still mixed, a fact which calls for a further analysis, which is taken up in this book (cf., White, Taylor, & Moss, 1992).

DEVELOPMENTS IN PSYCHOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Recent developments in psychology and anthropology pertinent to the issue of child development and early education show two trends. Whereas, still in 1981, Schwartz remarked that anthropology has ignored children in culture while developmental psychology has ignored culture in children (p. 4), both disciplines are currently converging, opening new avenues for research and leading to important new insights for the general aim of enhancing educational opportunities for disadvantaged children. Developmental and educational psychology are paying increasing attention to the social and cultural context of child rearing, child development, and learning. The recent theorizing on cognitive development, emergent literacy, and numeracy in family and school settings has been profoundly influenced by anthropological and ethnographic research. The key to the chemistry of the different research programs is Vygotsky’s sociohistorical psychology, which has opened psychology to anthropological approaches for studying the social and cultural context. Within anthropology, educational anthropology has evolved as a subdiscipline focusing on educational processes at school, particularly those involving ethnic minority students (Anthropology and Education Quarterly; Fetterman, 1984; Spindler, 1982; Spindler & Spindler, 1987; Trueba, 1989). A second field of research in anthropology integrating psychological perspectives is psychological or cognitive anthropology (see, e.g., Schwartz, White, & Lutz, 1992). Moreover, cultural anthropologists are nowadays paying more attention to intracultural variation at subgroup and individual level (cf., Borofsky, 1994).

Psychology is seeing the unmistakable rise of the behavioral genetics paradigm accompanied by a further expansion of nativist or hereditarian explanations over more domains of human development and behavior (for instance, see Plomin, DeFries, & Fulker, 1988; Rowe, 1994). Riding on the wave of behavioral genetics, Herrnstein and Murray (1994) published the “The bell curve,” in which they give short shrift to educational priority policy and affirmative/positive action, and reinforcing Jensen’s early critique of educational intervention programs. Although Herrnstein and Murray’s analysis is not convincing, and at times is demonstrably mistaken (Bronfenbrenner, McClelland, Wethington, Moen, & Ceci, 1996), it has set a certain tone.

The evidence from behavioral genetics seems quite strong and, at first glance, not in favor of early intervention to enhance educational opportunities for the disadvantaged. However, a major problem is the acontextual, content-free approach to psychological traits and their behavioral instantiations. This issue has recently been examined by Bronfenbrenner and Ceci (1994) in their article “Nature and Nurture Reconceptualized,” in which they develop an elementary model of the interaction of genes and environments departing from Bronfenbrenner’s socioecological theory. They argue that genetic potential as such is void, a disposition, a code existing in DNA proteins. It literally needs flesh and bones and, as far as psychological traits are concerned, symbolic content and behavioral instantiations in actual sociocultural contexts to come into real existence. This points to the fact that actualization of genetic potential does not take place in a cultural vacuum but necessarily involves appropriation and construction of specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes which may differ fundamentally between contexts, cultures, and historical eras in terms of content and phenotypical appearance.

THE CONCEPT AND IMPACT OF CULTURE

The present book deals with processes of early education in different cultural contexts. Although relevant for analyzing human development, the concept of culture is complex, much debated, and often defined very differently. A distinction can be made here between a broad, more inclusive concept of culture and a narrower one. The broad concept of culture, for instance, includes all phenomena that are not natural or biological, that is to say, are not logically reduceable to the laws of physics and biology. It refers to the intergenerationally transmitted sociohistorical forms of economy, social organization, family life, religion, language, tools, and other products of human agency and creativity that reflect functional adaptation to physical circumstances and biological constraints. The other concept of culture refers to a set of shared ideas, values, and meanings that are manifested and communicated in everyday discourse and social practices. Related to this notion of culture are the concepts of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986), lifestyle (Kohn & Schooler, 1983), value system (Hofstede, 1980), and the cognitive-anthropological concept of cultural models (Quinn & Holland, 1987).

The authors in this book relate to both concepts of culture and have different views on the impact of culture on child development (cf., Poortinga and Richter with Harkness & Super, all this volume). The research findings presented have been obtained in different countries, involving different social and cultural groups. One recurring issue in several chapters is the transferability of educational programs, or even more fundamentally, of basic intervention strategies and educational goals, from one cultural context to the other. In addition, much attention is paid to the influence of cultural factors in a narrower sense, such as the impact of parental beliefs, lifestyles, and patterns of literacy use on child-rearing practices, developmental outcomes, and school learning. Another recurring issue is the necessary scope of early educational programs and the sensitivity to cultural “content” that is required when designing and implementing educational programs.

PROSPECTS

In the 1990s the young child was reinstated at the top of the agenda, and in addition to the commitment to education for all, concern grew about the disintegration of the family; the economic pressure on parents; rising school dropout rates; the increase in teenage pregnancies, violence, juvenile delinquency and drug abuse; and the relative ineffectiveness of measures after problems have become manifest in late childhood and adolescence. As a consequence, the focus has been redirected to early childhood as a pedagogically critical phase. In developing countries, awareness has grown that investment in human capital, (i.e., in healthy biological and psychological development), and in literacy and schooling of all youngsters is the key to empowering nations to take control of their own destiny. The prerequisites for this include high-quality programs that can be transferred to different sociocultural contexts, and insight into effective early intervention strategies.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

The contributions from experts from various disciplines and different parts of the world have been divided into three parts. In Part One, the role of context and culture in children’s development and its implications for early intervention programs are discussed from a theoretical perspective. Part Two, in contrast, presents empirical findings about the relationship between the social, economic, and cultural context, and development, particularly language development and literacy. Part Three approaches the field of study from the perspective of intervention practice, presenting four large-scale early intervention programs currently running in different parts of the world.

In Part One, dealing with the role of culture and context in children’s development and learning, Poortinga presents three orientations on the relationship between culture and human behavior. After discussing the strong and weak points of cultural relativism, psychological universalism, and behavioral universalism or absolutism, he opts for psychological universalism, a moderate form of universalism, acknowledging the primacy of universal psychological functions and viewing cultural variation as an empirical issue. In the final part of his chapter, Poortinga addresses the question of the extent to which transfer of intervention programs across cultural boundaries is meaningful, concluding that intervention programs should be indigenized at the level of presentation and content.

Serpell identifies the major theoretical constructs of developmental psychology that have practical relevance for the design of early intervention programs. He divides the field broadly into theories that treat context as a form of external stimulation and those that treat context as an incorporating system. Conceptualizing the context of development as an incorporating system of social activity and cultural meanings, which, according to Serpell, reflects a cumulative progression of insights, implies that educational curricula must take the everyday practices and technologies of the child’s eco-cultural niche into account. In his view the co-construction of goals in terms of a system of shared meanings provides an optimal entry point for the design of programs to ameliorate human development. Early intervention programs in the real world, however, tend to deviate from the precise implications of the theoretical models. Serpell explores the lines of reasoning behind such deviations, using the intervention programs presented in Part Three as illustrations.

Harkness and Super’s theoretical framework of the “developmental niche” is a concrete example of a theory that views development as an incorporating system of social activity and cultural meanings. They point out how the concept of culture has been used in the social sciences to signify a wide range of different things. Although the various ideas of culture seem in some ways opposed to each other, these ideas share the concept of systematicity, which makes culture a necessary although complex construct for analyzing human development in context. Harkness and Super conceptualize the developmental niche in terms of three major subsystems operating together as a larger system and interacting with other features of the culture. They assign a leading role to parental ethnotheories, which are the cultural models held by parents regarding children, families, and themselves as parents, instantiated in customs and practices of care. From this perspective, it follows that any program that aims to change parental behavior—or the behavior of children—must take parents’ ideas into account.

Jacob and Phipps focus on the development of the concept of context within the field of culture and cognition, and its implications for teaching practice. The earliest work in this field did not explicitly address context, but focused on comparing cultural groups or observable traits within cultures. By providing a more integrated framework for understanding context, the cultural-historical school has stimulated researchers to elaborate aspects of context at micro, meso, and macrolevels as well as the concept of context itself. Drawing on research on ethnic minorities in the United States, Australia, and South Africa, Jacob and Phipps illustrate the contribution that the increased understanding of the relationships between context and cognition can make to instructional practices for young children.

Can interventions permanently change intelligence? Van de Vijver approaches this question by distinguishing two types of theories of intelligence: the “lumpers” and the “splitters.” Theories of the first type consider intelligence as a general capacity for acquiring knowledge, whereas theories of the second type view intelligence as composed of many separate mental abilities that operate more or less independently. Van de Vijver opts for a componential view of intelligence and discusses the modifiability of its various components. He concludes that although pragmatic knowledge is easily modifiable, intervention programs should focus on metacognitive knowledge because of its broader effects.

The chapters in Part One substantiate the importance of culture in child development and learning. Culture is taken as an incorporating meaning system, that is to say, as a system with contents, tools, and skills that are appropriated in social interaction. Theoretical building blocks are provided covering insights from the psychology of intelligence to the cultural anthropology of belief systems.

Part Two presents empirical evidence on the impact of the sociocultural and economic context on young children’s development. The basic premise of Snow’s chapter is that literacy development and school success are promoted most effectively during the preschool period by paying attention to the development of oral language skills. The model of literacy development presented by Snow pays particular attention to the role of such skills. The Home-School Study of language and literacy conducted among low-income families in the United States showed that during book-reading, engagement in talk that goes beyond the immediate demands of the text and exposure to extended discourse and rare vocabulary items predicted successful literacy. She concludes her chapter with some implications for the design of preschool classrooms and family intervention programs.

Leseman critically examines the potential of the home environment in preparing young children for literacy and schooling in a multicultural society. He identifies three issues that need further consideration in order to strengthen the theoretical basis of context-sensitive early educational intervention programs. The first issue concerns the effective ingredients of home literacy. On the basis of a study conducted in the Netherlands in a socioeconomically varied and multiethnic sample, he concludes that home literacy, and informal home education in a broader sense, is multifaceted, including opportunities for interactions, quality of communication and instruction, and quality of affective experience. The second issue is about the importance of home literacy relative to other kinds of cognitive apprenticeships, such as joint play and problem-solving. The evidence indicates that there are probably multiple routes of preparation for school literacy, not exclusively connected to literacy in a narrow sense. The final issue refers to the contextuality of literacy and informal education at home. Research findings suggest that socioeconomic and cultural factors strongly determine the characteristics of educational processes at home. Implications for early educational intervention programs are discussed.

It has been mentioned that Leseman hypothesizes that interactions in the home vary with the family’s sociocultural background. Richter extends this theory, arguing that stimulation itself is dependent on a more basic parental affective availability. She further emphasizes the hidden potential of poor parents in developing countries; in this case, in South Africa. This potential, however, has been obscured by scientists by deliberately ignoring individual differences in people’s adaptation to poverty and hardship and an unconscious blindness to the psychological substance of poor people. Reviewing available research in South Africa, Richter confirms her hypothesis that...