EARLY CHILDHOOD CARE AND EDUCATION WORKING PAPERS SERIES

Locally relevant and quality ECCE programmes: Implications of research on indigenous African child development and socialization

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United NationsEducational, Scientific and

Cultural Organization

EARLY CHILDHOOD CARE AND EDUCATION WORKING PAPERS SERIES

Robert Serpell University of Zambia, Zambia

A. Bame Nsamenang Human Development Resource Centre, Cameroon

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Locally relevant and quality ECCE programmes: Implications of research on indigenous Africanchild development and socialization

About the authors

Robert Serpell is Professor of Psychology at the University of Zambia (UNZA). His publications include Culture’s influence on behaviour (1976), The significance of schooling (1993), Becoming literate in the city (2005), and peer-reviewed articles in a wide range of journals. His research focuses on cultural aspects of human development, intelligence, multilingualism, literacy, assessment and intervention services for children with disabilities and their families, and curriculum development. Formerly Director of African Studies at UNZA, Director of Applied Developmental Psychology at UMBC, USA and Vice-Chancellor of UNZA, he is currently Coordinator of UNZA’s Centre for Promotion of Literacy in Sub-Saharan Africa.

A. Bame Nsamenang teaches psychology and counselling at the University of Bamenda, Cameroon, where he heads the University Cooperation Division as well as directing the Human Development Resource Centre, a research and service facility (www.thehdrc.org). His work and research seek to understand and enhance Africa’s future generations. He leads an international initiative that produces Africa-centric literature and tools for Early Childhood Development and teacher education. He has authored numerous books and articles and networks for African voices into developmental and educative sciences.

Acknowledgments

Preparation of this paper was greatly assisted by comments and suggestions received from Professors Robert LeVine, Kofi Marfo, and Alan Pence, by constructive feedback from the Editors, and by Robert Serpell’s access as an Affiliate Visiting Professor to the Library of Virginia Commonwealth University.

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Contents

List of boxes 4

Abstract 5

Introduction 7

Multiple dimensions of the African context 9

Extrapolations from developmental science to the design of ECCE services in Africa 11

Culture-sensitive methods of assessment 14

Indigenous African conceptions of child development and socialization practices 16

Child-to-Child: an African educational strategy 21

Culture-sensitive ECCE programming for rural African communities 23

Application: challenges, constraints and strategies 26

References 27

List of boxes

Box 1: Assessment of non-verbal cognition in an African context 15

Box 2: An African social ontogeny 17

Box 3: Indigenous African conceptualization of intelligence 18

Box 4: Indigenous African games and songs: a neglected fund of knowledge for the enrichment of ECCE curricula 20

Box 5: Child-to-Child approach to education in an African public school 22

Box 6: The role of indigenous languages in ECCE 24

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Abstract

Most sub-Saharan African societies display linguistic diversity, rapid social change, rural-urban contrasts in lifestyle and widespread biculturation. Planning and delivery of early childhood care and education (ECCE) services in the region have been constrained by the legacy of Western colonial occupation, low prevalence of literacy and limited institutionalization of systematic research. Some international agencies tend to construe ECCE as a compensatory intervention for children disadvantaged by poverty, primarily to prepare them for formal schooling. They also tend to exaggerate the degree of scientific consensus about the optimal conditions for children’s cognitive and social-emotional development. The validity of much research to date has been constrained by reliance on a narrow database, a narrow range of authorship and a narrow range of culturally Western audiences. Close attention is needed to the unique sociocultural conditions of African societies especially in rural areas, including the strengths and limitations of local child-rearing knowledge, attitudes and practices. Culture-sensitive methods are essential for unbiased assessment of young African children, especially those with limited access to Western cultural materials and practices, and for effective communication with their caregiving families. Distinctive features of indigenous African approaches to child socialization include emphasis on social responsibility and widespread involvement of pre-adolescent youth in the care of younger children. The Child-to-Child approach has been effectively deployed as a way of respecting the rights and

competencies of children and mobilizing them to promote health. The design of ECCE services in Africa should focus on local strengths including indigenous games and music, emphasize community-based provision, incorporate participation by pre-adolescent children; use indigenous African languages and local funds of knowledge; and accord priority to inclusion of children with special needs. Strategies are identified to address the challenges confronting application of these recommendations.1

1 The abridged version of this paper will be published as a chapter under the title “The challenge of local relevance: using the wealth of African cultures in ECCE programme development” in a forthcoming UNESCO volume on ECCE to be published in 2014.

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Introduction

Human development from infancy to adulthood is acknowledged in all societies as a process demanding protection, care and guidance. In African pre-colonial cultures these were provided by a child’s mother, elder siblings, other community adults and playmates (Erny, 1972; Fortes, 1938). With the advent of formal education, certain aspects of support were assigned to formal institutions such as madrassas and primary schools, typically from around 5-7 years of age until puberty. However, access to those institutions varied, depending on the child’s gender, the family’s economic and social status and religious adherence. Despite widespread endorsement by African governments of the principles of Education for All (UNESCO, 1990), access to formal education has remained uneven with many rural children receiving less than their urban peers.

The curricula of formal institutions varied according to their cultural agenda. In the Islamic madrassas and early Christian mission schools, the emphasis was on imparting basic literacy along with moral principles and religious practices (Snelson, 1974; Prochner and Kabiru, 2008; Gwanfogbe, 2011). In the second half of the twentieth century, in Africa and worldwide, a broader range of subjects including mathematics, science and social studies were incorporated into institutionalised public basic schooling (IPBS - cf. Serpell and Hatano, 1997), a trend followed more slowly by Islamic schools (Bray, Clarke and Stephens, 1986).

Internationally, advocates of early childhood care and education (ECCE) service development have often focused attention on mastery of the IPBS curriculum and justified ECCE as a corrective to the disadvantage suffered by children from low-income families, which in Africa are predominantly located in rural areas or urban slums. Thus ECCE has been construed as part of a broader modernization agenda through the progressive appropriation of Western culture in opposition to African traditions seen as deficient and/or outdated (Callaghan, 1998). In this paper, we advance a different perspective, arguing that Africa has its own legitimate conceptions of child development and strategies for supporting it and a rich store of often neglected resources which should be incorporated into ECCE and higher education strategies and inform future research.

For the majority of rural African children, success in the IPBS curriculum is in practice only loosely related to the more fundamental agenda of preparation for economic and social competence in their local communities. While women’s increasing access to schooling clearly has a beneficial impact on the health of their young children, multinational research on factors mediating that impact suggests that more than one causal pathway is involved (LeVine and Rowe, 2009). Mothers who have been to school may internalize new approaches to the primary socialization of their infants closer to middle-class European and north American practices, but equally or more important may be the fact that ‘Western-type schools in the less developed countries

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provide children with a communicative socialization that involves learning the language of bureaucracy’ (LeVine et al, 2102, 57). This enhances comprehension of public health messages disseminated by radio and in print, and compliance with top-down bureaucratic promotion of initiatives such as immunization of under-5 children, leading to higher child survival rates. It is also possible that a key learning outcome of short-term enrolment in low-quality, basic schooling is appropriation of the ‘“hidden curriculum” values of discipline and obedience of authority’ (Basu and Stephenson, 2005, 2011).

We further contend that the indigenous cultures of rural African families contain many elaborate and effective, informal socialization practices for nurturing such competencies. ECCE initiatives in rural areas should therefore build on the strengths of indigenous cultures by respecting their meaning-systems and adapting their demonstrably beneficial practices. For instance, in an era of falling academic standards and the promotion of consumerism, school curricula would benefit from promoting values of reciprocal accountability and cooperation evident in African family traditions (see Pence and Nsamenang, 2008).

Conditions relevant to the design and delivery of ECCE services vary considerably from one country to another. For purposes of analysis, we shall sometimes refer to a group of nations as the NoWeMics (Northern hemisphere, Western culture, More industrialised countries) and to another group as the Majority World. As a result of historical factors, NoWeMics receive higher international prestige than the Majority World (Kagitcibasi, 2007) where most of the world’s population resides.

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Multiple dimensions of the African context

The African region makes up around 20 per cent of the total land area of the earth and accommodates about 15 per cent of the world’s population. The economic and political history of the 54 sovereign states in the region is diverse. Following the expansion of Arabic and Islamic influence along the Mediterranean coast in the seventh century, the nations lying north of the Sahara have developed a distinctive cultural and political orientation linking them with the Arab states of the Middle East. Within the sub-Saharan region, most of the contemporary, post-colonial states share sociocultural conditions that have a direct bearing on the circumstances of early childhood development: a history of colonial occupation by a Western European power; rural-urban contrasts in life-style; rapid social change; widespread biculturation; low prevalence of literacy; widespread poverty (amidst rich natural resources exploited by foreign-dominated corporations); high prevalence of infectious and parasitic diseases (including HIV and AIDS); and limited institutionalization of systematic research (on early childhood development or indeed on any other topic).

In several countries of the region, a European language, originally imposed by Christian missionaries and/or a colonial power, has been retained as the principal medium of legislation, administration, mass communication and education, resulting in an enduring pattern of cultural hegemony (Serpell and Hatano, 1997; Brock-Utne, 2002; Wolff, 2006). In Zambia, this language is English, in Senegal, French (Ka and Serpell, 2003), and in Angola, Portuguese.

Great social prestige is attached to these languages and many parents want their children to acquire greater competence in them than they themselves have achieved. Fishman (1967) and other sociolinguists (e.g. Myers-Scotton, 2002) have built on the concept of diglossia, originally proposed by Ferguson (1959), to propose that in post-colonial states the dynamics of spoken and written communication follow a pattern of differentiation between a formal language of power and a more intimate language of ‘hearth and home’.

From a systems perspective (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), these macrosocial factors constrain and potentiate the meso-level organization of opportunities for young children to interact with adults and other children in ways that are systematically different from the eco-cultural context of child development in other societies. Mazrui (1986) has posited that Africa is heir to a triple cultural heritage, blending the ideas, institutions and practices of Christianity, government and bureaucracy imported from the West, Islamic religion imported from the Middle East and a set of deep-seated philosophical themes endogenous to African culture. Building on that analysis, Nsamenang (1992, 2005) has argued that while certain aspects of the region’s exogenous cultural heritage are fully integrated and appropriated within contemporary African societies, others remain in tension with the indigenous perspective of the majority of Africans. Serpell (1993, 1999b) has argued that for some rural African communities, differences between the indigenous concept of human development and socialization and the

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formal educational model of cognitive growth in public schooling, generates an enduring challenge of local accountability by schools to the community they aspire to serve.

A major challenge facing African societies is how to coordinate their multiple linguistic and other cultural resources in ways that respect their integrity, minimize conflict and generate productive syntheses consistent with the goals of progressive social change. Serpell (1993) has suggested that primary school teachers have a special role to play in Zambian society as ‘bicultural mediators,’ and Banda (2008) has advocated a syncretic approach to curriculum development, combining indigenous cultural resources with ideas from Western culture (cf. Ball and Pence, 2000, Barnhart and Kawagley, 2005, Ismail and Cazden, 2005). Such tensions and challenges are especially conspicuous during early childhood development in which parents worldwide tend to place greatest confidence in intuitive beliefs. Therefore policy-makers and practitioners should pay special attention to documented knowledge, attitudes and practices that inform public response to systematically planned ECCE services which have a relatively short history in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Extrapolations from developmental science to the design of ECCE services in Africa

Scientific research on child development dates back more than 100 years but until recently the vast majority of studies were conducted with children of middle-class North-American or European families by authors who grew up in such families, and were addressed to a narrow range of primarily Western audiences (Serpell, 1990; Arnett, 2008; Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan, 2010). Consequently, great caution should be exercised when extrapolating the concepts and theories originating from that research to the rest of the world. Given the long period of dependent infancy, young children are extremely sensitive to environmental influences, positive and negative. On a biological plane, it is widely agreed that the human brain develops many of its highly specialised functions through a process known as epigenesis: gradual differentiation of the organism through interaction between its genetic code and the environment. But as Bruer (1997) explained, the nature of changes in neural structures and processes induced by environmental variation is too complex to warrant postulating direct connections between the brain and education. In the current cultural zeitgeist of ‘biologization’, there exists a serious danger of allowing weakly substantiated ‘brain science’ speculations (Hirsh-Pasek and Bruer, 2007; Oates et al, 2012) to mask what are in fact primarily cultural and ideological hunches about what is ‘essential’ for healthy human development (LeVine, 2002).

A distinctive feature of humans, compared to other biological species, is their social

organization into groups that not only adapt to but actively customise their habitat and transmit cultural artefacts and practices across generations. Thus the developmental niche to which the infant must adapt in the first few years of life varies across cultures (Super and Harkness, 1986, 1997). Moreover, even when academic success is defined by culturally specific standards in NoWeMic schools, phenomenally high achievements by some culturally different immigrant children from the Majority World (Rong and Preissle, 1998) support the general hypothesis that multiple pathways exist from early childhood to longer-term developmental outcomes.

The International Child Development Steering Group (ICDSG) has proposed a synthesis of theoretical ideas as a policy guide to increase the quantity and quality of ECCE services in areas where there is less systematic, formal provision than in the NoWeMics (Grantham-McGregor et al. 2007; Walker et al. 2007; Engle et al. 2007). This synthesis weaves together a political argument about social justice in response to economic inequalities and a technical argument about the strategic benefits of prevention. In summary, these authors contend that vast numbers of children are placed at risk of premature death, developmental disability or pathology by conditions that could be changed for the better early in their lives. Therefore, resources should be channelled into such interventions since the payoff is greater than seeking to correct developmental

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consequences of early disadvantage at later stages of life.

We agree with this broad line of reasoning and advocacy. However, we take issue with some of the ways in which the ICDSG has marshalled supporting evidence, especially as it applies to those in the Majority World. Their approach tends to exaggerate the degree of consensus within the scientific community in order to convince lay audiences and funding agencies that science has come up with a definitive solution. One influential hypothesis, grounded in the classic work of Bowlby (1969) and Ainsworth et al. (1978), has been that healthy social and emotional functioning depends critically on a secure attachment between infant and mother, which in turn depends on specific patterns of maternal behaviour. But aspects of this interpretation have been challenged on the grounds that responsibility for infant care is variable across societies (Weisner and Gallimore, 1977), and that the sensitivity of a caregiver’s behaviour cannot be defined or measured independently of cultural context (e.g. Rothbaum and Morelli, 2005; Keller and Otto, 2009).

Other examples of oversimplification in several influential ECCE advocacy documents are as follows. Parental discipline that emphasizes egalitarian reasoning has been shown to be more effective in promoting healthy socio-emotional development in middle-class Western families than corporal or harsh verbal punishment (Baumrind, 1989). But this finding has not been consistently replicated in other cultural settings where strict parenting is widely endorsed (see Chao, 1994; Chen et al, 2000; Last, 2000; Lansford et al, 2005; Oburu, 2009). The negative impact of harsh punishment on children’s mental health seems to depend on how normative such punishment is perceived to be (Lansford et al, 2005, 2010). Structured, interactive play is given an important role in the promotion of children’s early cognitive development by major Western psychological theories (e.g. Piaget, 1951; Vygotsky (1933), but neither of those theories attaches special importance

to the role of adults in such interactions. Lancy (2007) has argued compellingly that the Western patterns of mother-infant play advocated by some ECCE programmes are so inconsistent with cultural practices and beliefs of many Majority World societies as to be dysfunctional in those contexts. The same may well be true of patterns of speech addressed to infants, which vary widely across cultures (see Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986).

In our view, psychological intervention programmes (educational or therapeutic) must, for both epistemological and ethical reasons, rely on the conscious, voluntary participation of their recipients in the programme. ‘The expert paradigm that informs certain clinical interventions with special populations takes the patient out of her normal social context and replaces it with an artificial one, structured to optimize conditions for the amelioration of the patient’s condition’ (Serpell, 1999a, 42). While such drastic intervention may sometimes be warranted in times of natural catastrophe, war or intrafamilial abuse, ‘it is clearly impracticable and politically unacceptable as a method for the enhancement of developmental opportunities in a large section of society. That goal can only realistically be addressed by working with and through the children’s existing families’ (op.cit, 42).

The expert paradigm may be more justifiable in the case of biological as opposed to social processes. In the large-scale intervention in Zambian schools by Grigorenko et al. (2007) treatment of intestinal parasite infection significantly enhanced the ability of learners to follow instructions for an academic task. Arguably, parents and teachers did not need to understand the biomedical processes involved in order to consent to this intervention. A broad stroke explanation and certification that the tablets were safe may have been adequate. However, when this paradigm is extended to modes of social interaction between children and their adult caregivers, intervention to change the latter’s behaviour is likely to disturb the

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prevailing sociocultural system. To abandon a long-standing traditional practice calls into question the indigenous theory that informs it and may affect interpersonal relationships in the child’s family and community as well as the social distribution of responsibilities for child-rearing.

One popular interpretation of Engle et al.’s argument (2007) seems to rest on an analogy with the GOBI strategy (UNICEF 1985) of universal promotion of growth-monitoring, Oral rehydration therapy, breast-feeding and immunization. A new orthodoxy seems to be emerging, designed to enhance the development of children’s cognitive and social-emotional competence through stimulation and caregiver sensitivity. But psychosocial intervention to optimise the development of young children cannot be operationalized with the same degree of cross-cultural equivalence as a vaccine or breast-feeding. Importing a culturally alien package of cognitive stimulation would only be justifiable if research showed that existing, local stimulation techniques were less supportive of children’s development and such research evidence does not exist.

We believe that the design of appropriate, effective ECCE services for African societies requires close attention to the prevailing sociocultural conditions especially in rural areas, including the strengths and limitations of local child-rearing knowledge, attitudes and practices. Such attention has been conspicuously absent from the vast majority of ECCE intervention programmes. This paper is devoted to exposition of some of the more salient, widely recurrent features of child development and socialization in Africa and their implications for the optimal design of ECCE programmes.

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Culture-sensitive methods of assessment

Much of the systematic research on early childhood development in Africa has been hampered by the use of imported measures inadequately adapted to the local context (Greenfield, 1997; Serpell and Haynes, 2004; Stemler et al, 2009). In recent years, however, research has shown that it is possible to assess the cognitive development of African children in ways that take account of the learning opportunities afforded by their home and play environments (e.g. Kathuria and Serpell, 1998) (see Box 1). The implications of such endogenous test development deserve close attention by researchers, clinicians and educational service providers in Africa, especially with respect to early childhood and economically marginal neighbourhoods.

An ambitious programme of cognitive test development on the East Coast of Kenya has paid special attention to children with neuropsychological impairment (PCD, 2002). This research group has adapted tests originally developed in the NoWeMics, noting that ‘some psychological constructs show greater functional universality than others. One example is psychomotor development, where motor control and co-ordination are seen to develop in a universal sequence’ (Holding et al., 2008, 4). Thus Abubakar et al. (2007, 2008) have reported impressive evidence of the reliability and validity of the Kilifi Developmental Inventory, to assess the progress of children aged 6 - 35 months across developmental milestones in the areas of locomotor skills and eye-hand co-ordination. Unusual sensitivity

was shown in this applied research to the perceptions by local, indigenous adults (including parents) of the validity of test items and the acceptability of assessment procedures. This grounding of assessment in the local culture gives providers of ECCE services a powerful foothold from which to collaborate with family members in the design, implementation and monitoring of health and educational interventions for young children at risk for developmental disabilities.

Looking to the future of this emerging field of technical expertise in Africa, Nsamenang (2009) has noted the need to ‘chart the conceptual leap’ from indicators to underlying theoretical concepts about human development, and for training programmes to nurture the emergence of ‘culture-informed and context-tuned “experts” especially with the nerve and adroitness to dare step out of the Euro Western box to articulate their own or creatively gain from donor-posited guidelines and indicators’ (p.119). Valuable groundwork for such psychometric research and development has been provided by the South African Human Sciences Research Council’s Indicators Project (Dawes et al., 2007) which generated a detailed set of indicators for monitoring early childhood development, as well as child health status, injury and mortality, mental health, disability, specific difficulties of learning, abuse and neglect, neighbourhood qualities, education, and various hazards faced by especially vulnerable children. If quantitative research on the character

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and determinants of child development in Africa is to progress, many more instruments will need to be developed in accordance with psychometric principles to establish their reliability and validity in African contexts (Grigorenko, 2009). In the next section we turn to a set of fundamental, conceptual issues essential to such validation.

Box 1: Assessment of non-verbal cognition in an African context

Numerous studies have reported that African children seldom attain performance levels regarded

as normal in the West on pattern reproduction and pattern reasoning tests such as Block Design

and Progressive Matrices. Serpell (1979) conducted an experimental test of the hypothesis that

such difficulties arise from unfamiliarity of the testing medium. Children from low-income urban

families in Zambia performed much better in wire modelling than low-income urban English

children, whereas the English children outperformed their Zambian peers in drawing with pencil

and paper. No significant difference was found between the two cultural groups in clay modelling

or hand position tests. Within the Zambian sample, boys outperformed girls in the wire modelling

and drawing tests, but not on clay modelling or hand position tests.

These findings inspired a programme of test development at the University of Zambia’s Psychology

Department for the assessment of general cognitive ability among children growing up in rural

African eco-cultural settings, many of whom enrol in school either relatively late in life or not at

all. The Panga Munthu Test (literally ‘Make a Person’ Test) (PMT) presents the child with clay

but no model to copy. Like the well-known American Draw-a-Person Test, the PMT invites the

child to produce a figure of a person from general knowledge and is scored for the amount of

appropriate detail of the human form included. Zambian norms have since been compiled by age

and by school grade, and guidelines published for using the test to assess the general cognitive

ability of a child relative to his or her peers (Kathuria and Serpell, 1998).

Most of the other current tests for children aged between 5 and 12 tend to presuppose general

exposure to Western artefacts such as written texts, pictures, puzzles, building blocks and TV, and

practices with adults such as joint storybook reading and face-to-face conversations including

‘known-answer questions’. Such exposure is quite rare and very unevenly distributed among

Africa’s children and is generally absent for those growing up in subsistence agricultural or

pastoral communities. The Panga Munthu Test presupposes only familiarity with the widespread

play activity of clay modelling and thus offers a less culturally biased approach to assessing the

cognitive functioning of rural African children. Several lines of evidence suggest that PMT taps

a dimension of cognition more relevant to children’s home environments than to the demands

of the school curriculum (Serpell and Jere-Folotiya, 2008). If so, the test may be especially

suitable for the intellectual assessment of African children who, for one reason or another, have

received less formal schooling than is prescribed by official public policy. Significant groups for

whom such assessments may be needed in the current era of Africa’s political economy include

children of school-age engaged in street vending, and children whose enrolment in school was

interrupted by premature death of a breadwinning head of household, or by civil war and forced

migration. As Alcock et al. (2008) have noted, populations that include large numbers of children

in such situations pose a special challenge for the design of appropriate standardization of

developmental tests.

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Indigenous African conceptions of child development and socialization practices

In this section, we present three complementary approaches to knowledge generation about child development and socialization rooted in endogenous, African ways of knowing: analysis of traditional African proverbs, African theory-building and documentation of indigenous African parental ethno-theories. A widespread concern is captured by Odora-Hoppers’ (2009, 603) advocacy of an ‘integrative paradigm shift’, in which ‘modernization proceeds without following Western values ... or sequences, but rather with a re-strengthening of core values from different traditions of knowledge and living... [and] indigenous peoples reclaim... the custodianship over their knowledge in public spaces along with the right to speak and be determining agents of co-operative contemporary change and creative knowledge sharing of these knowledge systems.’

One line of scholarship has examined the indigenous formulations of child development and socialization values embedded in African languages and oral traditions. Abubakar (2011) presents an analysis of philosophical ideas about education derived from Swahili proverbs and concludes that ‘the adults in the child’s environment, and not just the parents, were given a duty to teach, guide and educate the child’ (p. 99); and ‘an important first step toward good citizenship is to start teaching children very early how to place the needs of the society/country before personal needs, which is a deeply entrenched principle intrinsic in almost all ethnic communities throughout Africa (p. 101). Several collections of proverbs have been published in different African languages

(e.g. Milimo, 1972; Wamitila, 2001; Wanjohi, 1997). Abubakar (2011) suggests indigenous educators in Africa might identify and reflect on proverbs that have direct implications for classroom teaching and school learning or for the conduct and behaviour of teachers.

Marfo (2011), in a paper entitled Envisioning an African child development field, poses the question:

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? (p.142)

One response to this challenge is the theoretical elaboration of an indigenous West African social ontogeny by Bame Nsamenang (1992) (see Box 2). Nsamenang’s (1992) theory draws from writings by African scholars in philosophy and the humanities and is grounded in systematic observational research and personal experience of the socialization practices of the rural Nso community, in Western Cameroon (Nsamenang and Lamb, 1995). The growth of social selfhood is construed as passing through seven phases, each characterized by a developmental task. The major focus of the first, ‘pre-social’ phase is on social priming: babies are cuddled and teased to smile along with adults; parents and other caregivers offer food items and playthings

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and lure them verbally and nonverbally to return the ‘gifts’ - a prelude towards induction into the ‘sharing and exchange norms’ that bond the social system. The second phase, ‘social apprenticing’, roughly corresponds with childhood. Its principal task is to recognize, cognize and rehearse social roles that pertain to four hierarchical spheres of life: self, household, network and public. Adults assign responsibility to pre-adolescent and adolescent children including the care and socialization of younger children which serves the function of priming the emergence of social responsibility. The priming strategies embedded in indigenous African child-care practices have important

implications for the design of culturally appropriate forms of intervention to optimize developmental opportunities for children (Nsamenang, 2009b).

Whether this theoretical scheme would fit across the many different societies in sub-Saharan Africa is debatable. For instance, Levine et al. (1994) describe mother-infant interactions among the Gusii of rural Kenya in the 1950s and 1970s that stands in marked contrast to Nsamenang’s description of social priming through cuddling and teasing. Gusii mothers, according to Levine et al ‘are not expected to talk to or gaze at their infants or play with them’ (p.148), and they

Box 2: An African social ontogeny

An African social ontogeny (Nsamenang, 1992) is a theoretical articulation phrased within an eco-

cultural perspective. Nsamenang’s (1992) theory of social ontogenetic development draws from

writings by African scholars in philosophy and the humanities (e.g. Mbiti, 1969, 1990; Moumouni,

1968) on worldview and social ontogenesis shared by different ethnic groups and grounded in a

combination of systematic observational research and personal experience of the socialization

practices of the rural Nso community in Western Cameroon (Nsamenang and Lamb, 1995). The

growth of social selfhood is in seven phases each characterized by a distinctive developmental task

defined within the framework of the culture’s primarily socio-affective, developmental agenda.

In the first phase, the ceremony of naming projects the kind of socialized being the neonate

should become. The major developmental task of this ‘pre-social’ phase is success in social

priming; babies are cuddled and teased to smile along with adults; parents and other caregivers

offer infants food items and playthings and lure them both verbally and through nonverbal

communication to return the ‘gifts’ - a prelude towards induction into the ‘sharing and exchange

norms’ that bond the social system. Rabain (1979) and Mtonga (2012) describe similar teasing

in their ethnographic studies, respectively, of Wolof child socialization practices in Senegal and

amongst the Chewa and Tumbuka peoples of Zambia’s Eastern Province, where such interactions

of adults with toddlers are interpreted as cultivating generosity and preventing the development

of greediness or selfishness.

The second phase of social ontogeny, ‘social apprenticing’, roughly corresponds with childhood.

Its principal developmental task is to recognize, cognize and rehearse social roles that pertain

to four hierarchical spheres of life: self, household, network and public. Adults assign family

and neighbourhood responsibility to pre-adolescent and adolescent children. Adult delegation

of responsibility for care and socialization of younger children serves the function of priming

the emergence of social responsibility. The priming strategies embedded in indigenous African

child-care practices have important implications for the design of culturally appropriate forms

of intervention to optimize developmental opportunities for children in contemporary Africa

(Nsamenang, 2009b).

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explain how this (strange to Western eyes) emotional detachment is compatible with healthy emotional development in later life. Part of their explanation is that the infants receive playful stimulation and emotional support from their elder siblings and other child caregivers, which is consistent with observations by Nsamenang in West Africa and by Serpell in Zambia. The contrast between these ethnographic accounts serves as a warning that wide variations

occur across different ethnocultural groups within the African region (cf. DeLoache and Gottlieb, 2000), and that further detailed research on socialization practices is needed (Marfo, Pence, LeVine and LeVine, 2011).

A number of researchers have sought to document through empirical research the implicit ethno-theories held by African parents and other indigenous experts about child development and socialization (see

Box 3: Indigenous African conceptualization of intelligence

Serpell (2011) provides an overview of his programmatic research in an African society over a 40-

year period. His elaboration of the indigenous Chewa psychological construct nzelu was initially

motivated by doubts over the local validity of Western tests of intelligence when these were applied

in an African sociocultural context very different from the NoWeMic context for which they had been

designed (Serpell, 1972). In order to generate an informed account of the system of meanings that

define what constitutes intelligence in a rural African community, a cultural, quasi-ethnographic

study was initiated in the early 1970s (Serpell, 1977). Semi-structured interviews were conducted

with a purposive sample of adults in a cluster of Chewa villages in Eastern Zambia.

Rather than asking them to discuss terminology, we asked each adult to consider a hypothetical

critical incident in the village and to choose among a group of actual children the one to whom

they would assign a concrete relevant task. These scenarios included: a house catches fire and

there are only these children present with you; you are washing your clothes at the stream and you

see that the place where you usually spread them out to dry is muddy; you are doing some repair

work on the thatched roof of a house and you see the need for a makeshift hammer.

In answering the questions, respondents were asked to explain what it was about the child

selected that made him or her the most suitable. The term nzelu came up frequently in this

context as it does 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) (Wober, 1974), the Bemba concept of mano

(Zambia) (Kingsley 1985), the Baoule concept of ng’louele (Cote d’Ivoire) (Dasen et al 1985) and the

Djerma-Songhai concept of lakkal (Mali) (Bissiliat et al, 1967). In studies of each of these African

language groups, a distinction emerges between the notion of cognitive alacrity (ku-chenjela)

on the one hand and that of social responsibility (ku-tumikila) on the other, with a highly valued

personality trait defined as a combination of the two (Serpell, 1989). Over the years following

the initial study, we have held a wide range of conversations among cultural insiders of rural

Chewa society (Serpell, 1993, 1996). The overall picture that emerged of the indigenous Chewa

perspective on children’s intellectual and moral development can be summarized as follows:

• Nzelu includes both ku-chenjela (cognitive alacrity) and ku-tumikila (social responsibility)

• Ku-chenjela without ku-tumikila is dangerous

• Responsibility for child socialization is shared communally

• Play activities require no supervision and provide opportunities for practice and elaboration of

desirable skills and dispositions, some of which are desirable.

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Box 3). Serpell’s studies in a rural Chewa community of Zambia’s eastern province ‘led to the insight that nzelu [a term that translates as intelligence] was construed as an amalgam of cognitive alacrity and social responsibility’ (Serpell, 2011a, 128). Extrapolating from this, Serpell (1993, Table 2.7) proposed a list of socialization practices of rural Chewa society that are designed to stimulate, guide or promote the cognitive, moral and social development of children towards culturally cherished goals. Similarly, Barry and Zeitlin (2011) conclude from their research with mothers of young children in Senegalese villages that ‘a curriculum of endogenous knowledge and practices exist [s], which essentially relies on learning through orders and observation.’ (p. 134) For instance, mothers massaged their 1-2-month-old infants’ limbs, helped their 9-month old infants to walk by holding their hand, assigned their 15-18-month-old toddlers increasingly complex tasks and sent their 19-25-month-old toddlers on increasingly challenging errands. Ogunnaike and Houser (2003) describe the use of errands as development-promoting socialization activities for 2-year-olds among low-income Yoruba families in rural, semi-urban and urban Nigerian settings.

Another significant feature of the developmental niche described by many researchers on African early childhood is the prominence of elaborate play activities, unsupervised by adults. Marfo and Biersteker (2008) note that while play is attributed an important role in child development by major Western psychological theories, this is mainly focused on cognition, whereas anthropological studies in Africa (e.g. Fortes, 1938; Reynolds, 1969; Schwartman, 1978; Lancy, 1996) have emphasized that play also serves as an interactive process of social enculturation, structuring opportunities for the rehearsal, critique and appropriation of cultural practices. The cognitive and social structure of indigenous African games has been extensively documented (see Box 4). Music and dance are notably rich dimensions of most African cultures and children participate in both from an early age.

Yet indigenous games are seldom deployed as resources for enrichment in ECCE programmes in Africa, despite the heavy emphasis on play in the curricula imported from Western pre-school orthodoxy. Okwany, Ngutuku and Muhangi (2011) describe a number of recent initiatives in Kenya and Uganda where a systematic attempt was made to ‘leverage indigenous knowledge for child care’, by deploying local traditional songs, proverbs, and food production, preparation and preservation practices as resources for the enrichment of children’s intellectual, emotional and nutritional development, rather than ‘downgrading’ them in favour of those imported from the NoWeMics. Unfortunately, as Hyde and Kabiru (2008, p. 82) note, such efforts are relatively rare, and ‘centre-based programmes in Africa tend to be heavily influenced by Western culture and sometimes are not relevant to the needs of children and society’.

Barry and Zeitlin (2011, 134) suggest that ‘it is possible to improve and enrich ... [endogenous] practices by adding the knowledge and products of modern science’, contending that ‘parents must learn how to add frequent spoken language, verbal explanations, and verbal discipline to the old methods of physical demonstrations and commands that prepare children for their social and economic roles.’ They justify this recommendation as follows: ‘The old, silent ways tend to train children in obedience and in learning by observing and imitating correct behaviour without explanation. But modern life, particularly in the cities, has too many places where a child can wander away from home and too much information to make it safe to continue in this way’ (p. 134). However, these authors acknowledge that their attempts to promote these new practices through ‘Trials of Improved Practices’ encountered some resistance:

‘Mothers of 0-2 month-olds told researchers that the family ridiculed them so much when they talked to the newborn infant that they couldn’t continue’ (p.132)

20

‘All but the most educated members of the population were found to refuse to teach their children the names of objects outside of the context of commands even if they understood the importance of teaching vocabulary’ (p.133)

These observations raise a challenging topic for future research. Does modern science really show that the current practices of middle-class, cosmopolitan Western families are (a) superior in effectiveness to the traditional practices of rural African communities, and (b) transposable into low-income African communities without disturbing the prevailing sociocultural system, threatening the psychological well-being of parents and undermining their confidence in their own parenting skills?

Relatively little research is available on the emotional dimensions of African child development. Kithakye and her colleagues (2009, 2011) have explored the applicability of contemporary Western theoretical conceptualization and assessment to the behaviour and experience of children growing up in a low-income neighbourhood of Kenya’s capital city, Nairobi. These researchers make a compelling case for the relevance of emotional flexibility in the patterning of behaviour among children whose environment lies beyond the NoWeMics. But further research is needed to establish the receptiveness of local parents and teachers to interventions grounded in this theoretical perspective from Western psychology (Eisenberg et al 2007).

Box 4: Indigenous African games and songs: a neglected fund of knowledge for the enrichment of ECCE curricula

Mtonga (2012) compiled the texts of indigenous Chewa and Tumbuka children’s songs and games

observed in the 1980s in rural and urban areas of Zambia. His close analysis of specific examples

illustrates how these ‘games help children to think, intellectualize or discuss their own activities,

and explore the world around them’. Thus ‘seeking and guessing games, ... and riddle contests

involve reasoning and understanding the psychology of other participants’; and language games

demonstrate ‘playful and skilful manipulation of certain word-sounds in order to distort meaning,

create new concepts, or paint a satirical caricature...’ Mtonga further emphasised that in the

Chewa cultural tradition, ‘play and games also have a role in responsibility training and general

socialisation.... In several games ... children rehearsed their future roles as adults, and so showed

that they were at least intending to live up to the expectations people had of them.’ Moreover, the

social organization of children’s play emphasised inclusiveness: ‘Traditional play and games...

were thought to enable children to develop into healthy, strong adults. Even if they suffered from

some physical handicap or incapacitation, they were still encouraged to play and to take part in

games in the hope that they would at least regain or maintain their physical fitness.’

Croft (2002) observed extensive use of choral singing in her qualitative study of lower primary

school teaching in overcrowded rural schools in Malawi, but reported that it was used as a

management tool for exerting gentle discipline, commanding attention and invoking a sense of

community, rather than as a resource for teaching the content of the lesson. On the other hand, in

equally overcrowded rural schools in Uganda, Abiria (2011) describes how lower primary school

teachers build productive connections between the local Lugbara culture of the families in which

their young pupils are raised and the schools that seek to promote their initial acquisition of

basic literacy. A key factor supporting this mobilization of local ‘funds of knowledge’ (cf. Moll

and Greenberg, 1990) may have been the introduction in 2007 of a new ‘thematic curriculum’

emphasizing the use of home languages and cultural resources such as local stories and songs

as pedagogical tools to improve literacy instruction.

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Child-to-Child: an African educational strategy

Despite robust efforts by African governments over the past three decades to broaden access to schooling, the structure of formal educational provision in most countries requires most of those who start out in Grade 1 to ‘drop out’ long before completion of the full 12-year curriculum (Serpell, 1993). Thus the process of formal education is perceived by teachers, parents and pupils alike as one in which students are challenged to climb up a narrowing staircase.

While progression up the staircase may be a source of pride for the minority who reach the top, this conception of the significance of schooling is in many respects problematic for the community that hosts a local primary or basic school (Serpell, 1999b). The majority who set out on this upward journey are doomed to be ‘squeezed out’ long before reaching the top, where there is only room for a tiny minority. (In Zambia, less than 1 per cent of any given cohort of children enrolled in Grade 1 will make it into a tertiary level institution.) Dropping out at earlier stages is perceived as failure and the individual’s return to the community a source of disappointment. The experience of a few years of schooling is not generally perceived as adding value to the individual’s productive capacity within the community. Thus the purpose of schooling is widely understood as the extractive recruitment of the best and brightest individuals to climb up and out of the community and enter a higher, powerful, elite society. Any benefits to the community are construed as flowing indirectly from national level societal progress or from trickle-down remittances. A number of

different ways of focusing education have been proposed in search of alternatives to the narrowing staircase model, including apprenticeship, life-long learning, school production units, health education and the Child-to-Child (CtC) approach.

The CtC approach is designed to mobilize children as agents of health education (Pridmore and Stephens, 2000). It differs from the narrowing staircase model by focusing on the promotion of social responsibility in pre-adolescent children, an educational goal that resonates with the Chewa concept of nzelu. The widespread African practice of entrusting pre-adolescent children with the care of younger siblings was a major inspiration for the original proponents of the CtC approach (Pridmore, 1996; Udell, 2001), which has been applied in more than 80 countries worldwide (CtC Trust, n.d.). Box 5 presents a case study of integrative curriculum development by a group of teachers at a government primary school in Mpika, a small town in Zambia’s Northern Province using the CtC approach (Serpell, 2008). The key insight that pre-adolescent children can take on responsibility as agents of infant care and nurture, within the context of primary health care and progressive social change was re-appropriated by the African teachers at Kabale Primary School in Mpika as a way of incorporating indigenous insights into the formal educational process (Serpell, 2008). The striking long-term benefits claimed by the graduates of Kabale school’s CtC curriculum, including a growth of egalitarian relations between the genders, even within adult marriages (Serpell et al

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2011) lend credence to Nsamenang’s (2012, 101) call for more attention to be paid to CtC determinants of development in the design of ECCE programmes in Africa, with

a view to integrating into their curricula ‘the hands-on responsibility training component of African family-based education.’

Box 5: Child-to-Child approach to education in an African public school

A case study at Kabale Primary School in Zambia’s Northern Province (Serpell, 2008) observed a

comprehensive, integrative approach to involving pre-adolescent schoolchildren in the promotion

of public health at school and in their communities. One practice involved pairing schoolchildren

with selected children of pre-school age whose weight was monitored as an index of nutritional

status through regular visits to the local health centre. The growth charts, which served as a clinical

health record (Morley and Woodland, 1988) kept at home for these young children, were deployed

in school lessons as resources for learning about mathematics (cf. Gibbs and Mutunga, 1991)

and biology while reflective discussions on factors contributing to health led into social studies

and English. Children undertook group projects on topics in demography and sanitation and they

shared responsibilities for practical activities such as growing nutritious foods and bringing clean

water to school. Throughout these various activities, the theme of active participation was applied

both to exploratory problem-solving and to the cultivation of social responsibility (Mumba, 2000).

Practical and social skills acquired were demonstrated through role-play (Mwape and Serpell,

1996) and parents interviewed were generally positive about the programme’s promotion of

responsible participation in the nurturant care of younger children, which they recognized as an

indigenous tradition.

Analysis of official records revealed that students at Kabale School who were enrolled in CtC

classes scored higher 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 implementation also carried

weight. A follow-up study examined the sustainability of the students’ pro-social attitudes through

more advanced education at two highly selective national high schools and two less selective basic

schools. CtC students found less opportunities at the high schools than at basic schools to apply

the cooperative, pro-social skills and attitudes they had acquired at primary school (Adamson-

Holley, 1999).

Nevertheless, in a longer-term follow-up study, in-depth interviews with young adults found that

most of them recalled their experience with remarkable clarity and consistently testified that

it had promoted their personal agency, cooperative disposition and civic responsibility in early

adulthood (Serpell, Mumba and Chansa-Kabali, 2011).

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Culture-sensitive ECCE programming for rural African communities

In this section, we articulate some implications of the research we have reviewed for the design of interventions to protect, support and promote the optimal development of young African children. The vast majority of these children are still raised within extended families in rural communities that depend on subsistence agriculture and use one or more of the continent’s indigenous languages for everyday communication. This paper is primarily addressed to the interests of those children. We recognize that a significant and growing minority of Africa’s children are growing up in urban families, and that a large proportion of those families are economically deprived. But the particular configuration of cultural factors relevant to their situation is likely to differ in significant ways from those of rural, subsistence villages.

Focus on local strengths as well as challenges

Developmental assessment for young children in Africa should be informed by programmes of applied research including local stakeholder consultations about the goals of early childhood socialization and education. Assessment as a guide to action requires identification of a person’s strengths as well as difficulties. The use of exogenous tests often gives rise to underestimates of a child’s capabilities. Test modifications can yield dramatic improvements in some African children’s cognitive test performance. African primary school teachers engaged in educational innovation can make coherent assessments

on child behaviour they are trying to cultivate through their teaching and their insights can be used to sensitize other teachers to those educational goals. Exploratory research and development are needed to identify how best to mobilise the intimate knowledge and understanding of parents and caregivers in the extended family, including pre-adolescent children as first-hand assessors of young children’s development.

Building on local strengths

Highly valued dimensions of child development that are largely ignored by Western tests and pre-school curricula include nzelu, a socially responsible type of intelligence, and cooperation. Cooperative learning arrangements deserve special attention in African ECCE programmes as an entry-point for the cultivation of social responsibility (Serpell, 2011b). Rather than seeking to promote ‘homogenization of the world around Euro-American developmental values and educational models’ (Marfo, 2011), we recommend that priority be given in ECCE curriculum development and practitioner education to explaining and celebrating the cognitive, social and emotional power of African games, music and dance. These are effective resources for the stimulation of individual cognitive development, for promoting cooperative learning between children of different ages, for building pride in cultural heritage and for demonstrating to sceptical parents that the ECCE agenda need not alienate young African children from their indigenous cultural roots.

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Community-based provision

Community-based provision promotes community ownership and sustainability of ECCE services. The African tradition of pre-adolescent children caring and nurturing younger siblings and neighbours is informed by sound principles that share the burden of care and promote the prosocial development of school-age children. ECCE programmes in rural African communities should not rely on separating young children from their pre-adolescent elder siblings and peers and placing them under the exclusive care of adults. The rights of the older children to school education

need not be compromised by inviting their participation. ECCE practitioners should be oriented to the potential of the CtC approach with free resource materials accessible in sub-Saharan Africa from the Child-to-Child Trust (nd).

Use of locally familiar languages

ECCE intervention programmes for rural African communities should be conceptualized as far as possible in the local indigenous languages. Training of paraprofessional personnel to implement the programmes should be conducted, as far as possible, in those languages,

Box 6: The role of indigenous languages in ECCE

Most African societies are multilingual and deploy different languages for various social purposes

(e.g. Underwood et al 2007). For everyday discourse about the behaviour of young children, most

African parents, especially in rural communities, rely on indigenous languages rather than the

exogenous languages that dominate the formal school curriculum (English, French, Portuguese)

and the Koranic curriculum of the madrassas (Arabic). In many cases the indigenous languages

encode in distinctive ways various key concepts and values (such as nzelu and ku-tumikila) that

inform the prevalent socialization practices of local families. These languages are also rich in

resources for the promotion of moral and intellectual development of young children, such as

stories, songs and riddles. Using these resources rather than those of a European language

serves to connect the practitioners of ECCE with their young charges’ home community in ways

that afford the construction of bridges of cross-cultural compatibility (Jordan, 1985).

If strategic interventions to protect, support and promote the optimal development of young

children in rural African communities are to become sustainable components of progressive

social change, they will need to be appropriated by the community as their own. The process of

participatory appropriation begins with trust. Parents and community leaders will more readily

incorporate new concepts and practices in their implicit theories of child-rearing if these are

recognizably expressed in the community’s familiar ‘language of hearth and home’ (Fishman,

1967).

A popular belief among many parents and teachers in Africa is that an early start on learning

the language of power will be highly beneficial for children of the current ECCE generation. Yet

systematic research has repeatedly demonstrated that academic competence is generally more

readily acquired by children who have first mastered basic literacy in the language of their home

(Cummins, 2000; Heugh, 2000). For the minority of high-income African families that use one of

the exogenous languages of power as a medium of communication with young children at home,

enrolment of the child in a private pre-school where s/he is immersed in the language of power

may be a viable strategy. But for the majority of African children, whose families cannot afford to

pay for private schooling, it is arguably dysfunctional to promote the use of the language of power

as a medium of instruction in ECCE settings.

25

and training of all ECCE personnel should include special attention to communication with and accountability to young children’s families (see Box 6).

Inclusion of most vulnerable children

If anyone truly needs ECCE services in Africa, it is those disadvantaged children whose families are struggling to cope with their biological impairments (resulting in loss of vision, hearing or mobility, intellectual disability, or other forms of learning disability), or whose access to the normal support afforded to young children by family and community has been disrupted (by war, disease, domestic violence, or some other disaster). These are the children for whom a felt need for intervention will be most readily acknowledged by members of the local community. ECCE programmes are exceptionally well placed to include children with intellectual or emotional needs. Many activities in existing programmes emphasize sharing, mutual respect and cooperation and active inclusion of children with special needs flows logically from those principles. Public policy in African societies should affirm and protect the rights of these children to inclusion in ECCE, and positive discrimination in favour of them should be included in funding formulas, with targeted subsidies from the public authorities responsible for quality assurance, licensing and oversight.

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Application: challenges, constraints and strategies

Implementation of our recommendations will face considerable economic, political and institutional challenges. Many of these arise from the endurance of Western cultural hegemony in the publication and training practices of the international community of research and higher education, which is sustained by the low level of endogenous institutionalization of systematic research in the African region. Plotting a way forward will call for effective advocacy for evidence-based decision-making and decision-oriented research (Garcia, Pence and Evans 2008). Practical steps of particular value include:

• Feasibility demonstration projects incorporating and adapting indigenous cultural resources in ECCE (e.g. Mwaura and Marfo, 2011; Newman, 2007);

• Inclusion of cultural relevance among the criteria applied by accreditation bodies for approval of ECCE services, institutions and training programmes (cf. Mavimbela, 2001);

• Challenging western hegemony through systematic study of cultural diversity;

• Integration of African cultural resources into teaching resources for higher education in Africa (e.g. Nsamenang and Tchombe, 2011);

• Bridging curricula for higher education between orthodox western higher educational practices and the demands of an African sociocultural context (cf. Serpell, 2007);

• Institutionalization of child development research at African universities (cf. Pence & Marfo, 2004);

• International partnerships in the design and delivery of professional training for ECCE providers that emphasise the use of indigenous resources and the cultivation of commitment by trainees to work in local, poorly resourced settings (e.g. ECDVU - see Vargas-Baron and Joseph, 2011).

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Information on the seriesUNESCO Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) Working Papers Series offers analysis and discussion on various themes and issues concerning ECCE. It aims to enrich perspectives on ECCE and contribute to strengthening global knowledge base on ECCE.