Chapter 6 - Studying Children in Sociocultural Context: A Widening Journey

Summary

Becoming a subject to oneself is a challenge. To make the task somewhat more meaningful, I have presented a narrative that builds on experiences that are likely to resonate with other scholars from the Global South. In the academic journey from separation to synthesis, I have had the good fortune of collaborating with scholars from young students to renowned scholars, to whom I owe immense gratitude. I chose to modify the given metaphor of a pillar to better suit my orientation both to my inner self and to the outside world.

My early intellectual development was nurtured by liberal-minded English parents, a French lycée and a Western “classics” curriculum to approach communication through literature and history. But my university introduction to psychology was framed as experimental science. Personal relationships and political awakening in early adulthood prompted me to migrate to a newly decolonized African nation, where all my children were raised. My early publications focused on explaining the performance of African children on Western measures of cognition in terms of measurement bias. In the 1970s my personal agenda of integration into Zambian society motivated closer attention to ways in which sociocultural context influences plurilingual discourse and conceptualization of intelligence. As a sojourner in the USA in the 1990s, I collaborated with American colleagues in a multi-method study of early literacy development in an ethnically diverse city. We theorized that the intimate culture of a child’s family filters wider cultural influences on individual development. Application of science to policy for support of children’s development needs to engage with their families’ ethnotheories.