Culture-Sensitive Communication in Applied Developmental Research

Abstract

Communication about child development between persons with different cultural preoccupations requires that author and audience agree without coercion on how to connect their perspectives. Western cultural hegemony persists in many international fora under the guise of “globalization,” giving rise to systematically distorted communication in ways that do epistemological violence to indigenous cultural models in Africa. The dominant paradigm of public basic schooling is sustained by institutionalized path dependency and construes educational success as extracting the learner from her community of origin. Consensus-building within a framework of mutually respectful communication involves bridging, coordination or fusion. Societal progress is a different kind of “development” than ontogenesis. A given cultural group’s developmental niche for its children is part of a chronosystem that changes over the course of history. An individual’s transactions with significant others are embedded in a complex and dynamic sociocultural system, to which programming of early childhood education should respond.