Cultural Construction of Child Development: Creating Institutional and Cultural Intersubjectivity

Introduction

Early childhood education has expanded globally since the early nineteenth century, becoming institutionalized in various countries.
Many European countries have experienced migration, leading to culturally and linguistically diverse communities.
The paper critiques early childhood institutional practices, especially when Western theories and middle-class practices are not representative of diverse communities.
An alternative model of child development is proposed, valuing the diversity of children’s cultural experiences.
Educational systems are founded on theories and values about children and childhood, guiding their upbringing and education.
Early childhood education in European heritage countries emphasizes materially rich and active play-based pedagogy.
The selection of materials, organization of learning, and underlying beliefs in center-based environments are often not questioned.
This is problematic because original communities and those adopting Western early childhood education are culturally and linguistically diverse.
Early childhood education in English-speaking countries has developed routines, practices, rituals, artifacts, symbols, conventions, stories, and histories, evolving a specialized discourse.
What is valued in early childhood education is essentially a Western view of childhood and development.
Western learning is located within a child-centered pedagogy, influenced by the organization of factories.
The institution's legacy remains largely uncontested, prompting an examination of the cultural-historical construction of early childhood education within institutionalized practices.

Theoretical Problem

Living in a particular community of practice affords specific types of activity and learning, evolving community-specific cultural tools.
Individuals appropriate terministic screens, affordances, and constraints associated with the cultural tools they employ.
In early childhood education within European heritage communities, individuals become enculturated into the practice as enacted within the community.
Existing cultural tools inform and guide the enactment of early childhood education.
Examining these taken-for-granted cultural practices requires a broad cultural-historical analysis.
Critiques of early childhood education have highlighted the cultural context as a resource.
Early education would be better served by a version of psychology that takes context seriously and sees it as something that shapes and is shaped by those who participate in it.
Adults contribute to and shape the cultural world of the child.
Insufficient attention has been paid to finding alternatives to individually oriented versions of developmental psychology for informing professional practice.
A new theoretical basis for early education practice is needed, placing culture at the center of interactions and being in the world.

Culturally Specific Theories of Child Development

Contemporary early childhood education in many European heritage countries foregrounds educators’ child development knowledge and play-based pedagogy.
It also emphasizes learning centers, a child-centered philosophy, working with children’s interests and families, and building educational programs based on close observations of children.
Many European heritage communities that have appropriated these pedagogical practices are culturally and linguistically diverse.
The extent to which we are developing culturally specific theories of development needs consideration.
Child development has traditionally been conceptualized as observable age-related stages of behavior, universal for all children at roughly the same age.
Physical milestones such as crawling and walking, or psychological milestones such as stranger anxiety or object permanence are reported in many child development texts and courses.
Programming for young children is usually based upon these child development expectations.
Child development forms the basic fabric of early childhood education practice and is the benchmark upon which all children are compared.
Developmental psychology, as traditionally applied to early childhood education, is one cultural construction of development.
Although all children develop emotional attachments, learn language, and develop reasoning, these take place within culturally regulated social relationships and are mediated by cultural practices.
These practices are shaped by knowledge and beliefs about what is normal and desirable.
Comparative material can lead to reinterpreting behaviors as cultural that were assumed to be natural.
Cross-cultural research has provided evidence of many other constructions of development;
- 'stranger anxiety' in western Kenya is related to social niche rather than developmental norms
- language acquisition in some villages in Papua New Guinea is related to the social embeddedness of infants rather than disembedded practices where language lessons are introduced
- sleeping patterns of infants (USA, 8 hours longest period of sleep; western Kenya, $4\frac{1}{2}$ hours longest period of sleep) are significantly different across cultures
Cross-cultural diversity in relation to how adults and children interact, and the subsequent communication strengths exhibited in different cultures, has profound consequences on assumed ‘instructional styles’.
Children who are constantly in the company of their caregivers may rely more on non-verbal cues, such as direction of gaze or facial expression.
Infants who are in ‘almost constant skin-to-skin contact with their mothers may manage effective communication through tactile contact in squirming and postal changes’.
In Kaluli families (Papua New Guinea) caregivers and infants do not gaze into each others’ eyes, but rather face their babies outwards to the social group.
Older children greet and address the infant and, in response to this, the mother, while moving the baby, speaks in a high-pitched voice “for” the baby.
Examining cultural practices from within one’s own culture is much more challenging than when looking cross-culturally.
Expectations shape the data gathered and analyzed by researchers, including developmental psychologists.
When one learns more about another culture, one also learns more about one’s own.
In some parts of West Africa, child development is viewed as a social rather than a biological construct.
Children are given different roles and responsibilities based on their perceived level of social competence rather than their age.
Many industrialized nations underpin the way we organize pre- school, childcare and schools with the age of children.
Before the 1800s, age was not a criterion for organizing people.
Industrialization saw the systemization of people into specialized institutions according to age.
Developmental psychology and pediatrics began at this time, along with old-age institutions and age-graded schools.
Child development as presently conceptualized and enacted within many European heritage communities has become normalized and institutionalized within early childhood education.
Ages and stages underpin this particular taken-for-granted practice, and the expectations within stages focus on those appropriate for western communities.
This particular cultural belief about children is relevant for children from European or North American backgrounds from a time period in which industrialization was an important cultural practice.
The legacy of this cultural belief and assumption about how children develop in all contemporary societies is in need of review.

Other Views on Child Development

The child’s chronological age cannot serve as a reliable criterion for establishing the actual level of his [sic] development.
Vygotsky provides a powerful critique of child (developmental) psychology.
Traditionally, there have been two important conceptions of child development.
- ’Development is nothing other than realization, modification, and combination of deposits; Nothing new develops here—only a growth, branching, and regrouping of those factors that were already present at the very beginning’
- ’Development is a continuous process of self-propulsion characterized primarily by the continuous appearance and formation of the new which did not exist at previous stages’
The latter perspective has dominated psychology and early childhood education for the past century.
The perspective taken by a caregiver or educator shapes how they respond to, think about, and plan for children.
Both perspectives highlight a linear path where deviating from ‘the normal path’ can be considered as ‘“diseases” of development’.
Educators look for and expect particular behaviors; when they are not forthcoming concern is expressed about the individual.
An evolutionary view of child development is embedded within the institutionalized thinking of early childhood education in most European heritage countries.
Vygotsky argues for a dialectical process ‘in which a transition from one stage to another is accomplished not along an evolutionary, but along a revolutionary path’.
A dialectical approach to development invites the pedagogue to be continually projecting learning beyond the child’s current capacities, but will do so in ways which connect with the child’s growing sense of themselves within their communities/institutions.
This perspective encourages teachers to examine context as well as the children’s zones of proximal development when making judgments about children and when planning for learning.
Teachers who have an evolutionary rather than revolutionary gaze on the children they teach will enact a pedagogy that is static and not dialectical.
An evolutionary gaze by the teacher sees the child becoming ‘relatively difficult’ when ‘the pedagogical system applied to the child does not’ match the child’s projected developmental pathway.
A revolutionary gaze by the teachers foregrounds the cultural context, the institutional context, and the specific child’s lived experience.
Western heritage communities have tended to utilize an evolutionary perspective in their early childhood education institutions.
A revolutionary gaze provides an alternative conceptual framework for early childhood educators and helps practitioners move beyond the present developmental conceptual framework.
Having a revolutionary perspective allows teachers to foreground the social situation of development. For example:
- in many European heritage communities verbal language is privileged
- in other communities, such as Mexican heritage communities, non-verbal competence is mastered much earlier and represents an important mode of communication
These different communication trajectories highlight the social nature of development and foreground how cultural communities shape development by what they value and need.
The social situation of development represents the initial moment for all dynamic changes that occur in development during the given period.
It determines wholly and completely the forms and the path along which the child will acquire ever newer personality characteristics, drawing them from the social reality as from the basic source of development, the path along which the social becomes the individual.
The first question we must answer in studying the dynamics of any age is to explain the social situation of development.
The social situation of a child is determined by the society and cultural context in which the child is embedded.
Rogoff has argued that ‘development can be understood only in light of the cultural practices and circumstances of their communities—which also change’.
Culture determines not only the principles for defining development but also frames the contexts in which the development of children is supported.
Development can be viewed as a transformation of participation in cultural activities.
Through this transformation, individual roles change and developmental transitions in communities become evident.
Transformation through participation of individuals means not only that individuals change but also that they change the communities in which they live.
Assuming universal views on child development position some children from some families in deficit.
We need to begin to understand ‘the development of children in the context of their own communities’ and this requires the ‘study of the local goals and means of approaching life’.
The sociohistorical approach assumes that individual development must be understood in (and cannot be separated from) the social context.
Through this new view of development, traditional western lenses of social, emotional, cognitive and physical development are problematized.
Studying child development in social and cultural contexts cuts through the conventional demarcation between cognitive, social and emotional development researchers.
In many European heritage communities, a significant amount of program support material available to early childhood teachers has been developed on a child development model in which social, emotional, physical and cognitive development are privileged.
Of significance is the assumption that this model of child development should underpin quality-assurance and government regulations, particularly in relation to observing, assessing and planning for children’s learning.
An evolutionary model of child development has become normalized as the dominant approach within the institution of early childhood education.
For early childhood professionals to reframe their thinking and to adopt a new conceptual framework, further examination of the institutional nature of early childhood education is needed.
Hedegaard has researched the construction of childhood and development within the framework of the institution, society and the individual.
Her work draws extensively upon Vygotsky’s seminal critique of child development but specifically examines contemporary contexts, where cultural and linguistic diversity feature.
In line with Vygotsky’s work on the dialectical approach to development, and the social situation of development, Hedegaard views development as the relationship between the child and society.
Development is not something that exists within the child but rather takes place as the child interacts with her/his cultural community.
When development does not proceed it is not the fault of the child but rather the relationship between the child and society.
The problem lies not in the child but in the institution.
When an institution foregrounds only one view of development (e.g. western), then teachers expect and accept one developmental trajectory.
This is problematic for culturally and linguistically diverse communities.
Children develop through participating in everyday activities in societal institutions, but neither society nor its institution (i.e. families, kindergarten, school, youth clubs etc.) are static but change over time in dynamic interaction between persons’ activity, institutional traditions for practice, societal discourse and material conditions.
Children’s life and development is influenced by several types of institutional practice in a child’s actual social situation and can be seen as socio-cultural tracks through different institutions.
Children’s development is marked by crises, which are created through change in the child’s social situation.
When children enter a new societal or institutional context, where expectations and practices are unfamiliar, children experience a crisis situation.
Hedegaard documented three perspectives for development:
- the school’s perspective
- the child’s perspective
- the societal perspective
Because the children had not gained the literacy and numeracy skills expected of them, that they were deemed ‘learning disabled children’.
The protective and caring behaviors developed and valued in the adolescents’ communities prior to integration into Danish society positioned these adolescents as being involved in gang activity against authority.
The adolescents’ ‘competencies were not seen as age adequate’ and their ‘social motive of caring for friends was not seen as positive’.
School expectations were normed against particular developmental milestones, and behaviors were normed against societal expectations.
From the adolescents’ perspective, ‘their problem was not a learning problem, but a problem of finding strategies to survive in a new societal context’.
Behaviors were thought appropriate for those who they cared about.
From a societal perspective, adolescents who end up as young criminals would be deemed as having ‘inadequate development … [when they] cannot read and write Danish, and when they transgress the laws of society’.
We need a developmental theory that can handle societal and institutional change and integrate this with the child’s perspective.
Rather than focusing on biological maturation, the concept of development should be constructed more broadly.
Hedegaard’s research focuses attention beyond just the child, and on to society and the institution and further problematizes the way early childhood education has taken on, without question, an evolutionary universal developmental trajectory and institutionalized this perspective as the only way of conceptualizing teaching and learning.
If we consider Hedegaard’s proposition of child development as being about the relationship between the child and society or institution, rather than simply something that occurs within the child, then we must closely scrutinize the institutions in which the child learns.
Hedegaard has put forward a model to illustrate child development as located within institutions.
The theory of development gives conditions for how to realize the values held by a society.
The different cultural traditions of families and their interface with schools and community practice are shown (see Culture 1 Tradition; Culture 2 Tradition; and Culture 3 Tradition).
The model begins to make visible the multifaceted nature of development and how a single universal view of development is problematic.
Hedegaard highlights three cultural institutions that may or may not be aligned for a particular child in a particular society, namely home practice, school practice, and work practice.
In more culturally homogeneous communities the values that are seen in relation to a society and what is deemed to be a ‘good life’ are also supported in the school and family.
In more culturally and linguistically diverse communities a societal institution such as an early childhood center does not always represent, or is not reflective of, all family values.
When educators use an evolutionary model for child development, and focus on milestones that are representative of one culture (namely western heritage communities), the institution privileges this culture and silences other cultural groups.
Hedegaard’s research is important for early childhood professionals in that it draws to our attention the significance of the conceptual framework adopted for child development and the central place it holds within the institution, in western heritage communities.

Institutional Values—Institutional and Cultural Intersubjectivities

What is needed is a new model for re-forming early childhood education within communities that are culturally and linguistically diverse.
A new model would need to be conceptualized in ways that bring together the values of culturally and linguistically diverse families.
Much has been written about intersubjectivity, and the ability to read and be in tune with children and their families.
Cultural beliefs that are not western in their origin are still ‘added on’ to mainstream fundamental early childhood education.
Social ‘add-on’ theory best describes the way in which early childhood education theory and practice have taken account of culturally and linguistically diverse communities.
We have mainstream early childhood education, with only some reference to cultural diversity.
Culture is bolted on as something to be considered, but different views of development are not necessarily applied.
We have not as yet seriously disrupted the western developmental perspectives as the main and only view of early childhood education.
We have also not taken account of the linguistic and interactional patterns that feature among many cultures outside the western world.
We have not problematized dominant cultural assumptions about what happens in the home among families before and during the pre-school years.
What prevails is the institutional practice of western early childhood education, where intersubjectivity between the institution and families of western origin fits snugly.
When educators consider institutional intersubjectivity, the lens moves towards how the culture of the institution fits with the culturally and linguistically diverse communities which it serves.
Intersubjectivity between the early childhood institution and the different cultural communities is urgently needed.
Rather than different cultural groups being simply ‘added on’ to the institutional culture of early childhood education, institutional intersubjectivity problematizes a dominant worldview and practice.
The different cultural groups found within a community are carefully woven into a new form of early childhood education.
In this new model, assumptions about ‘child development’ transform into the cultural nature of development, the social situation of development or the state, institutions and individual nature of development.
This new worldview invites educators to seek out the diversity of ‘interactional patterns’, ‘beliefs and practices in relation to language acquisition’, ‘complexity and sophistication in non-verbal communication’ and the central or disembedded place of children in everyday activities within communities.
Many other taken-for-granted practices need to be examined, and a new repertoire of cultural practices unearthed and made visible to the early childhood profession.
A model of this kind does not allow one view of child development to dominate early childhood pedagogy.
It is possible not only to change the way we think about children and how they learn but also to change the nature of the early childhood institution.
In homes and communities children’s knowledge is presented informally ‘and often not formulated explicitly’.
‘Knowledge presented in school is dominated by the societal aspects of practice and is formulated through demands for activity in school and at examinations’ (p. 40).
Teaching professionals are expected to teach children to read and write, and many governments shape how this will be assessed and monitored.
Institutionalized learning becomes a form of cultural practice, which is taken for granted as the way one ‘does school’ or ‘does early childhood education’.
Making these values and assumptions explicit is important in contesting their privileged and monocultural status within culturally and linguistically diverse communities.
Through normalizing difference rather than recognizing only one cultural developmental trajectory, expectations in relation to development can be problematized immediately.
Building institutional and cultural intersubjectivity gives teachers permission to move away from an evolutionary model of development and towards a revolutionary model, thus eliminating the perspective that any difference to normalized western development would be constituted as a ‘disease’ of normal child development.
In making visible the different value sets that are working within the school or early childhood setting and the home it is possible to ‘understand differences in the forms of practice that dominate at home and in school’ (p. 39) and to value children’s cultural development as valid and normal.
Through this process, the foundations for constructing localized views on development can be put in place.

Conclusion

This theoretical paper has problematized the universal perspective on what constitutes an early childhood learning environment.
A cultural-historical critique of early childhood education can create a dialogical space in which tradition and culture can generate new thinking and practices.
The task of a sociocultural approach is to explicate the relationship between human action, on the one hand, and the cultural, institutional, and historical contexts in which this action occurs, on the other.
More research needs to be undertaken in rethinking the cultural construction of early childhood education as enacted within many communities and to build greater intersubjectivity between the early childhood institution and the culturally and linguistically diverse communities it serves.
The claim to superiority of a western view of child development must be relinquished.
Psychologists must explicate their own values and standards, and place themselves at the service of formally authorized upbringers (usually parents) and their children.
As a community of early childhood professionals, we must begin work on new ‘context-bound theories that offer an insight into the developmental processes under the new pedagogic conditions of shared care of children’ within a culturally and linguistically diverse community.
Cultural and institutional intersubjectivity offers one way forward.