Robert Serpell
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1999 23:49:56 -0400
From: serpell robert n. <serpell who-is-at umbc.edu>
To: xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Alternative definitions of educational success
I was excited to read today's postings by Bill Penuel and Genevieve
Patthey-Chavez.
Bill wrote:
I believe we have a responsibility to contribute to the debate
constructively by explaining to parents and community folks at every
opportunity to get that there are other places to get answers to their
question--other sources of evidence that their own children are learning
something significant, and then to provide some examples of that in our
communities.
And Genevieve wrote:
I want to go beyond lamentations &
hand-wringing about educational policy. The problem
for me has been how to work with, well, other
bureaucrats as well as teachers, students, and all the
good people that affect the actual delivery of
education in one specific place (my version of think
globally, act locally).
These concerns mesh well with my thinking about the potential of
sociocultural theories of human development to contribute to the reform or
enhancement of public education in Africa. The following abstract
summarizes my argument in a forthcoming chapter:
The narrowing staircase model of schooling, which increasingly receives
legitimation from an international prototype of Institutionalised Public
Basic Schooling (IPBS), rests on the concept of an age-graded curriculum.
This curricular concept arose from a particular set of socio-historical
conditions that included both cultural and economic constraints. I argue
that it is flawed as a strategy of pedagogical support for personal
development, and I suggest an alternative, more gradual, multidimensional,
and expansive conception of individual development. Secondly, I argue that
the narrowing staircase model is applied in many third world countries in
an extractive manner that works against the principle of local
accountability in both the economic and the cultural sphere.
In place of this culturally alienating and economically
disempowering strategy, I suggest that public schooling in Africa could
learn from several other types of educational endeavor, in which the
organisation of opportunities for learning is better attuned to a set of
principles that conform with the conception of personal development as a
socioculturally situated process. These principles include individualising
instruction within the student's zone of proximal development, maximising
the ecological validity of the curriculum, parent-professional
collaboration, use of authentic tasks, connecting technical skills with
social and moral responsibility, acknowledging the socially distributed
nature of cognition, use of appropriate technology, integration of
learning with economic productivity, and incorporation of the learner as a
legitimate peripheral participant within a social system that displays the
full range of desirable outcomes of the learning process. Three types of
educational provision that can be found in several contemporary African
societies incorporate several of these principles. Each of them defines
success in a less economically and culturally extractive way than IPBS:
home-based learning programs for children with disabilities; health
education for mothers of young children; and apprenticeship in
economically productive activities.
Although most of the public basic schools in rural areas of Africa
define their principal mandate in terms of the narrowing staircase model,
many of them also perform additional local service functions as a
community library, as a community forum for discussion of public affairs,
and as a base for continuing education. I suggest that educational
planners could profitably borrow from these existing practices the notion
of schools as nodes in their planning models, in order to build local
accountability into the public legitimation accorded by central
administrative authorities to the activities of rural schools.
Robert
Robert Serpell tel: ( 410 ) 455 2417
Psychology Department 455 2567
University of Maryland Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore MD 21250 fax: ( 410 ) 455 1055
PLEASE NOTE: this message originates from my NEW EMAIL ACCOUNT:
SERPELL who-is-at research.umbc.edu