ABSTRACT
Case-studies ... of exemplary programs of
basic education, health promotion, and habilitation
that address in innovative ways the challenges of
supporting human development in low-income
communities in Zambia. Each study will include an
analysis of the social systems within which the
program is situated, an historical account of how it
has evolved as a service, a psychological analysis of
how the behavior of its various participants relate
to the quality of its clients' personal development,
and a cultural analysis of the system of meanings
that informs its practices and how this relates to
the indigenous practices and meaning- system of the
community that it aspires to serve. Topics under
consideration for the case-studies include:
community-based, individual program plans for
children with developmental disabilities; linking
basic education in science to primary health care
through the use of growth-charts and child health
monitoring; promoting agricultural innovation in
adolescents; and preparing adolescents for the tasks
of parenting . The programs will be selected in
consultation with local scholars and agency personnel
as examples of promising initiatives that explicitly
seek to complement, extend, or reform
institutionalized practices. The focus will be on
activities already under way and administered by
indigenous personnel with long-term local commitment.
Documentation will be conducted through multiple
methods with the collaborative participation of
indigenous students and scholars. An integrative
theoretical account will be advanced of these various
service activities, as well as articulating their
implications for the refinement of human service
policies and strategies for basic education, primary
health care, and community-based rehabilitation.
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Rationale
The goal of this proposal is to document some exemplary
programs of basic education, health promotion, and habilitation
that address in innovative ways the challenges of supporting
human development in low-income, African communities. A set of
case-studies will provide a detailed account of each ongoing
program's mode of operation, its sociocultural ramifications,
the history of its conceptualization, and the conditions that
facilitated its implementation. The promise of these programs
for continuing success will be analyzed in terms of current
theoretical ideas in developmental psychology with special
reference to cultural, systemic, and ecological perspectives
(Bronfenbrenner & Crouter, 1983; Cole, 1992; Dixon & Lerner,
1992; Sameroff, 1983; Serpell, 1993b). Implications will also
be articulated for the refinement of service policies and
strategies in the fields of basic education, primary health
care, and community-based rehabilitation.
The strategic focus of selection for the programs to be studied
in depth will be on promising initiatives already underway that
explicitly seek to complement, extend, or reform
institutionalized practices that are currently collapsing in
many African societies - such as text-based, classroom
lecturing, hospital treatment, and separate residential care.
The context of this crisis in 'traditional' service provision
is one of growing public disillusionment with a system that was
originally designed for very different social, cultural and
economic circumstances, exported to Africa under politically
oppressive and exploitative conditions, and only minimally
adapted by an indigenous bureaucracy, that now attempts to
maintain it with dwindling resources and a set of product-
oriented, efficiency criteria that tend to constrain the
sociocultural sensitivity of their personnel (Serpell, 1993a).
These criteria derive their legitimacy partly from historical
tradition, and partly from the advocacy of certain,
economically-oriented, technical specialists and agencies
(Hawes & Stephens, 1990; Samoff, 1993). Several dysfunctional
consequences flow from adhering to them. For instance, primary
schools and the local communities they are supposed to serve
tend to conspire in adopting an extractive definition of
success (Serpell, 1993a). This definition is fundamentally
self-defeating, since it legitimates a stereotyped equation
between intellectual progress and alienation from the
indigenous culture. Yet, as Wober (1975) long ago observed, one
of the greatest challenges for African social scientists is to
acknowledge that they "can become more modern by not being just
Western" - a theme endorsed by many influential African
analysts (eg. Kashoki, 1979; Mazrui, 1986; Ake, 1988;
Nsamenang, 1992).
Furthermore, preoccupation with input-output statistics serves
to divert attention from questions of educational quality
(Hawes & Stephens, 1990). For instance, the narrow staircase
model of schooling tends to overlook, even to undermine, the
cultivation of social responsibility or aesthetic expression
(Serpell, 1993a). In the field of health, efficiency criteria
for the distribution of supplies, monitoring workload, and
institutional management tend to inform the design of official
reporting procedures, ignoring, and indirectly devaluing, the
psychological and social dimensions of illness (Serpell, 1983).
In catering to the needs of children with disabilities,
institutional facilities tend to focus on the technical
efficiency of their own, immediate procedures, and pay limited
attention to their clients' full range of developmental
opportunities throughout the life-span, or to the resources and
needs of the communities in which much of those lives will be
spent (Serpell, 1986).
In the alternatives to be documented in this study, key
parameters of human development are prioritized and
intervention procedures are designed to respect the integrity
of local community relationships (cf. Moll & Greenberg, 1990;
Tharp et al, 1984; Thompson, Mixon & Serpell, in press). In
some cases, these alternatives to established, institutional
practices have been prompted by theoretical concerns and/or the
outcome of formal evaluations of impact. In other cases they
represent more intuitively conceptualized, grass-roots
initiatives. In order to provide a link among the
case-studies, a conceptual framework for applied developmental
research will be advanced, that emphasizes the mutually
enriching potential of interaction between theoretical and
practical criteria for the design of interventions in human
development (Richards & Pierce, 1993; Serpell, 1989, 1993b;
Tharp et al., 1984; Zigler & Finn-Stevenson, 1992). Through a
detailed analysis of actual programs, this study will seek to
demonstrate "how psychological analyses can better connect with
praxis if they are situated within a multi-dimensional array of
perspectives from several complementary types of analysis. In
short, psychological theory needs to be situated both with
reference to the general intellectual climate of its primary
audience and also with reference to other academic disciplines.
To adequately situate psychology for warranted social
intervention entails working out in detail the technical
relevance of each concept for the particular forms of work,
child-rearing, hazards to mental health, etc., which prevail in
the society for which the program is being designed." (Serpell,
in press). The study will also examine in a more prospective
manner the constraints and possibilities for "going to scale"
(Korten, 1985; Myers, 1992) with programs that have been
validated in a particular locale.
One of the guiding principles for selecting an activity for
in-depth case-study will be that key personnel are indigenous
to the society and are demonstrably committed to long-term
service in this setting. Few, if any, of these key personnel
are likely to have much familiarity with psychological theory.
But their interpretations of the activities in which they are
engaged will in all probability be compatible with, and in some
cases influenced by, various social scientific ideas.
Interviews with these personnel will be combined with
observations of their activities to generate some preliminary
theoretical interpretations of how their practices in context
afford their clients opportunities for developmental benefit.
These preliminary theoretical interpretations of process will
be subjected to critical analysis in discussions among the
operational executives of the projects, selected clients and
the author. The executives will also be asked to provide
information about the history of the project, that will be
checked with independent sources, and (subject to validation)
incorporated within the author's eventual evaluative account.
Thus the account of each project will be contextualized in
several ways: in an analysis of the social systems within which
it is situated, in an historical account of how it has evolved
as a service, in a psychological analysis of how the behavior
of its various participants relate to the quality of its
clients' personal development, and in a cultural analysis of
the system of meanings that informs its practices and how this
relates to the indigenous practices and meaning-system of the
community that it aspires to serve.
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Robert Serpell,
P.O.Box 37090, Lusaka, ZAMBIA
Telephone: (260) 1 - 274783