Introduction to the Field

I grew up in a middle-class, English family in London in the 1950s. From middle childhood onwards, my parents nurtured in me and my elder sister an appreciation of the arts, with visits to architectural monuments, galleries, concerts, and theaters, and plied us with novels and poetry. We were enrolled in the Lycée Francais de Londres, where we acquired fluency in French and learned about the national histories of France as well as Britain. The intimate culture (Serpell, 1997) of our nuclear family of four was respectful of individual differences in aesthetic preference, mediated through egalitarian conversations about artistic style, religious faith, and personal relationships. But contemporary politics was a forbidden topic (largely due, I now realize, to my father’s politically sensitive job). Our family identified as Europeans tolerant of cultural and linguistic differences, and conscious of commonalities rooted in the shared history of Britain with both France and Germany. As I entered adolescence, I shifted from the lycée to Westminster, a boys-only, so-called “public school,” where I received sensitively individualized instruction in the “classics” – the Greek and Latin languages of ancient Greece and Rome, their literature, philosophy, and history of that early period of Western civilization. Psychology was not recognized as a component of the classics curriculum, but I recall being inspired by the bold statement in a Latin play by Terence: “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” (I am a man, and I think nothing human is alien to me).

My first encounter with psychology as a discipline was with what Broadbent (1960) termed “small-b behaviorism,” coupled with a search for neurophysiological correlates. My tutors at Oxford University in the 1960s, Stuart Sutherland and Nick Mackintosh, convinced me that controlled experiments were a good way of testing theories, and that human behavior shared certain regularities with other animal species, grounded in the structures and processes of our brains. Thus cognition and learning could be studied productively by conducting experiments with rats or chickens in artificially restricted settings such as a laboratory maze. When I inquired about the applicability of their theory to humans, they drew my attention to experimental research that followed the procedural paradigm of presenting children with simple, binary choices between two visual stimuli. As in the animal studies, the criterion of successful learning in these “concept formation” or “problem solving” studies was that the subject consistently selected over a series of consecutive trials an arbitrarily designated “correct” item, “rewarded” with a food token or with verbal praise.

Thinking about learning in this way was very different from the humanistic approach to understanding human behavior in which I had hitherto been educated through the medium of “literature.” In high school I had studied plays and poetry in various languages, and I had acquired an introspective sensitivity to language through my bilingual primary schooling at the lycée and through the practice of translation at Westminster. I had also gained some experience in drama, performing in school productions of classical Western plays. In the humanities, learning was typically construed as some kind of intellectual enrichment, involving far deeper understanding than was required for mastery of the binary choice problems of psychology experiments. So the seeds of skepticism about the behaviorist paradigm were already well planted in my mind. But for a number of years I ignored them, treating psychology and “literature” as parallel channels of exploration, best kept firmly insulated from one another. Chomsky, whose revolutionary ideas I encountered as a graduate student, first raised my awareness of the qualitative poverty of behaviorism as a mode of interpreting human experience. Some of my energies as an undergraduate student were devoted to drama, but I regarded acting as a recreational hobby, and did not connect it with my intellectual preoccupations as a student of psychology.

Another, more serious, extracurricular engagement in my years at Oxford was political activism. This strand of my intellectual life was also far removed from experimental psychology. It originated from a personally transformative year in Singapore between leaving high school and “going up” to OxfordFootnote ¹, where I was exposed to an ongoing societal process of decolonization. Enrolled as a “non-graduating student” at the multiracial University of Singapore, I discovered the delights of romantic love and the anomalies of racial discrimination, in the context of a colony that was in the process of attaining independence from Britain. My orientation to politics until then had been confined to historical accounts of conflicts and rivalries in the distant past, and I knew next to nothing about the twentieth century. The rhetoric of decolonization prevalent among Singaporean students was exciting. Moreover, it seemed to respond well to the racial discrimination in housing that I witnessed on my return to England. On arrival in Oxford, my interest was captured by a student-run club entitled The Joint Action Committee Against Racial Intolerance (JACARI). The club’s agenda responded to an emotion-laden dimension of my personal orientation that had emerged during my “gap year” in Singapore, and I devoted much of my energy to active participation in its affairs.

Within the broad field of psychology, my decision to focus on human development arose from a convergence of two personal interests: (1) how to secure honest and effective communication with other people (prompting a search for commonality among humans across generations, genders, languages, and social addresses); and (2) how to understand the changes over time in an individual person (beyond the ostensible facts of biological growth and subsequent decline) that warrant social consensus about individual empowerment or societal progress.

As a child I had been skeptical at times of the commonsense notion that adults in general know better, and I became even more so as an adolescent and emerging adult. This argumentative disposition was generally welcomed in the Oxford academy, albeit moderated by a patriarchal assumption that established scholars have greater wisdom than those at earlier stages of their career.

Migration and Parenting

My first professional job seemed to respond equally to two career aspirations that I had thought of as completely separate: to conduct systematic research on human development, and to participate actively in progressive societal change. I was appointed as a Junior Research Fellow of the newly established University of Zambia, a treasured project of the nationalist movement for political independence from British colonial rule, offering me an opportunity to participate in the process of decolonization. The fellowship was advertised in the newly launched Human Development Research Unit (HDRU) at the university’s Institute for Social ResearchFootnote ². Alastair Heron, an experimental psychologist by background, a strong supporter of the independence movement, and a British expatriate professor on the founding staff of the university, was the Institute Director. In his case for establishment of the HDRU, he argued that basic research on perception and learning in Zambian children was an essential prerequisite to offering relevant undergraduate psychology courses at the university. This rationale appealed to me and provided extra motivation for conducting research in Zambia, an opportunity afforded by my decision to migrate to Africa, where I was excited to participate in “higher education” as a dimension of nation-building.

I arrived in Lusaka just one year after the nation’s declaration of independence, accompanied by my newly married wife, Esther. Six months after our arrival, our first child, Derek, was born. A formative influence on my personal and intellectual development came from observing and jointly nurturing his development through infancy. My preparation for fatherhood was minimal since, unlike Esther, I had grown up without any younger siblings. We found the day-to-day emotional challenges of childcare daunting, but also exhilarating, and we paid close attention to the advice of Dr. Spock’s popular “Common Sense Baby Book.” On the cognitive development side, I learned a great deal from Flavell’s recently published, magisterial introduction to Piaget’s research, trying out each of his “clinical” methods, and maintaining a diary of Derek’s early language development. Raising my own child in this way was motivated both by curiosity and by nurturance. Every stimulus I presented to Derek was a bid to communicate with him, to build up our mutual understanding, and to draw him into a deeper understanding of his environment.

The family we started in 1965 did not last long – by 1972 it had been formally dissolved, with Derek then commuting between his mother in England and me in Zambia. My second wife, Namposya, came from a large extended Zambian family and gave birth to three girls between 1974 and 1980, Zewe, Chisha, and Namwali, who grew up in our household along with Derek and our niece Mwila. Our child-rearing practices reflected both my earlier experience with Derek and the influence of indigenous African culture. For instance, the challenge of putting a fretful baby to sleep was addressed by carrying her close to the caregiver’s body in a sling (known traditionally as papu); and the older children participated actively in this and other aspects of infant care. Several decades later, I had an opportunity to study how the African tradition of including children in the care of younger siblings can be leveraged educationally in the socialization of infants and the preparation of preadolescents for adult responsibility (Serpell, Mumba, & Chansa-Kabali, Reference Serpell, Mumba, Chansa-Kabali, Flanagan and Christens2011).

Addressing Various Audiences

In the beginning of my research with children, my communication with them was generally superficial and tightly constrained by the conventional design of my investigations, merely explaining to them the task demands of the tests or “games” that I presented to them. I also largely disregarded the parents of participant children, seeking only their consent to engage in interaction with their child, but providing only superficial information by way of explanation, and showing little or no interest in their opinions. Moreover, I seldom, if ever, shared with them what I thought I had learned from interacting with their children.

Yet, I felt explicitly accountable to two supervisory individuals, Professors Stuart Sutherland and Alastair Heron. While their particular theoretical preoccupations differed, trained in classical experimental psychology methods they shared a concern that I exercise strict control over the data collection process, in order to ensure equivalence of elicitation contexts across individual subjects. More challenging, formative technical feedback came from my collegial peer and collaborator, Jan Deregowski. Drawing on his mathematical knowledge in engineering, he helped me to master methods of statistical analysis, to which I had received only an elementary introduction at Oxford. The concept of statistical significance as a criterion of scientific credibility became a key feature of my epistemological orientation, that helped me to gain acceptance of my research reports by technical journals, whose editorial policy laid heavy emphasis on statistical analysis; for example, the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology (1971).

Other disciplines I encountered during that phase of my intellectual development included anthropology and psychiatry. But I regarded them with grave skepticism as lacking in methodological rigor. The academic staff of the institute from its foundation in the 1930s had been predominantly trained in social anthropology, including a number of distinguished “pillars” of the field, such as Max Gluckman, Elizabeth Colson, and Clyde Mitchell. Many of them conducted their doctoral dissertation “fieldwork” in Northern Rhodesia and received their PhD degree from the University of Manchester in the UK. Given that the tail end of that center-periphery relationship was still in operation during my formative years as a research fellow, I had frequent opportunities to interact socially with emerging scholars in the Manchester tradition of anthropology conducting their fieldwork in Zambia. An informal forum for interdisciplinary discussion was teatime on the veranda of the institute, where conversations ranged from anecdotal accounts of experiences “in the field” to theoretical interpretations of human and social behavior. In one indicative exchange at the tea table with a distinguished professor of anthropology, I complained that some anthropological research reports seemed to me no more scientific than fictional literature. He retorted that if he were to publish a successful novel, he would regard it as a landmark professional achievement!

My concurrent interactions with psychiatry were motivated by mutual curiosity. Both parties were somewhat dissatisfied with the standard procedure in Western clinical practice by which a medically trained psychiatrist would request a psychologist to provide an assessment of a client’s intelligence. Some Western authors of psychometric instruments such as Raven’s Progressive Matrices had claimed that they were “culture-free” or “culture-fair,” but no local or regional norms had been published of them, and it seemed obvious to me that scores by Zambian patients could not be meaningfully interpreted with reference to Western norms.

Consistent with such concerns, a prominent theme in the emerging field of cross-cultural psychology in the 1970s was that elicitation methods should reflect the indigenous culture of respondents in a manner analogous to the phonological categories of their indigenous language (known by linguists as phonemes). In contrast, other researchers sought to transcend cultural differences by adopting an approach analogous to the universal International Phonetic Alphabet. The distinguished linguist, Kenneth Pike, set the stage for this debate with the conceptual distinction between emic and etic approaches, which was taken up both in anthropology and in cross-cultural psychology, notably by Harry Triandis and John Berry. However, another founding father of that field, Gustav Jahoda, expressed serious doubts about its theoretical utility, caricaturing it as “the cross-cultural emperor’s conceptual clothes.”

In the late 1980s, I prepared a wide-ranging contribution to the debate, arguing that while Jahoda’s critique was sound, some elements of Pike’s original insight could be usefully applied as methodological guidelines in psychology. I theorized that psychological explanation in general involves triangulating the perspectives of three participants: the author, the subject whose behavior or experience is being interpreted, and the audience to whom the interpretation is addressed. The challenge in cross-cultural psychological research is to craft a meeting point between the three perspectives.

My paper drew on multidisciplinary literature and was submitted by the editor of the relatively new journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) to a wide spectrum of peer reviewers. The most positive reviews came from leading figures in the field of cross-cultural psychology, the most negative from scholars in the field of cognitive science. Despite extensive revision, I was unsuccessful in convincing all the journal’s reviewers. Their recommendations ranged from “publish as it stands” to “reject outright.” I then withdrew the paper and submitted it to the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, whose editor had praised the manuscript as a peer reviewer for BBS; but it was again rejected. Sharing this frustrating series of experiences with Michael Cole, I was relieved to receive his acceptance of the paper for publication in the Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition.

The frustrating struggle to get my ideas published in 1989 sensitized me to a tendency in academia to underestimate the cultural embeddedness of implicit models informing theorists’ attempts to communicate about child development with various non-academic stakeholders, such as parents, teachers, and policymakers. In a more recent paper I have revisited the issue of audience constraints, extending it to address broader policy issues in the design of early childhood education interventions by international agencies in Africa (Serpell, Reference Serpell2020).

A Widening Journey

The period from 1965, when I first came to live in Zambia, to 2019 when I took formal retirement from UNZA, encompassed a process of personal development from early adulthood at twenty-one to old age at seventy-five. During that span of life, I assumed the domestic responsibilities of parenthood, beginning with a single infant in 1966, and thereafter expanding by 1989 to parenting six children ranging in age from infancy to early adulthood. Concurrently, I took on growing administrative responsibilities in my professional career, as Head of Department, Director of Research and Graduate Studies, and University Vice-Chancellor. Interactions between those two life-journeys were occasional and largely unplanned. In both spheres the challenges of assuming greater responsibility prompted me to view life in a broader perspective. The developmental journey of my research endeavors over those years also progressed in breadth of perspective, from an initially narrow theoretical and methodological approach to a broader, more complex one, inclusive of multiple strands of conceptualization favored by various academic disciplines, and attentive to the cultural preoccupations of various audiences.

The first phase of my doctoral research in Zambia was framed as an exploration of the cognitive function of selective attention in Zambian children, with a variety of concept attainment and perceptual preference tasks modelled after published Western research with children of European cultural heritage. In addition to my Oxford mentors, I drew for theoretical interpretation on the work of Eleanor and James Gibson. My first attempt to break free of Western cultural constraints on understanding human development in an African context retained the behaviorist procedural paradigm of psychological testing. Several early cross-cultural researchers had reported exceptionally poor performance by African children, adolescents, and adults on Western psychometric tests, such as Raven’s Matrices and Koh’s Block Design, and speculated that this reflected broad underlying cognitive deficiencies, biases, or styles.

But Mallory Wober (1969) argued persuasively that the authors had unwittingly expressed an ethnocentric attitude by focusing on comparisons with children in the researcher’s home society, posing questions in the form “how well can they (Africans) do our (European) tricks?” Instead, a more appropriate research question would be “how well can they do their tricks?” I realized that most of my doctoral research had been what Wober termed “centri-cultural,” and that my studies of pictorial perception and of first-language interference errors in spoken and written English had been over-preoccupied with Zambian children’s cognitive shortcomings without attending to their strengths.

So I set out to design a more truly “cross-cultural” study, comparing the performance of African and European urban school children on tasks that were grounded in activities recurrent in their respective, eco-culturally distinctive, developmental niches (a concept later articulated by Super and Harkness, and by Gallimore and Weisner). The cognitive process of pattern reproduction featured in a popular play activity among boys in Lusaka, virtually unknown in English society, namely, construction of scale models of cars from scraps of pliable wire. Conversely, the reproduction of patterns by drawing with a pencil on paper was a common play activity from an early age in many English children’s homes, but seldom encountered by children of low-income neighborhoods in Lusaka before attending school. In our experiment, we presented the same patterns for reproduction in the media of wire modelling, drawing, and clay modelling – a familiar medium in both childhood settings. The results, published in the British Journal of Psychology (1979), confirmed my predictions: the English children excelled at drawing, while the Zambian children excelled at wire modelling, and the two groups scored equally on clay modelling. Subsequent applied research gave rise to a locally standardized test, with a detailed scoring scheme to document the accuracy of children’s clay models of a human figure, which we called the Panga Munthu (make-a-person) test.

However, I sensed that the relevance of refined measurement of cognitive functions still required evidence of credibility to authoritative adults in the children’s developmental niche. From 1974 to 1988 I established a professional relationship with a rural community in Zambia’s Eastern District of Katete. Our study documented the life journeys over fourteen years of a cohort of boys and girls born soon after Zambia’s independence, resident with their families in five small villages in the catchment zone of a government primary school. My entry into the host community was explained by my locally recruited research assistant as follows in the local language, CiCewa:

What we learned in the first phase of the study was summarized in CiCewa by my collaborator, Chikomeni Banda, as a synthesis for sharing with the host community, and was widely endorsed:

Several in-depth investigations of how intelligence is conceptualized in other rural African communities have reached similar conclusions (Dasen et al., 1985; Grigorenko et al., 2001).

When asked about what contributes to success in school, parents and learners in Katete most frequently cited ku-cenjela. In our longitudinal follow-up, we explored the question of what personal attributes were most strongly correlated with school attainments. We found that the influence of personal attributes was moderated in practice by many external factors.

To make sense of the variable significance of schooling in individuals’ lives, I found it necessary to broaden my perspective to include the historically inherited school curriculum. Each individual’s encounters with the cultural resource of literacy were negotiated over the course of a unique life journey. And the dynamics of each child’s family of origin meshed in particular ways with the local affordances of schooling, which in turn were constrained by an institutionalized framework rooted in a societal history of Western cultural hegemony. Within those sociocultural-historical constraints, teachers convinced many parents to construe success in school as a marker of general intelligence, blaming school failure on the learner’s personal inadequacy. Yet, from a broader perspective, it was apparent that public provision of affordable schooling was characterized by a narrowing staircase that allowed only a minority of those entering the first grade to progress up more than a few steps of the twelve-grade curriculum (Serpell, Reference Serpell, Leach and Little1999).

When I moved to the USA in the 1990s, as director of a graduate programFootnote ³, my mandate included diversification of student enrolment, construed as part of a broad national strategy of redressing inequities of access to education. Our strategy for recruitment of students of diverse ethnocultural heritage included offering paid assistantships in a collaborative, longitudinal research project. There, we sampled Baltimore families from four “social addresses” (low and middle income, African-American, and European-American), and, inspired by Bronfenbrenner’s ecological perspective, we probed within each family the impact of proximal environmental factors on the child’s development, with special attention to participatory appropriation of literacy (Serpell, Baker, & Sonnenschein, Reference Serpell, Baker and Sonnenschein2005). Our theoretical interpretation invoked the notion of parental ethnotheories. Building on the work of Sameroff and Fiese we advanced the construct of a family’s intimate culture that draws selectively on the cultures of larger reference groups such as community, race, or nationality, and sustains over time a distinctive configuration of recurrent activities and meanings.

Respecting the uniqueness of each family was a theme of the conclusions I reached in both the Katete and Baltimore studies. This stands in contrast to the tendency of some influential, cross-cultural theories to attribute to whole communities, societies or nations, broad cultural characteristics such as individualism or collectivism, or as supportive of independence or interdependence. It also contrasts with universalistic theories of human development, such as Bowlby’s attachment theory or Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, that postulate certain constructs as equally relevant and explanatory in every society.

In a related vein, my perspective on the application of developmental theory to the design of public policy has increasingly centered on the key role of families. For instance, in Zambia’s nationwide campaign to reach children with serious disabilities, conducted in the early 1980s, our university-based technical support team recommended adopting a community-based approach that assigned primary responsibility for individualized care and education to the child’s local family, with back-up and supervision from centre-based experts. However, translation of such a policy change into practice was impeded during a severe, national economic recession by a convergence of administrative factors with internationally driven refocusing of priorities (Serpell & Jere-Folotiya, Reference Serpell and Jere-Folotiya2011).

Universalistic theoretical ideas have been increasingly invoked by international agencies in recent decades as evidence for the design of intervention programs, particularly in the domain of early childhood development, care, and education (ECDCE). Several of my African colleagues and I have argued that more attention needs to be accorded to indigenous child-rearing practices and the ethnotheories that inform them, especially in the African region where institutional structures are so deeply saturated with Western cultural hegemony (Serpell & Nsamenang, Reference Serpell and Nsamenang2014). A conspicuous example is the widespread persistence in many countries of prescribing the European language of the former colonial power as the medium of instruction in public education. For the majority of young children in most African countries, this generates a significant impediment to timely acquisition of basic literacy. Thus, while my earlier research focused on the errors made by such children in mastery of a second language, my closer personal engagement with Zambian social and communication practices and a late introduction to sociolinguistic theories (e.g., those of Gumperz, Kashoki, and Garcia) led me to place greater emphasis on the need for educational policy to acknowledge and foster plurilingual competencies such as code-switching and translanguaging (Serpell, Reference Serpell2020).

Some Lessons Learned