The value of culturally appropriate life skills frameworks in East Africa: Problem Solving

• In Event: Beyond tool adaptation: how culture and context should inform the development, use and interpretation of SEL measures

Proposal

A number of theorists argue that cultural differences lead to fundamental dissimilarities in cognition. Nisbett et al. (2001), for example, maintains that epistemology is strongly influenced by culture, suggesting that there are fundamental differences between Western and Asian systems of thought.
Education is a cultural process, and as a result, it is likely that stimulating cognitive and life skills through education differs between cultures. In this, the fundamental role in the discovery, use, and teaching of life skills is played by language, which is indeed one of the fundamental means of communicating culture (Duranti, 1997; Lurii︠a︡, 1976; Ong, 1982).
Starting from this, it is interesting to investigate and question whether assessments, including life-skills assessments, in the sub-Saharan region are designed for appropriate contextualization and cultural sensitivity. Several authors (Grosser & Lombard, 2008; Madondo, 2018; Schendel, 2016), for instance, highlight the importance of starting from the local understanding of a skill for developing and measuring it through relevant and context sensitive strategies. Nevertheless, only a few studies have investigated the local understanding of these skills before assessing them, without deepening into the influence of cultural differences on these skills.
The lack of attention to the local interpretation of what needs to be assessed is, and how it relates to culture and language, results in the acquisition of assessment tools and pedagogical strategies that do not take the cultural nuances into account.
This paper presents the findings of a study conducted in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda that aimed at highlighting the cultural differences in the understanding of problem solving in the three countries. This study, through an ethnographic design with 230 participants (113 males, 117 females), explored the meanings and understandings of problem solving within varied cultural contexts in Kenya (80 participants), Tanzania (55 participants), and Uganda (95 participants). The interview protocol used was structured around three sections: (i) location and participant background information (9 items); (ii) definition of problem solving (4 items, all open-ended); and (iii) characterized traits of a problem solver (9 questions, all open-ended). The comparison of the findings of contextualization studies on problem solving in the three countries shows significant similarities and only minor differences. Subskills, dispositions, and values linked to problem solving are influenced by the understanding of the self as being part of a community. Overall, the communitarian approach to problem solving, supported by the institutions available in each community and fueled by values such as confidentiality, love, and trust, emerges as the most unique premise in the contextualized understanding of problem solving in East Africa. The study findings also showed that the codes of skills related to self-awareness such as self-confidence and self-control mainly emerged from women in Tanzania, whereas in Kenya the same codes emerged from more men than women, and in Uganda both men and women contributed equally. It is interesting to note that codes relating to self-management skills such as planning, and goal setting emerged largely from men in all countries.

Author

• Mauro Giacomazzi, Luigi Giussani Institute of Higher Education