Cultural Sensitivity in the Study of Language and Literacy Interventions: A View from Africa
Contributing author: Yonas Asfaha.
Describing cultural sensitivity
There are a number of points to highlight when we discuss cultural sensitivity or sensitivity to local contexts. Many educational interventions in Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, for example, borrow key ideas from interventions developed and trialled in high-income countries. It is not always the case, however, that these interventions are adequately suited for the new context. Even when adaptations are made or planned to be made, there is still the huge task of understanding the context, with all its cultural and linguistic diversities and unique social stratifiers, into which the borrowed ideas are introduced. The key question then is about how we achieve an understanding of local contexts.
One way of answering these questions is to assess cultural sensitivity when planning new studies by looking into the intervention design, instrumentation, implementation, and analytic plan. Cultural literacy practices such as choral chanting, for example, can be part of the design of a study, as a variable that can be manipulated to see its impact in learning literacy in school settings (for example, by varying its frequency or how many times it is present in one intervention versus the other). On the other hand, using the local names of objects can be part of assessments in a proof of concept, effectiveness, or efficacy study of an intervention that has been brought in from outside the context and has arguably been adapted for the local context. Finally, a study may use available local knowledge, cultural and linguistic characteristics, and social stratifiers in trying to make sense of results in the analysis stage.
What type of knowledge is relevant in a cultural sensitivity analysis of an intervention study? Language is a key factor in literacy interventions everywhere but especially so in multilingual contexts. The language – home or school, minority or dominant, foreign or national language – in which the literacy intervention is carried out may have important implications in understanding findings reported from a study. What local educational practices or other local elements, such as games or folktales, are relevant to the study and the study context has to be answered. Important social status information, including gender, income, rural-urban settings, and nomadic-settled lifestyles, have to be highlighted to understand any variable impacts found in the study. Studies that are keenly interested or adequately bothered by these and other contextual variables are assumed to have greater cultural sensitivity. This sensitivity, in turn, is expected to further promote literacy education and knowledge generation in the field.
Examples from the African continent
Many studies from African countries show that the majority of the ideas for early childhood and primary school reforms introduced in intervention studies come from outside, mainly from high-income countries of the West. Usually, the central ideas are borrowed by governments and multilateral aid agencies and adapted locally. They may also be intervention ideas widely promoted by international and local NGOs. A study in Kenya, for example, reported on results of a program called ABRA (a shorter version of the acronym for, A Balanced Reading Approach for Children And Designed to Achieve Best Results for All or Abracadabra). This multimedia educational software was developed based on insights from “systematic reviews of evidence about what works in reading and spelling” by the United States’ National Reading Panel (Abrami et al., 2016, p. 947). An intervention in Ethiopia was based on an Emergent Literacy and Math (ELM) program developed by the international NGO Save the Children, “an innovative set of resources for reading, play and cooperative games to support essential emergent literacy and math skills alongside physical and social-emotional development” (Dowd et al., 2016, p. 479). In other cases, reference is made to global literature on fruitful literacy acquisition or teaching methods (Brooker et al., 2015) and the need to align local practices to these evidence-based practices “to improve literacy learning by aligning curriculum and teacher practices with current research” (Kenya: Piper et al. 2014, p. 11). A study in Uganda sought to develop literacy by “employing a mother-tongue-first instructional approach and extensive teacher support and training” (Kerwin & Thornton, 2015, p. 3). At the centre of most of these intervention studies are ideas originating outside Africa.
A substantial investment in intervention studies relates to language and literacy assessments, many of which are adapted from globally available standardized assessments. Some of these include the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA), Early Grade Mathematics Assessment (EGMA), Schedule of Early Number Assessment (Australia), Reading Recovery Observation Survey (New Zealand), and the Woodcock-Muñoz Language Survey – Revised. Sometimes, locally produced assessments are used; for example, the Malawi Development Assessment Tool, “a test created and validated specifically for use in rural Malawi with Chichewa-speaking children 0-7 years of age” (Özler et al., 2016, p. 56).
Sometimes, studies try to achieve cultural appropriateness by giving due consideration to local cultures and languages. The Primary Mathematics and Reading (PRIMR) Initiative in Kenya, for example, “exposed students to controlled-text stories relevant to their local context” (Piper et al., 2014, p. 14). A study from Ethiopia reported that “assessment, consent and interviews were translated into the local language” (Afaan Oromo) and that assessments used only objects familiar to the child such as rocks, beads, beans, or bottle caps (Dowd et al., 2016, p. 483). An intervention assessment in Malawi and in the Chichewa language “replaced ‘apple’ with ‘papaya’, a fruit that is well known throughout the country, and was estimated to be of similar difficulty as the word ‘apple’ would be in the United States” (Özler et al., 2016, p. 57).
Sometimes, cultural sensitivity is shown when interventions aim to develop local language literacy (Kenya: Piper et al., 2016; Malawi: Iyengar et al., 2015; Uganda: Kerwin & Thornton, 2015) or build awareness for local language education by “engaging with parents and the local community to communicate the benefits of mother tongue instruction” (Uganda: Kerwin & Thornton, 2015, p. 4). However, most of the time the interventions are carried out in dominant national or regional languages or the official foreign language such as English or French. Despite their relevance in developing literacy, local literacy practices are usually sidelined (Nag et al., 2016). For example, in an intervention in Malawi, during training, teachers were asked to “abandon the teaching norms and traditions they've been accustomed to through their own experiences in school, often defined by practices such as rote memorization and repeating without really reading” (Iyengar et al., 2015, p. 187). However, some of the studies acknowledge cultural practices in traditional African cultures such as the “peer-to-peer education that takes place in child culture” (Burkina Faso: Boily et al., 2015, p. 249).
In many cases, contextual factors are only acknowledged at a later stage of study during the analysis of the results. For example, a study from Kenya reported: “The results may be potentially limited by using a North American standardized measure of reading achievement that may lack cultural sensitivity to adequately capture the development of reading skills in Kenyan students” (Abrami et al., 2016, p. 962).
These brief examples of cultural sensitivity analysis may help us understand the depth and dimensions of cultural sensitivity analysis. These examples are hoped to raise awareness and perhaps promote further inclusion of local realities in future studies.
Justifications for cultural sensitivity analysis
The theoretical inspiration for cultural sensitivity analysis comes from socio-cultural perspectives to literacy, the Literacy as Social Practices movement, and sociolinguistic and ethnographic insights on language and multilingualism. These perspectives argue that the analysis of literacy and language education, in particular in multilingual contexts, has to consider power relations in social contexts, that language has to be viewed as fluid, instead of static, and that ethnic and language differences as such rarely, but for our definitions of them, lead to conflicts. These perspectives have implications on how we view literacy, including instruction, school, and home practices surrounding a given language or literacy activity, and the practices that most interventions seek to change or target.
These perspectives put a strong spotlight on situated, contextual, and cultural aspects of literacy. However, the emphasis on the local should not come at the expense or to the exclusion of the global, or potentially ‘universal’ factors in any literacy activity, for local or contextual factors may not exhaustively explain everything about any language or literacy-related event. For example, an analysis of a reading program for a multilingual student body in a post-colonial context has to pay attention to the historical, cultural, and linguistic local factors and at the same time take advantage of global or universal ‘certainties’ of reading (e.g., how the awareness of language units affects reading development). There is a lot to be gained in understanding complex classroom activities, for example, by paying attention both to the local and global elements that come into interaction.
Qualitative understanding of contexts of educational interventions, therefore, has the potential to promote better and lasting impact in the study areas. The qualitative data gathered typically through, but not limited to, ethnography may be useful in the planning, implementation, and analysis stages of such studies.
Based on these insights, cultural sensitivity analysis attempts to answer calls for including contextual realities in educational interventions which commonly use quantitative methods such as experiments.
References
Abrami, P. C., Wade, C. A., Lysenko, L., Marsh, J., & Gioko, A. (2016). Using educational technology to develop early literacy skills in Sub-Saharan Africa. Education and Information Technologies, 21(4), 945-964.
Boily, É., Ouellet, C., & Turcotte, C. (2015). Effects of an assisted repeated reading program on student fluency in a large class in Burkina Faso. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 174, 244-250.
Brooker, S., & Halliday, K. (2015). Impact of malaria control and enhanced literacy instruction on educational outcomes among school children in Kenya a multi-sectoral, prospective randomised evaluation. 3ie Impact Evaluation Report, 18. New Delhi: International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie).
Dowd, A. J., Borisova, I., Amente, A., & Yenew, A. (2016). Realizing capabilities in Ethiopia: Maximizing early childhood investment for impact and equity. Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 17(4), 477-493.
Iyengar, R., Karim, A., & Chagwira, F. (2016). Applying a reading program based on cognitive science in rural areas of Malawi: Preliminary results. Journal of Education and Training Studies, 4(5), 183-195.
Kerwin, J. T., & Thornton, R. (2015). Making the grade: Understanding what works for teaching literacy in rural Uganda. Population Studies Center Research Report No. 15 – 842.
Nag, S., Snowling, M. J., & Asfaha, Y. M. (2016). Classroom literacy practices in low-and middle-income countries: an interpretative synthesis of ethnographic studies. Oxford Review of Education, 42(1), 36-54.
Özler, B., Fernald, L. C., Kariger, P., McConnell, C., Neuman, M., & Fraga, E. (2016). Combining preschool teacher training with parenting education: A cluster-randomized controlled trial. Poverty and Inequality Team, Development Research Group, World Bank. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/580351473691118169/Combining-preschool-teacher-training-with-parenting-education-a-cluster-randomized-controlled-trial
Piper, B., Zuilkowski, S. S., & Ong’ele, S. (2016). Implementing mother tongue instruction in the real world: Results from a medium-scale randomized controlled trial in Kenya. Comparative Education Review, 60(4), 776-807.
Piper, B., Zuilkowski, S. S., & Mugenda, A. (2014). Improving reading outcomes in Kenya: First-year effects of the PRIMR Initiative. International Journal of Educational Development, 37, 11-21.
Describing cultural sensitivity
There are a number of points to highlight when we discuss cultural sensitivity or sensitivity to local contexts. Many educational interventions in Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, for example, borrow key ideas from interventions developed and trialled in high-income countries. It is not always the case, however, that these interventions are adequately suited for the new context. Even when adaptations are made or planned to be made, there is still the huge task of understanding the context, with all its cultural and linguistic diversities and unique social stratifiers, into which the borrowed ideas are introduced. The key question then is about how we achieve an understanding of local contexts.
One way of answering these questions is to assess cultural sensitivity when planning new studies by looking into the intervention design, instrumentation, implementation, and analytic plan. Cultural literacy practices such as choral chanting, for example, can be part of the design of a study, as a variable that can be manipulated to see its impact in learning literacy in school settings (for example, by varying its frequency or how many times it is present in one intervention versus the other). On the other hand, using the local names of objects can be part of assessments in a proof of concept, effectiveness, or efficacy study of an intervention that has been brought in from outside the context and has arguably been adapted for the local context. Finally, a study may use available local knowledge, cultural and linguistic characteristics, and social stratifiers in trying to make sense of results in the analysis stage.
What type of knowledge is relevant in a cultural sensitivity analysis of an intervention study? Language is a key factor in literacy interventions everywhere but especially so in multilingual contexts. The language – home or school, minority or dominant, foreign or national language – in which the literacy intervention is carried out may have important implications in understanding findings reported from a study. What local educational practices or other local elements, such as games or folktales, are relevant to the study and the study context has to be answered. Important social status information, including gender, income, rural-urban settings, and nomadic-settled lifestyles, have to be highlighted to understand any variable impacts found in the study. Studies that are keenly interested or adequately bothered by these and other contextual variables are assumed to have greater cultural sensitivity. This sensitivity, in turn, is expected to further promote literacy education and knowledge generation in the field.
Examples from the African continent
Many studies from African countries show that the majority of the ideas for early childhood and primary school reforms introduced in intervention studies come from outside, mainly from high-income countries of the West. Usually, the central ideas are borrowed by governments and multilateral aid agencies and adapted locally. They may also be intervention ideas widely promoted by international and local NGOs. A study in Kenya, for example, reported on results of a program called ABRA (a shorter version of the acronym for, A Balanced Reading Approach for Children And Designed to Achieve Best Results for All or Abracadabra). This multimedia educational software was developed based on insights from “systematic reviews of evidence about what works in reading and spelling” by the United States’ National Reading Panel (Abrami et al., 2016, p. 947). An intervention in Ethiopia was based on an Emergent Literacy and Math (ELM) program developed by the international NGO Save the Children, “an innovative set of resources for reading, play and cooperative games to support essential emergent literacy and math skills alongside physical and social-emotional development” (Dowd et al., 2016, p. 479). In other cases, reference is made to global literature on fruitful literacy acquisition or teaching methods (Brooker et al., 2015) and the need to align local practices to these evidence-based practices “to improve literacy learning by aligning curriculum and teacher practices with current research” (Kenya: Piper et al. 2014, p. 11). A study in Uganda sought to develop literacy by “employing a mother-tongue-first instructional approach and extensive teacher support and training” (Kerwin & Thornton, 2015, p. 3). At the centre of most of these intervention studies are ideas originating outside Africa.
A substantial investment in intervention studies relates to language and literacy assessments, many of which are adapted from globally available standardized assessments. Some of these include the Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA), Early Grade Mathematics Assessment (EGMA), Schedule of Early Number Assessment (Australia), Reading Recovery Observation Survey (New Zealand), and the Woodcock-Muñoz Language Survey – Revised. Sometimes, locally produced assessments are used; for example, the Malawi Development Assessment Tool, “a test created and validated specifically for use in rural Malawi with Chichewa-speaking children 0-7 years of age” (Özler et al., 2016, p. 56).
Sometimes, studies try to achieve cultural appropriateness by giving due consideration to local cultures and languages. The Primary Mathematics and Reading (PRIMR) Initiative in Kenya, for example, “exposed students to controlled-text stories relevant to their local context” (Piper et al., 2014, p. 14). A study from Ethiopia reported that “assessment, consent and interviews were translated into the local language” (Afaan Oromo) and that assessments used only objects familiar to the child such as rocks, beads, beans, or bottle caps (Dowd et al., 2016, p. 483). An intervention assessment in Malawi and in the Chichewa language “replaced ‘apple’ with ‘papaya’, a fruit that is well known throughout the country, and was estimated to be of similar difficulty as the word ‘apple’ would be in the United States” (Özler et al., 2016, p. 57).
Sometimes, cultural sensitivity is shown when interventions aim to develop local language literacy (Kenya: Piper et al., 2016; Malawi: Iyengar et al., 2015; Uganda: Kerwin & Thornton, 2015) or build awareness for local language education by “engaging with parents and the local community to communicate the benefits of mother tongue instruction” (Uganda: Kerwin & Thornton, 2015, p. 4). However, most of the time the interventions are carried out in dominant national or regional languages or the official foreign language such as English or French. Despite their relevance in developing literacy, local literacy practices are usually sidelined (Nag et al., 2016). For example, in an intervention in Malawi, during training, teachers were asked to “abandon the teaching norms and traditions they've been accustomed to through their own experiences in school, often defined by practices such as rote memorization and repeating without really reading” (Iyengar et al., 2015, p. 187). However, some of the studies acknowledge cultural practices in traditional African cultures such as the “peer-to-peer education that takes place in child culture” (Burkina Faso: Boily et al., 2015, p. 249).
In many cases, contextual factors are only acknowledged at a later stage of study during the analysis of the results. For example, a study from Kenya reported: “The results may be potentially limited by using a North American standardized measure of reading achievement that may lack cultural sensitivity to adequately capture the development of reading skills in Kenyan students” (Abrami et al., 2016, p. 962).
These brief examples of cultural sensitivity analysis may help us understand the depth and dimensions of cultural sensitivity analysis. These examples are hoped to raise awareness and perhaps promote further inclusion of local realities in future studies.
Justifications for cultural sensitivity analysis
The theoretical inspiration for cultural sensitivity analysis comes from socio-cultural perspectives to literacy, the Literacy as Social Practices movement, and sociolinguistic and ethnographic insights on language and multilingualism. These perspectives argue that the analysis of literacy and language education, in particular in multilingual contexts, has to consider power relations in social contexts, that language has to be viewed as fluid, instead of static, and that ethnic and language differences as such rarely, but for our definitions of them, lead to conflicts. These perspectives have implications on how we view literacy, including instruction, school, and home practices surrounding a given language or literacy activity, and the practices that most interventions seek to change or target.
These perspectives put a strong spotlight on situated, contextual, and cultural aspects of literacy. However, the emphasis on the local should not come at the expense or to the exclusion of the global, or potentially ‘universal’ factors in any literacy activity, for local or contextual factors may not exhaustively explain everything about any language or literacy-related event. For example, an analysis of a reading program for a multilingual student body in a post-colonial context has to pay attention to the historical, cultural, and linguistic local factors and at the same time take advantage of global or universal ‘certainties’ of reading (e.g., how the awareness of language units affects reading development). There is a lot to be gained in understanding complex classroom activities, for example, by paying attention both to the local and global elements that come into interaction.
Qualitative understanding of contexts of educational interventions, therefore, has the potential to promote better and lasting impact in the study areas. The qualitative data gathered typically through, but not limited to, ethnography may be useful in the planning, implementation, and analysis stages of such studies.
Based on these insights, cultural sensitivity analysis attempts to answer calls for including contextual realities in educational interventions which commonly use quantitative methods such as experiments.
References
Abrami, P. C., Wade, C. A., Lysenko, L., Marsh, J., & Gioko, A. (2016). Using educational technology to develop early literacy skills in Sub-Saharan Africa. Education and Information Technologies, 21(4), 945-964.
Boily, É., Ouellet, C., & Turcotte, C. (2015). Effects of an assisted repeated reading program on student fluency in a large class in Burkina Faso. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 174, 244-250.
Brooker, S., & Halliday, K. (2015). Impact of malaria control and enhanced literacy instruction on educational outcomes among school children in Kenya a multi-sectoral, prospective randomised evaluation. 3ie Impact Evaluation Report, 18. New Delhi: International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie).
Dowd, A. J., Borisova, I., Amente, A., & Yenew, A. (2016). Realizing capabilities in Ethiopia: Maximizing early childhood investment for impact and equity. Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 17(4), 477-493.
Iyengar, R., Karim, A., & Chagwira, F. (2016). Applying a reading program based on cognitive science in rural areas of Malawi: Preliminary results. Journal of Education and Training Studies, 4(5), 183-195.
Kerwin, J. T., & Thornton, R. (2015). Making the grade: Understanding what works for teaching literacy in rural Uganda. Population Studies Center Research Report No. 15 – 842.
Nag, S., Snowling, M. J., & Asfaha, Y. M. (2016). Classroom literacy practices in low-and middle-income countries: an interpretative synthesis of ethnographic studies. Oxford Review of Education, 42(1), 36-54.
Özler, B., Fernald, L. C., Kariger, P., McConnell, C., Neuman, M., & Fraga, E. (2016). Combining preschool teacher training with parenting education: A cluster-randomized controlled trial. Poverty and Inequality Team, Development Research Group, World Bank. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/580351473691118169/Combining-preschool-teacher-training-with-parenting-education-a-cluster-randomized-controlled-trial
Piper, B., Zuilkowski, S. S., & Ong’ele, S. (2016). Implementing mother tongue instruction in the real world: Results from a medium-scale randomized controlled trial in Kenya. Comparative Education Review, 60(4), 776-807.
Piper, B., Zuilkowski, S. S., & Mugenda, A. (2014). Improving reading outcomes in Kenya: First-year effects of the PRIMR Initiative. International Journal of Educational Development, 37, 11-21.