Challenging western hegemony through systematic study of cultural diversity: an undergraduate course on child development and culture

Abstract

Traditional courses in developmental psychology treat the development of white, middle‐class European American children as normative. This approach offers an inaccurate representation of child development, displays a lack of sensitivity towards the cultural diversity of students, and fails to meet these students’ intellectual needs. This paper describes an attempt at rectifying this ethical, paradigmatic error in an undergraduate course on child development and culture. Key concepts at the interface of culture and development in cultural geographical zones that contrasted with the European‐American tradition were systematically treated, employing varied instructional strategies. The experience suggests that synthesizing a multicultural classroom with a multicultural syllabus compels students to confront their own intellectual ethnocentrism, diversifies intellectual experience and, for minority students, addresses an intellectual lacuna that they may not yet have articulated.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Teaching Diversity/Thinking Diversity Faculty Conference sponsored by the Faculty Initiatives Committee, University System of Maryland (USM) Diversity Network, Baltimore, MD, October 2002