Marfo – perspectives on human development

The issue of how we look at human development in general but in particular young children.  It’s one that has not been discussed a whole lot.  Most scholars agree that there are multiple perspectives on anything.  The question is does our knowledge base and does the literature reflect what we all seem to believe in.  Knowledge, like many things, it’s really context bound.  I mean the things we care about, happen to be the things we know about and we know about them because we are a member of a group and we are located in a certain place.  We are part of a particular culture.  We’ve had a certain type of education.  So everything we considered to be knowledge is actually bound in context.  It is either a reflection of what others have passed on to us from within that society or what we have gained formally through reading research.  And the idea or the ability of any of us to place ourselves in a different perspective is part of what makes you know conversations and ideas and dialogue rich.   

So even the research questions we pose typically reflect questions we have on our minds.  So we look at western research. Every research is problem solving.  It’s a problem solving system.  And so our research hopefully begins from the questions that are important in the context in which we live our lives.  So if you took a topic or a research question that somebody has found very compelling in Canada and so this is wonderful, I like the results let me go and try it in Machakos in Kenya.  You’re really missing a very important part of research.  Now the idea of replicating to see if there are differences between the Canadian town and Machakos in Kenya is a wonderful thing.  That’s not the issue.  You can always do that.  But if you’re trying to answer a question that society faces then that Canadian question may not be the question that’s important for people in Machakos who try to understand.  So that’s in the general sense, that is why perspective matters because most of the things we do are driven by circumstances some of which are actually tied historically to places, to cultures, to ethnic groups and things like that.