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Using perspectives drawn from recent work in the anthropology of learning as socially situated practice, alongside attention to multimodality as a lens for exploring learning, this article analyzes patterns of meaning-making among children engaged in small group learning during an after-school Creole literacy program in Haiti. Ethnographic analysis of an extensive corpus of video data reveals a powerful role for embodiment, wide attention, and distributed participation in children's learning, processes that in turn channel wider systems of meaning in Haitian society and culture. The article suggests that attention to the multiple affordances and cultural resources children use during engagement in socially situated learning offers a resource for thinking more deeply about education as social practice, especially in contexts where schools and society are shaped by social inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of recent global debates over the dangers of institutionalised orphan care, a new model of family care premised on the trope of family reunification has emerged among Haitian and US faith‐based actors as the best alternative for ensuring vulnerable children's well‐being. This article offers a critical cultural reading of narratives on family reunification in Haiti in social media and advocacy discourse, revealing how this approach privileges Northern assumptions about proper parenting and family life. Not only are these ideas a mismatch with realities in Haiti, they evoke deficit constructions of family and childhood that facilitate the nation's further positioning as a subject of transnational neoliberal governmentality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much attention has been given to the theory and practice of global citizenship education (GCE). In this article, drawing from an emerging body of literature that examines GCE through a postcolonial lens, we offer a Freirean critical reading of how GCE intersects with ideologies of globalization. We argue that GCE discourse privileges certain understandings of globalization that work to socialize students into the current global system, rather than giving them the capacity to challenge that system. To move beyond this limitation, we draw from Levinas and argue for a post-humanist approach to GCE, which would open up opportunities to cultivate individuals' capacities to act within and against prevailing ideas and forces of globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global spread of mindfulness-based interventions raises some interesting questions regarding the universality and translatibility of key ideas and practices of mindfulness. Based on ethnographic research, this article reflects on one effort to bring ideas and practices of mindfulness-based stress reduction to Haitian mental health practitioners and educators in Haiti. While core concepts of mindfulness-based stress reduction are often assumed to be universal, this analysis suggests that cultural meaning systems and social contexts, and in particular local cultural psychologies of personhood, strongly influenced the meanings that Haitian participants took away from their exposure to mindfulness-based stress reduction. These differences manifested in resistance to individualist concepts self-embedded in the discourse of mindfulness-based stress reduction as well as to its secularism. However, while rejecting an individualistic and amoral self-focus, Haitian participants also re-interpreted mindfulness in new ways that stressed its value for societal and national well-being. The article reflects on the larger questions that surround the making and re-making of meanings associated with well-being as mindfulness-based interventions move across cultural and national borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY This article describes subjective transformations in perception that the author has experienced over years of field visits to Haiti. These changes suspend the usual rationalist assumptions about the separation between mind and material environment, animate and inanimate, temporal cause and effect. Instead, the article suggests an attunement between ethnographer and the field, where the field itself speaks and forces different modalities of perception, knowledge, and learning. Intuition and symbolic and spiritual sources of meaning are significant dimensions of a process of 'coming into understanding' that is never complete, but always evolving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic work with out-of-school youth in Haiti, this article considers how youth's perspectives on their lives contain important lessons for thinking about social development. Despite much research that points to 'at-risk' children and youth as lacking ambition, Haitian youth maintained high aspirations for belonging to mainstream society. This suggests that while social policy often frames children and youth through a lens of vulnerability and risk, this perspective fails to engage with the local contexts, aspirations, and needs of youth. More research on youths' ideas about present and future is needed to advance new ideas for thinking about social development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long before the earthquake in Haiti on 12 January 2010, but particularly since, international media and humanitarian groups have drawn attention to the ‘vulnerable child’ in Haiti, a child often portrayed as needing ‘saving’. Focusing in particular on the restavèk (child domestic laborer), this article first explores the ways in which such children are represented as vulnerable and victimized, despite emerging ethnographic evidence on children’s lived experience that paints a rather different picture. It then argues that far from being inconsequential, however, representations of children’s vulnerability enable a critique of the Haitian culture and nation itself as fundamentally flawed and in need of saving through the interventions of the international order. Raising the question of for whom and for what purposes such projects of critique and saving exist, the article suggests that the saving of Haiti’s children can be seen as a way to position the Haitian nation within a universalized and moralizing narrative of maturation/development that ultimately is not so much about meeting Haiti’s (and its children’s) needs as it is about satisfying the needs and desires of the more powerful in terms of their own security, prosperity and global dominance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This critical cultural analysis of trends in the field of social emotional learning (SEL) in the United States considers how ideas concerning emotional skills and competencies have informed programmatic discourse. While currently stressing links between SEL and academic achievement, program literature also places emphasis on ideals of caring, community, and diversity. However recommended practices across programs tend to undermine these ideals by focusing on emotional and behavioral control strategies that privilege individualist models of self SEL in practice thus becomes another way to focus attention on measurement and remediation of individual deficits rather than a way to redirect educators 'focus toward the relational contexts of classrooms and schools. The promise of SEL to foster increased achievement and equity in American education may not be realized unless more work is done to connect ideals with practices and to address the political and cultural assumptions that are being built into contemporary approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the diffusion of ideas and concepts concerning children and their education has been the norm throughout history, this article argues that we are currently witnessing the emergence of a globalised cultural ideology of childhood based on Western cultural assumptions and research traditions. Examining the case of contemporary Chinese approaches to early childhood and childcare as reflected in parenting magazines, and comparing these with American parenting advice, the authors illustrate how certain basic themes such as the role of scientific expertise, individualism, and self-expression appear to draw from a convergence of ideologies regarding children's nature and needs. At the same time, there remain some fundamental differences between Chinese and American perspectives. The article considers alternative explanations for such covergences and divergences and suggests that attention to the gap between the idealised and actual practices with regard to children's welfare is central to addressing the paradox of an ostensibly child-centred ideology that in fact marginalises children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Childhood ideology functions in each nation as a complex of ideas about what children are like and how best to teach and socialise them. One important domain of childhood ideology concerns ideas and practices related to children's development and behaviour management. Drawing from an analysis of popular childrearing magazines and early childhood education materials in the United States, this cultural study describes contemporary American mainstream beliefs concerning children's early emotional and behavioural development. In particular, the paper explores themes of emotional expression, autonomy, individuality, power, and consumerism. Some comparisons with Japanese views on child development and emotional/behavioural socialisation are also made. The paper suggests that popular ideas and techniques of emotional and behavioural management in the United States in both families and early childcare environments reflect a dominant ideology of children that has potentially negative consequences for children's welfare. Furthermore, childhood ideologies, while retaining culturally specific values and ideas neither remain static nor exist in isolation from one another. The paper questions the global diffusion of a Western-style professionalised discourse of child psychology that may not be applicable to all nations and their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a critical conceptual analysis of early education discourse in the United States and Japan. Difference in ideas about children's selves and its implications for classroom practice; Influence of cultural ideas concerning child developmental expertise and knowledge of children on the emotional tenor of adult-child relationship.

Comparisons of Japanese and American early education frequently rely on a contrast between so-called Japanese groupism and American individualism. This article suggests that this simplistic contrast leaves unexamined the different cultural understandings of the individual that underlie Japanese and American educational practices. Drawing on and integrating existing literature on early education and the self in Japan, this article suggests that a distinction needs to be made between individualism and individuality, with Japanese education tending toward a focus on individuality and American education toward individualism. The article explores the implications of this distinction for educational practices and for cultural self-critique among American educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the impact of culture on comparative education. Points of debates on the status of culture concept in anthropology; Status of culture in comparative education; Areas of comparative research where culture is productive; Uses of culture in comparative education; Destabilization of self and the other.

Discusses cultural diversity in education in the United States. Conceptualization; Diversity as social fact; Ethics; Implications for educational policy.

Presents and expounds the root of anti-Americanism in contemporary South Korea. Indigenous cultural psychology characterized by an emphasis on uri; Korean concern over the Western cultural invasion; Other focus of the uri emphasis.