The vast majority of youth development research takes place in minority world cultural contexts. To understand and nurture the optimal development of young people living in majority world countries, cross-cultural research teams are uniquely suited to conduct careful and culturally sensitive research in these settings. However, this is difficult.…

The dominance of Western research methodologies and epistemologies has come under intense scrutiny. However, the recognition that knowledge is produced and packaged differently cannot override its fluid, unbounded and comparative nature. That said, researchers are yet to outline the case for a decolonising comparative educational leadership…

Aim(s): This research explored perspectives of play according to parents of Somali heritage and primary school practitioners, in an English primary school. At its core, it aimed to investigate the frequently overlooked cultural dimension of play and how this affects the education of Somali heritage children. The broader contentious concern of the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the push-pull factors and motivations of African and Asian international students in Chinese universities. Design/methodology/approach: Concurrent mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative) design was used. The quantitative component included 537 Africans and Asians from five notable universities,…

The aim of this paper is to search for possibilities to change the terms and content of conversations on colonial/decolonial human rights education. The content of conversations consists of what we know about human rights. The terms of conversations are the principles, assumptions, and rules of knowing in human rights education. The terms and…

Studies conducted in Western countries document the special role of mother--infant face-to-face exchanges for early emotional development including social smiling. A few cross-cultural studies have shown that the Western pattern of face-to-face communication is absent in traditional rural cultures, without identifying other processes that promote…

The research investigated the thanking/gratitude strategies of three distinct cultures; Hausa, Chinese and Arabic languages with the aim of finding out the different strategies used by them and how different they are in their use of such strategies. The study employs Cheng (2005) Taxonomy of gratitude strategies in analyzing the data which was…

Ogbu and Simon's (1998) and Ogbu's (2003) cultural-ecological theoretical framework postulates that voluntary immigrants, those who chose to migrate to a new land, would perform well academically because of their perceived beliefs that they could get a good education and could succeed more in their "new" land of opportunity than in their…

This study, conducted in June 2014 in Kampala, Uganda, is a follow-up to a similar study conducted in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 2008. The basic research question addressed is: "What are the experiences in the lives of upper elementary-aged Ugandan children that foster an intrinsic motivation to seek information?" A secondary…

How might U.S. social work students' perceptions of HIV/AIDS differ from those of social work students in sub-Saharan Africa? Furthermore, what can students learn from hearing how students from other countries view them? Social work students in the United States, Botswana, and Malawi were video-recorded; they then viewed the videos of students at…

In this article we provide a theoretical reconstruction of sub-Saharan ethics that we argue is a strong competitor to typical Western approaches to morality. According to our African moral theory, actions are right roughly insofar as they are a matter of living harmoniously with others or honouring communal relationships. After spelling out this…

Adult education efforts in Africa are dominated by Western models. One aspect of this domination is a presumption that Western models of adult development can be applied to African contexts. As perspectives on adult development affect adult education programmes, this presumption may negatively impact these programmes in Africa. This manuscript…

In this paper, the author attempts to sketch out both an argument for and the outlines of what might be termed an African cultural studies of education. This formation would actually be composed of several fields and discourses that are often taken up as quite distinct, namely critical approaches to education, cultural studies, and African…

The author, an anthropologist, relates her experiences in Zambia, pointing out that African children do enjoy meaningful cognitive activities and are continually learning in their daily out-of-school lives, yet the formal, authoritarian, European school model fails to utilize these experiences or often even to recognize their existence. (EH)