Cross Cultural Perspectives on Children

Catalog description

Explores how the behavior and psychological functioning of children are shaped by culture and how different cultures tend to produce children with characteristic personalities, selves, thought patterns and behaviors. Every cultural community provides developmental pathways for children. These pathways are shaped by history and by the goals of parents, communities and children themselves. The course will focus on how human knowledge is transmitted through multiple cultural channels in both informal and formal contexts. This is a service-learning course in which students provide a needed service: Mentoring and tutoring Liberian young people in a literacy program. This will serve as a basis for conducting research on this refugee population and the final paper will be the recording of oral histories from teenagers. Enrollment limited to 30.