Robert Serpell, vice chancellor at the University of Zambia, discusses the results of his five-year study tracing literacy development in pre-kindergarten through third-grade children from low- and middle- income families of European and African heritage in Baltimore. His presentation centers on how the concept of intimate family culture can assist in moving the discussion of educational disadvantage beyond stereotyped accounts of various social addresses. Catherine Snow, the Henry Lee Shattuck professor of Education, will provide an introduction.
Robert Serpell is Professor of Psychology at the University of Zambia. From 2003 to 2006 he was Vice-Chancellor of the University. He has conducted numerous studies on gaps in academic performance between ethnic groups, finding that even within a given society, different cognitive characteristics are emphasized from one situation to another and from one subculture to another. These differences extend not just to conceptions of intelligence but to what is considered adaptive or appropriate in a broader sense. Serpell's work shows how conceptions of intelligence vary from culture to culture, and that the majority of these views do not reflect Western ideas. Serpell and others have found that people in some African communities--especially where Western schooling has not yet become common--tend to blur the Western distinction between intelligence and social competence. In rural Zambia, for instance, the concept of nzelu includes both cleverness (chenjela) and responsibility (tumikila).
Catherine Snow is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from McGill and worked for several years in the linguistics department of the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include children's language development as influenced by interaction with adults in home and preschool settings, literacy development as related to language skills and as influenced by home and school factors, and issues related to the acquisition of English oral and literacy skills by language minority children. She has co-authored books on language development (e.g., *Pragmatic Development* with Anat Ninio) and on literacy development (e.g., *Unfulfilled Expectations: Home and School Influences on Literacy*, with W. Barnes, J. Chandler, I. Goodman & L. Hemphill), and published widely on these topics in referred journals and edited volumes. Snow's contributions to the field include membership on several journal editorial boards, co-directorship for several years of the Child Language Data Exchange System, and editorship of Applied Psycholinguistics. She served as a board member at the Center for Applied Linguistics and a member of the National Research Council Committee on Establishing a Research Agenda on Schooling for Language Minority Children. She chaired the National Research Council Committee on Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, which produced a report that has been widely adopted as a basis for reform of reading instruction and professional development. She currently serves on the NRC's Council for the Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, and as president of the American Educational Research Association.