Lectures

Teaching is often defined as the direct and systematic intervention of a teacher whose goal is to change the behavior of a learner, which resonates with school teaching. Based on such definition, it was argued that teaching does not exist in small-scale societies, formerly known as hunter-gatherers. Yet, adopting a more functional approach which includes the modification of one’s own behavior to facilitate another’s learning, allows us to include other, more subtle ways in which adults can support, direct and enhance children's learning beyond direct instructions and intervention.

In a series of lectures, I use my own ethnographic experience among children and parents of a Nayaka community, historically recognized as hunter-gatherers and living in the forests of South India, as well as cases from other hunter-gatherer societies around the world based on the work of the Forager Child Studies research group I co-founded. Using examples from the deserts of South Africa to the Arctic, Australia and the tropical forests of Southeast Asia and South America, I provide a comprehensive overview of to the experience of childhood among different hunter-gatherer societies.

• How hunter-gatherer children learn?

In the first lecture, I show how knowledge is acquired through social interactions that allow children to choose what, how and when they learn and foster learning through observation, full participation in adult's activities and with adult's tools and through trial and error. I discuss children learn by engaging with peers and through play and the role of social skills as an important tool for knowledge acquisition, including learning of abstract knowledge and practical skills.

• Autonomy and risk taking

This lecture is dedicated to the notion of personal autonomy, a central value in many hunter-gatherer societies, which is not only fostered in regards to adults but also to children from a very young age. One of the first images of a hunter-gatherer child by outsider is that of carless parents allowing their children to take extreme risks by climbing trees, play with axes and manage a fireplace. I show how the notion of autonomy plays an essential role in constructing adult-child relations. I describe how adults' active avoidance from direct instructions not only fosters children's personal autonomy but in fact opens a door to new ways of knowledge transmission and support children's' development. I also show how, despite their aversion from any kind of coerciveness, adults have various ways in which they can be very involved in supporting their children's learning.

• Social and emotional learning

In this lecture, I focus on social skills, which are highly valued and prioritized in many hunter-gatherer societies. I describe the unique ways parents support their children social and emotional learning in different communities across the globe. I discuss how parents address issues such as empathy, anger management, creating and maintaining relations and sharing. Focusing on the Nayaka in South India, I show how parents perception of the notion of child development revolves around social skills, which are not only viewed as vital for communal and personal wellbeing, but also as prime learning tools in and of themselves and a pre-condition of any academic/practical skill development.

• Parenting

In the last lecture, I talk about how the practices of parenting among hunter-gatherers provide us alternative views on key notions we too often take for granted. In particular, I concentrate on notions of childhood, child development, parental responsibilities, adult-child relations and learning processes. Last, I invite a discussion about whether and how such views and practices can perhaps be relevant to our own society and notions of education.

With the mission of providing access to education for every child on the globe declared by the world's leading development institutions, more and more children from diverse backgrounds attend – or are expected to attend – school. Yet, among marginalized indigenous small-scale communities, many of such education programs report on poor school attainments and achievements of children and dissatisfaction of all parties involved. In this lecture, I explore the dissonance between school educators and parents belonging to communities historically classified as hunter-gatherers. I discuss different views of what child development is, and what abilities such development is expected to construct. To do so, I first provide a brief theoretical overview on the link that has been suggested between parenting, child development and success at school and discuss the importance to learn about people in their context. Following the description of my ethnographic work among a forest-dweller community in South India, I describe the core values that shape childrearing practices among the community which on one hand foster personal autonomy but on the other hand gently direct and monitor the development of social skills, relationships and collaboration. I then turn to examine children's school experience as they shift between different settings of learning and different sets of adult expectations. Finally, I discuss the broader implications of my study not only for indigenous societies but for school education and assessments of child development in general.

Development initiatives for indigenous and small-scale societies is an growing global phenomena, officially aimed at promoting socioeconomic change among societies perceived as disadvantaged, and foster their integration into the broader society. The relations between the aid industry and small-scale marginalised groups are often described in terms of a clash between two opposing sides. Official reports show that even in cases of developers and programmes are happily accepted, the end results of development projects still bear significant disappointment from both sides and projects still do not manage to replicate the mode of living they were set to create. In this lecture, I shed new light on the relationships (rather than power relations) between development agents and small-scale indigenous communities. I explain through the case study of one small forest-dwellers community in South India, why beneficiaries who happily welcome projects use them completely differently than expected, without feeling to be resisting or misusing them. I unravel the different meanings attached to basic concepts of everyday life that are often taken for granted in aid-related discourses, such as community, family, children, dwelling, relatedness, poverty, dependency, efficiency and autonomy. Moreover, I provide a novel account on the complex and unpredictable mechanisms of what is commonly termed ‘cultural transformation’ among indigenous small-scale communities in today’s global world.