What role does culture play in how children and young people view knowledge and understand knowing?

Abstract

My systematic literature review is a quantitative literature review to investigate the impact culture plays on epistemology. I wondered whether the longstanding pattern of “epistemological development” discussed in the literature was as a result of the culture in which the studies were conducted. Consequently, I utilised a systematic review process outlined by Petticrew and Roberts to identify and review 12 studies that had considered cross cultural differences in epistemology. All the studies considered except one found that culture did have a significant impact on epistemology. This finding led me to identify a gap in the literature which involved using a qualitative methodology to investigate epistemology in a culture that had not been previously considered, using participants younger than those in any of the aforementioned studies. I therefore used narrative inquiry to gather the views of eight Czech Roma pupils in year 5. I used unstructured interviews and using topics identified in the previous literature was able to ask questions from which I inferred epistemological positions. The findings were that all the young people displayed thinking that could be associated with a social constructionist stance. The implications of this are then discussed particularly in relation to an education system that is becoming ever more reliant on a positivist paradigm. This piece of work also includes a bridging document that contextualizes my systematic literature review and empirical research by discussing important issues that I was unable to discuss in the other documents.