Social scaling in children's drawings of classroom life: A cultural comparative analysis of social scaling in Africa and Sweden

This paper reports on a cultural comparative study of children's representations of themselves and their teachers in drawings of classroom life. Three settings, two in Africa and one in Sweden, have been chosen to represent cultural variation in pedagogic practices and child rearing ideologies. A total of 329 children in a traditional school setting in Tanzania, an ANC refugee settlement and a Swedish small-town setting drew pictures illustrating 'When I'm working in my classroom'. The Swedish children produced more self-centred (child-centred) representations of classroom life (larger-scale pupils, more detailed, central pupils, and less distance between reacher and pupil figures) than either of the African groups. The children in the traditional teacher-centred culture (the Tanzanian group) drew the most socio-centric and least child-centred representations, whereas children in the ANC settlement produced drawings that were intermediate. Differences in social scaling (size, detailing, centrality and distance scaling) were thus related to cultural differences in pedagogic practices and child-rearing ideologies. The results are discussed in terms of cultural variation in representations of social space.