Riad Touareg Badié

Riad Touareg Badié - 40, Rue Berrima - Derb Touareg - Médina - Marrakech - Morocco

E-mail: Riad-Touareg@Riad-Touareg.com

Berber Children in dreams of their future competencies -  a pilot project

This project is a pilot project designed as a part of developing a comparative research project, “Children in dreams of their future competencies”, in accordance with the research program for the Research centre for child and youth competence development at Lillehammer University College. More specifically the project is one of the projects planned to be coordinated within the interdisciplinary umbrella project Children’s and young people’s participation and competence development. As a part of this umbrella project, the project has a general focus on children’s emotional and cognitive conceptualization of their preferred future competencies. On the background of this general focus, the project is specifically addressing the question of if, and eventually in what ways, the children’s participation within and across different socio-cultural context has an impact on their emotionally and cognitive conceptualizations.

Below, integrated in the text, there are some pictures from the village and the excursion to Marrakech and from a picnic in the Atlas mountains as a part of the pilot project in Morocco.

The project as a whole is still in a developing  phase. This is true for the for the formulation of the research questions as well as for the methodological approach.  The pilot project in Morocco described here is conducted in order to develop ideas and experiences which can tell us about what is practical possible.  Taking in consideration the fact that the project is in this early developing phase, the preliminary general research question for the project as a whole can be formulated in the following way:

·       How does the children’s participation within and across social practices in different socio-cultural contexts impact on their emotional and cognitive conceptualizations of their future life and need/wishes for competence development?

Elaborating on this general question several questions can be formulated, such as:

·        Are the institutionalized trajectories for children and young people different arranged in different socio-cultural contexts, e.g. in agriculture and urban contexts?

·        In what way does the children’s conceptualizations of their future life and competence development differ  between different cultures? Are there fundamental similarities on a deeper level, beyond  cultural surface?

·        Does growing up and participating in social practices in agriculture districts and culture generate other types of conceptualizations of future life and competence development than growing up and participating in social practices in urban district and culture?   If so, what kind of differences can be identified and how can they be explained?

·        Growing up in a socio-cultural context, how does the confrontation with and experience of other socio-cultural context for the first time impact on the children’s conceptualizations of future life and competence development?    

The general methodological approach is interdisciplinary with a comparative design.  There is three types of comparisons:

• Comparisons between children in different national cultures, e.g. the Norwegian and Moroccan Berber cultures.

• Inside each national culture, comparisons between children growing up in agriculture district culture and urban culture

• Between each national culture, comparisons between the internal differences between the children in agriculture and rural culture in each national culture.

The data include a sample of 60 children from each national culture (30 children from agriculture district, 30 children from urban district) and one of the child’s parents and teachers. The data set planned includes:

•  Interview data addressing different back ground variables for the children collected from teachers and parents as informants

•  Interview data addressing children’s conceptualizations of their future life and competence development from two groups of children (6-13 years), one growing up in agriculture district and the other in an urban area.

• “Test-retest” interview data addressing eventually changes in conceptualizations of future life and competence development when children growing up in agricultural districts are confronted with and get concrete personal experience from the urban culture. Two drawing task for the children combined with interviews, where the children are asked to draw themselves involved in a practice in their future life when they are over 30 years old and answer questions in the relation to the drawings: 1) Drawing of themselves in one important future practice that they wish to participate in the future combined with a following up interview to display the meaning of the drawing according to the interpretation of the child him/herself; 2) Drawing of themselves in one important future practice that they think that they actually are going to participate in combined with a following up interview to display the meaning of the drawing according to the interpretation of the child him/herself.

   The pilot project involves 30 children (6-13 years old), their teachers (2) and parents (30) in the small Berber village Douar-Ait-Abdi.

The research questions addressed in the pilot project are:

   1. How are the institutionalized trajectories for children in the Berber village arranged?

   2. What are the Berber children’s conceptualizations of their future life and competence development?

   3. Growing up in a poor Berber agriculture district village, how does the confrontation with and experience of the socio-cultural context of the city of Marrakech for the first time impact on the children’s conceptualizations of future life and competence development?  

The data that has been collected is:

1.      Interview with key informants in the village, focusing on the arrangement of the institutionalized trajectory for the children.

2.      Interview data addressing the children’s conceptualizations of their future life and competence development among a group of children (6-13 years) growing up in agriculture district.

3.      “Test-retest” interview data addressing eventually changes in conceptualizations of future life and competence development when children growing up in agricultural districts are confronted with and get concrete personal experience from the urban culture.

4.      Two drawing task for the children combined with interviews, where the children are asked to draw themselves involved in a practice in their future life when they are over 30 years old and answer questions in the relation to the drawings: 1) Drawing of themselves in one important future practice that they wish to participate in the future combined with a following up interview to display the meaning of the drawing according to the interpretation of the child him/herself; 2) Drawing of themselves in one important future practice that they think that they actually are going to participate in combined with a following up interview to display the meaning of the drawing according to the interpretation of the child him/herself.

The interviews were conducted by the teachers and one morocco co-researcher Omar Aatabi. Omar, who him self  grow  up in the same village, has been engaged in the planning of the pilot project and is the cultural door-opener and facilitator as he has local knowledge and  a large social network.

In order to test out the “test-retest” part of the study, a three days excursion to Marrakech was done together with the teachers and some parents of the children. None of the children had visited Marrakech before, but they had of course met the urban culture that this city represents trough TV and  by listening to persons who has visited Marrakech, e.g. their parents and people from Marrakech visiting the village.

Most of the children in Berber agricultural villages in the Atlas mountains move to urban areas after growing up. The concrete confrontation with and experience from visiting Marrakech was supposed to influence the children’s conceptualizations of their needs for future competence development. Even if they had not visited Marrakech before, many of the children (according to their teachers and parents) say they want to move to Marrakech when they have finished school.  The teachers at the school had for a long time wanted to make an excursion with the children to Marrakech as a pedagogical element in their teaching. But until this pilot project this has not been possible for economic reasons. By financing this trip, the pilot project was thus also contributing to the school’s pedagogical praxis in addition to reaching the goal for the project.

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