I have been thinking a lot about my project recently. I originally wanted to compare parenting styles used by Tibetans to the styles that have been established and studied here in the US (according to Baumrind). However, after reading the article "What Students Don't Learn Abroad" I decided that this wasn't the approach I really wanted to take. Instead of comparing, I want to strictly observe and learn about their parenting styles as free-standing and original.
Of course, because I have learned and studied the styles taught to me here at BYU, some sort of comparison, whether it be intentional or not, seems inevitable. I would, however, like to try to be as unbiased as possible as I observe and create categories instead of trying to fit my observations into pre-made categories. Instead of using the parenting styles I have studied as set-in-stone-categories, I will use them as very primitive building blocks.
Yeah, I think you're right, you're not going to be able to completely escape the biases of the system you've been trained in ... but you can at least be as aware of those biases as possible, and could even use your project to challenge some of those biases.
ReplyDeleteIt will be exciting to see how this idea develops over the next couple of months!