Showing papers in "Human Development in 2016"

Integrating Development and Evolution in Psychological Science: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology, Developmental Systems, and Explanatory Pluralism

Abstract: New attempts in psychological science at integrating developmental (individual-level) and evolutionary (population-level) accounts of phenotypic stability and variability have achieved increasing prom

Power and Agency in Conceptualizing Life Stages as Master Narratives. Commentary on Arnett

Abstract: Psychologists have a long history of engaging in simplistic debates that provide broad contours to the discipline (e.g., nature vs. nurture, universal vs. culture-specific processes). Such a debate has been central to developmental science since its inception: continuity versus discontinuity in development [Schulenberg, Maggs, & O’Malley, 2003]. In other words, is development an incremental process consisting of many small changes that accumulate over time (i.e., continuous development)? Or does development follow a series of stages, wherein brief periods of dramatic change serve as transition points between periods of coherent stability (i.e., discontinuous development)? What sometimes gets lost in these scholarly arguments is the phenomenology of real people, that is, what people actually believe and experience. From a folk psychological perspective, there is really no doubt that people understand life stages and use them to make sense of their own lives and the lives of others. This point seems to be clearly demonstrated in Arnett’s analysis [this issue], through which he argues for both historical and contemporary cross-cultural prevalence of stages as a governing prescriptive framework for what a life through time ought to look like. Arnett refers to these stages as indigenous to make this very point, that these are stages “arising in the course of cultural life, as distinguished from the life stage theories proposed by academic psychologists” (p. 291). 1 In this regard, Arnett takes a useful side-

A Novel Theoretical Life Course Framework for Triggering Cognitive Development across the Lifespan

Abstract: Although intellectual engagement is a significant factor associated with adult cognitive health, it is unclear what it includes, why and how it declines across the lifespan, and importantly, whether i

Negotiating Complexity: A Bioecological Systems Perspective on Literacy Development

Abstract: Background/Aims: Urie Bronfenbrenner's bioecological systems model is well regarded in the field of child development. Although this model is not commonly used by

Life Stage Concepts across History and Cultures: Proposal for a New Field on Indigenous Life Stages

Abstract: This paper draws attention to the pervasiveness of life stage concepts in human cultures and advocates the creation of a new field of study on indigenous life stage concepts . First,

Developmental Affordances of War-Torn Landscapes: Growing up in Sarajevo under Siege

Abstract: Young people growing up in war zones experience significant changes of their physical and social environments caused by urban destruction. Employing the methodology of narrative inquiry, this work theoretically explores environmental and spatial affordances enabling sociocognitive development among young people growing up during the 4-year military siege of Sarajevo. The theoretical analysis focuses on two environmental contexts - war school and the Sarajevo war tunnel - and examines how affordances of physical environments, symbolically enacted in language, scaffold developmental activities during this highly specific wartime period. The developmental meaning of environmental affordances comes to life in contemporary narratives written by 16 adults who as young people attended war schools or worked in the Sarajevo war tunnel. Theoretical foundations of sociocultural and ecological psychology are employed to illuminate how environmental affordances contributed to the development of psychological functions well suited to everyday life in circumstances of war and urban destruction.

Rethinking Vygotskian Cultural-Historical Theory in Light of Pepperian Root Metaphor Theory: Dynamic Interplay of Organicism and Contextualism

Abstract: This article examines Vygotskian cultural-historical theory by putting it into dialogue with Stephen Pepper's root metaphor theory. I focus on Vygotsky's insistence on the dialectical unity of the phy

A Relational Approach to Human Development Research and Practice in 21st Century Violence and Displacement

Abstract: Children and youth growing up in political violence and displacement have urgent needs to connect with others and to influence the course of their own and others' development. In that process, languag

Framing Social and Emotional Learning among African-American Youth: Toward an Integrity-Based Approach

Abstract: This essay offers a cursory analysis of the potential of social and emotional learning (SEL) to foster optimal growth among African-American youth. Over the past two decades, the field of SEL has come to encompass a range of programs and practices that promote core social and emotional competencies (e.g., self-awareness, selfmanagement, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making) in schools and communities to support desired developmental outcomes [Durlak, Domitrovich, Weissberg, & Gullotta, 2015]. The field has appropriately garnered interest from a variety of stakeholders who share a commitment to improving such outcomes for children and youth from diverse backgrounds. Given the statuses and strivings of African-American youth, it is essential to interrogate more deeply whether and in what ways SEL can be leveraged to advance their personal and collective well-being. Despite notable successes in politics, business, education, and entertainment, research on the African-American experience tends to highlight vulnerabilities and inequities in educational, economic, criminal justice, and health-related processes and outcomes. These conditions have helped reinvigorate public debate and stimulated an uptick in civic organizing and activism. An integrity-based perspective is useful to this analysis as it situates the presentday African-American experience within the larger history of racialized cultural oppression that often accompanies American global imperialism. However, this perspective foregrounds the resulting resistance and pursuit of self-determined wellness by people of color throughout the world [Jagers, Mustafaa, & Noel, in press]. The recent protests and organizing triggered by both police and internecine violence represent contemporary instantiations of this centuries-old struggle. There is an appreciation for connections with other domestic and international movements (often youth led) that have (re)emerged to counter related concerns, such as Angloconformity and rising xenophobia, corporatism and government dysfunction, exploitation of women and heteronormativity, militarized police tactics and protracted foreign wars, and environmental exploitation and climate change.

Youth and Resilience in Postconflict Settings: An Intervention for War-Affected Youth in Sierra Leone

Abstract: In Sierra Leone, as in conflict and postconflict settings around the world, youth are coping with their exposure to violence during conflict as well as the poverty and displacement that follow war and the stigma that can persist long after involvement with armed groups has ended. Both contextual and individual factors influence whether youth overcome these barriers successfully and resume positive life trajectories, or struggle to reintegrate into their families and communities. This study reviews findings from the 14-year Longitudinal Study of War-Affected Youth in Sierra Leone and a recent intervention study examining a short-term group cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT)-based intervention for war-affected youth, and discusses the implications of the impact of interventions for understanding and promoting resilience in war-affected youth. The results suggest that group CBT approaches may be a cost-effective means of targeting support to youth most in need of psychosocial support in postconflict settings.

Prepared Is Not Preformed: Commentary on Witherington and Lickliter

Abstract: I know very well the problems associated with integrating development and evolution, and thus I applaud Witherington and Lickliter’s articulate opus examining two such proposals to do just that – evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP) and relational developmental systems (DS) theory. Some of the major assumptions of developmental psychology, especially when viewed from the perspective of DS theory, and of evolutionary psychology, particularly as espoused in its early incarnations, are, on the surface, incompatible. Evolutionary psychology emerged from sociobiology in the 1980s and 1990s as psychologists adopted Darwinian and neo-Darwinian concepts, most notably natural selection, to explain human behavior from a functional, or adaptationist, perspective. Most evolutionary psychologists also adopted Richard Dawkins’ [1976] gene’s-eye-view of evolution, which gave the impression to many developmentalists of genetic determinism, an anathema to DS advocates. DS theory in psychology traces its roots to early developmental psychobiologists such as Schneirla [1957], Kuo [1967], and Lehrman [1970], and most recently Gottlieb [1987, 1992, 2007] and his theory of probabilistic epigenesis. The theorizing of philosophers such as Griffiths and Gray [1994, 2005] and Oyama [1985, 2000] has also been influential. For DS theorists, nothing is preformed; structure and organization emerge via the bidirectional transaction of ingredients at all levels of organization, from DNA through culture. Somewhat ironically perhaps, the hard DS approach replaces the organism with DS as the principal focus of natural selection, much as Richard Dawkins [1976] replaced the organism with the gene in his selfish gene theory. In both cases, the organism is no longer a theoretically important entity in evolution [Pradeu, 2010].

With or Beyond Piaget? A Dialogue between New Probabilistic Models of Learning and the Theories of Jean Piaget

Abstract: For more than 10 years, we have seen the emergence of new “probabilistic” models of learning. They clearly echo Jean Piaget's works and theories but they also claim to go further. However, references to Piaget are often quick and rarely take the time to explore the rich heritage of the Genevan's works. This article takes a closer look at their links through a systematic review of the literature. To do so, I selected, read, and compared articles and books about the probabilistic models of learning and the works of Jean Piaget dealing with similar questions. I will first present the theoretical evolutions offered by the probabilistic models of learning. Then, I will reexamine the words and works of Jean Piaget to show how he had in fact formulated and addressed similar questions at his time, from his point of view. I will finally discuss how we could question, today, Jean Piaget's works in regard to these new models, but also how these new models could be discussed with regard to Piagetian works.

Moving beyond the Relational Worldview: Exploring the Next Steps Premised on Agency and a Commitment to Social Change

Abstract: I enthusiastically welcome the paper by Saeed Karimi-Aghdam [2016] for many reasons, but especially because it makes an important contribution to and serves to invigorate debates about theoretical and, more broadly, philosophical underpinnings of our contemporary approaches to human development, with crucial implications for applied fields including education. Such debates are sorely needed today as psychology continues to vacillate between the extremes of biologically deterministic views that reduce human development to processes inside the organism (and, increasingly, more narrowly inside the brain) on the one hand and those views that focus on development as a process that is distributed in and shaped by sociocultural forces without due attention to individual dynamics such as the development of the mind, self-regulation, motivation, and the self on the other. This vacillation and the accompanying painful ruptures in the approaches and disciplines concerned with human development need to be considered within the context of the “end of theory” climate – expressed for example, in the desire to deprivilege the “grand narratives” of the past – as this climate has gradually settled in psychology and other fields over several decades and even intensified in recent years. The recent dynamics are especially driven by appeals to the “evidence-based” approaches with their empirically oriented methodologies under the banner that we need to know the “facts” about development without much consideration of how these facts are enmeshed and embedded within wider theoretical and sociopolitical contexts. Alternatively, these recent dynamics are related to appeals to focus on positionality and provisionality of knowledge whereby the priority is given to localized investigations (e.g., in attunement with specific contexts and circumstances), also without much concern for theoretical and philosophical vicissitudes of knowledge production. Whether championed by mainstream ap-

Complexity Embraced and Complexity Reduced: A Tale of Two Approaches to Human Development

Abstract: The world is complex. So too is human development. I know of no scientist, within or outside the field of developmental science, who would dispute these obvious points. Differences among scientists exist, however, in regard to how complexity is treated. At this writing, there are two prominent approaches to treating the complexity of human development. One approach embraces it, including complexity as a defining feature of the developmental process. As explained with nuance, insight, and eloquence by Witherington and Lickliter [this issue, pp. 200–234], the other approach reduces the complexity of development to changes that merely express, or that fail to express, information that exists prior to a given organism even being conceived. The latter approach is an essentialist formulation. 1 Complexity is in essence explained away through ideas that reduce higher (and more complex) levels of organization to a fundamental level (in this case, a gene). The essentialist proposal is that the to-be-reduced-to element comprises the unit of analysis existing at the fundamental or ultimate level of analysis (i.e., the one that explains development). Examples of such formulations in developmental science are the stimulus-response ( S-R ) connections to which complex human behavior (e.g., cognitive development, lan-

Implicit versus Explicit Ways of Using Bronfenbrenner's Bioecological Theory

Abstract: There are many things to appreciate in Elizabeth Jaeger’s [2016] paper. Initially she does a fine job describing the development of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory, showing the ways in which the theory changed over time from one that appeared (at least to his readers) to concentrate primarily on contexts of development to one in which proximal processes were placed front and center. As Jaeger notes, Bronfenbrenner had focused on context during the 1970s because contemporary developmental psychologists paid so little attention to it. However, from the start, he termed his theory “ecological” because he viewed development as arising from the interaction of individuals and the contexts in which they were situated. Given that his theory became so quickly identified as a theory of contextual influences on development, Bronfenbrenner attempted during the 1980s to deal with this misinterpretation in three related ways, each of which Jaeger describes. First, he made clear that any model of human development had to explain the processes by which development occurred; second, he paid more explicit attention to the role played by person characteristics; third, although this was always implicit in his concern with process, he made increasingly explicit his discussion of time, both longitudinal and historical. By the late 1990s, he had renamed his theory “bioecological,” placed “proximal processes” (oft-repeated engagement in activities and interactions, increasing in complexity) at the heart of his theory, and provided more detail about the different types of person characteristics that influence proximal processes as well as about different ways of conceptualizing time. Bronfenbrenner referred to the operational design to be used to test the theory as the process-person-context-time (PPCT) model.

Explaining Literacy Development from a Bioecological Systems Framework: Affordances and Challenges

Abstract: Elizabeth Jaeger’s interesting article [this issue, pp. 163–187] takes on the rather challenging yet exciting task of extrapolating Bronfenbrenner’s seminal theory of human development [Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998] to a new domain, not covered by the original proposal. After presenting an overview of the evolution of Bronfenbrenner’s comprehensive bioecological theory, she shows with considerable skill how this framework could be used to account for the development of literacy, at both theoretical and empirical levels. The paper thus contributes significantly to this latter field by providing a useful theoretical perspective that can aid researchers to explain developmental literacy processes in a broad and systematic fashion. In the next sections I will highlight some of Jaeger’s main contributions in the context of advances in the field of human development in general and of development of literacy in particular. I will first present a brief overview of some affordances of Bronfenbrenner’s theoretical paradigm to account for human development, in the light of other seminal theories in the field. In the second section I will point at some strengths of Jaeger’s accounts of literacy development using a bioecological system perspective. In closing, I will explore some possible future avenues researchers might take to move the field forward, as well as some challenges that accompany this enterprise.

The Development of Ethical Civic Actors in Divided Societies: A Longitudinal Case

Abstract: This 4-year case study of the development of Gabriela, as civic actor during secondary school, comes from a cross-national study of civic development in divided societies. Her case contributes to developmental theory and adds to civics research by exploring how school, family, and community are intertwined with civic development. Gabriela's ethical civic development is both remarkable and uneven. She overcomes seemingly insurmountable struggles to project her voice in the world. Her story shows the critical nature of intertwined support from her school and family to make this growth possible. Her remaining struggle - to acknowledge the needs of those from other societal groups in relation to her community's substantial needs - shows the complexity of satisfying multiple groups' needs at once in divided societies. We conclude with the addition of the concept of “macrosupports” and “microsupports” to explain how the school, other institutions, and the student grow reciprocally.

Finally! A Developmental Science that Privileges Development

Abstract: There is something quite curious about the history of the study of human development. On the one hand, a part of this history involves a broad acknowledgment that developmental science involves the description, explanation, and optimization of change within an individual across the life span and of differences among individuals in within-person change [e.g., Baltes, Reese, & Nesselroade, 1977; Lerner, 2012, 2015]. On the other hand, another part of this history has involved a concerted search for the absence of change across the life span. Instances of this facet of the history of developmental science have involved a search for continuities and constancies across the life span [Brim & Kagan, 1980] and, as well, have entailed presuppositions of connectivity [Kagan, 1980], either between early experience and later life [e.g., for a review, see Clarke & Clarke, 1976] or between the genes received at conception (the genotype) and subsequent features of the mature organism [for reviews, see Gould, 1981, and Witherington & Lickliter, 2016]. Examples of this latter, predetermined link between genes and ontogenetically realized features of the individual include reductionist and essentialist discussions of cognitive/intellectual functioning [e.g., Burt, 1958; Eysenck, 1980; Jensen, 1969], personality [Costa & McCrae, 1980, 2006], temperament [e.g., Buss & Plomin, 1984; Sheldon, 1942], morality [e.g., Freedman, 1979; Rushton, 2000], and sexuality, reproduction, and parenting [Belsky, Steinberg, & Draper, 1991; Bjorklund, 2015, 2016; Bjorklund & Ellis. 2005]. In fact, in some writing [e.g., neo-Eugenicist essays such as Belsky, 2014] there have been warnings that attempts to systematically change the course of development through “progressive” interventions are fruitless and a waste of money because “some children” have genes that make such attempts to change the course of their behavior impossible. In other words, despite being a field defined by an interest in understanding the features and bases of change across life, there has been an attempt to “explain development away” by many people claiming to be interested in the study of developmen-

Piaget, Probability, Causality, and Contradiction

Abstract: The goal of the Tourmen [this issue] paper is to provide a systematic review of the Piagetian literature, with the objective of more fully understanding the links between Piaget and modern probabilistic models of learning. This is a worthy aim, and the paper is quite interesting. Piaget was one of the foundational thinkers in the field, upon whose ideas the edifice of modern developmental psychology is built. Probabilistic models of learning are a recent but highly successful approach to understanding human cognition. Although probabilistic models did not emerge directly from Piaget’s thinking, it can be useful and enlightening to trace the historical commonalities and divergences between the two. More profoundly, it is especially useful for current theorists to occasionally look back from whence we came, to ensure that the valuable insights and ideas of yesteryear are not lost in the hubbub and excitement of engaging with the new approaches and tools of the present. My goal in this commentary is to synthesize and build on some of the key points of the Tourmen paper. The overall aim is to contextualize and elaborate on what probabilistic models are and what they offer, as well as to highlight some Piagetian insights that our theories nowadays would do well to grapple more with. To that end, the first part of this paper focuses on making some important distinctions between core principles of the probabilistic approach, theoretical implications that (sometimes, but not always) follow from those principles, and empirical findings that are relevant to researchers who adopt the approach, but that themselves incorporate no special reliance on it. The second part turns to Piaget’s insights, focusing on those that are

Morality: Cooperation Is Fundamental but It Is Not Enough to Ensure the Fair Treatment of Others

Abstract: Tomasello [2015] has authored a compelling and novel book regarding the natural history of morality. Distinct from investigating the origins and development of morality from infancy to adulthood [Killen & Smetana, 2015], Tomasello [2015] theorizes about how morality originated in Homo sapiens, and what it might have looked like as it evolved from early humans to modern humans [Tomasello, 2015; Vaish & Tomasello, 2014]. Paralleling his book on a natural history of human thinking [Tomasello, 2014], Tomasello’s book on morality draws on his twenty years of comparative studies with children and great apes to document how evolution enabled humans to be ultracooperative animals. In his morality book, Tomasello [2015] makes three central points: (a) morality is rooted in our evolutionary past and stems from cooperation and interdependence (group-minded thinking); (b) “second-personal agency,” defined as morality in the form of sympathy and personal relationships, precedes objective and impartial morality in the natural history story as well as in the ontogenetic developmental one; and (c) children understand morality prior to formal teaching and socialization. Central to Tomasello’s [2015] theory is the parallel change from early to modern humans and from the infant to the 3.5-year-old child, which is a proposed change from a “me” focus (self-oriented survival), to “you,” which reflects the emergence of an interacting dyadic relationship (such as with a parent or sibling), to the “we” position, which reflects the interdependence that emerges with a group affiliation. Morality emerges as a form of sympathy that Tomasello [2015] frames in terms of “secondpersonal agency,” drawing on Darwall’s [2006] theory about the second person standpoint (morality as a form of interpersonal obligation). Morality emerges as objective moral codes with the awareness of the group (we) in modern humans and as shown in young children by the age of 3.5 years. In Tomasello’s framework, affiliation with nonkin others becomes the group, and in this context, morality is a form of shared intentionality about the treatment of others.

The Plot Thickens: Personality and Its Development

Abstract: Developmental psychologists of a certain age will remember a time when studying developmental change and individual differences were two very different lines of work, each with different theoretical traditions, methodologies and empirical objectives. By the 1980s, developmental psychologists were mostly concerned with mapping patterns of ontogenetic variation that tended towards some ideal telos of adaptive accomplishment. Charting the stage and sequence of intraindividual transformation of some skill, concept or behavior over time was a major research objective. Personality psychologists, for their part, wanted to track stable patterns of interindividual variability. They sought to discern the structure of personality and map the taxonomy of individual differences manifested as broad-based dispositional traits. But intraindividual development and individual differences in the structure of personality were two topics not often raised in the same conversation. There were exceptions, of course. Loevinger’s [1976] theory of ego development was capacious enough to fold within its purview wide swaths of personality functioning organized as milestones across nine levels of hierarchical development. Indeed, Loevinger [1966] presented ego development “not as one interesting personality trait among many, but as the master trait,” second only to intelligence in accounting for individual differences (p. 205). For Loevinger [1966] the ego is an organizing frame of reference that pulls together divergent experience, including interpersonal and cognitive style, conscious preoccupations and impulse control, and its existence and development can no more be doubted than that chromosomes contain DNA, although quantitative approaches like factor analysis are unlikely to find it (in her view). Loevinger’s [1966, 1976] ego development was considered one of two distinct traditions in personality research, the other being the dimensional or individual difference approach. While there was some interest in exploring how trait models of personality aligned with ego level – openness to experience appeared to fare better

Building upon the CALLA Framework: The Intersection of Novel Problem Solving and Applied Wisdom.

Abstract: The major issue with cognitive training interventions for older adults is that they typically fail to result in enduring skills that elicit far transfer – cognitive abilities that generalize to other independent functions [for exception, see Rebok et al., 2014]. In their novel Cognitive Agility across the Lifespan via Learning and Attention (CALLA) framework, Wu, Rebok, and Lin [2016] tackle this issue by exploring the optimal bioecological factors in early life that are most conducive to broad learning and the development of skills that generalize. Next, they frame the six critical factors that promote broad learning (basic cognitive abilities and far transfer of skills) and examine how they change over the life course. These factors offer implications for interventions designed at fostering neuroplasticity in the aging brain. Our commentary offers some additional important contributions of the CALLA framework to existing models and poses challenges and opportunities in the design of cognitive interventions that facilitate skills that far transfer for older adults. Specifically, this framework makes additional contributions as we extend it here to the bioecological systems framework and to engagement interventions. From here, we also identify the following challenges of implementing the factors of CALLA into cognitive interventions for older adults, including motivational shifts away from learning goals (socioemotional selectivity theory) and disposition towards certainty compared to novelty. Lastly, we identify the opportunities to create conditions that leverage older adults to apply their experience, knowledge, and skills towards novel problem solving.

Collective Practices of Human Development in Political Violence and Its Long Shadow

Abstract: Research on human development in violently and rapidly changing contexts requires innovative concepts, methods, and outcomes. Toward that end, articles in this issue focus on practice-based research i

Positioning Children in Developmental Analyses of Cultural Conflicts

Abstract: In this commentary on intervention studies in times and situations of war, violence and cultural conflict, I focus on the need to appropriately position children in specific situations. This involves acknowledging their presence and their rights, recognizing their participation, and incorporating their activities with the sociocultural and ecological environments. To theoretically position children in cultural conflict, I draw on Gottlieb's [1991] concept of “coaction” to analyze relations between agentic children and culture in a system of coactions. I propose the coacting system as an appropriate unit of analysis for understanding children's development and as a basis for intervention and policy following violence and cultural conflict. The papers in this special issue demand that developmental science attend to children's presence, participation, and activities as the basis for intervention and research.

Probabilities over What

Abstract: Tourmen [this issue] gives an overview of a number of convergences and divergences between some contemporary probabilistic models of learning and development and Piaget’s model. Tourmen’s points are interesting and important, but so are also some caveats concerning the relationships between probabilistic models and Piaget’s model, which are given limited attention. I elaborate on some of those caveats. Models of learning focusing on the learning of probabilistic relationships have expanded over recent years. It is clear, and clear in Piaget’s work, that this is an important field of thought and development. There are at least two prominent species of such models in the current literature: one derived from Bayesian models of causality and causal inference, and another known roughly as “predictive brain” models. This article focuses exclusively on the first and so will also my commen ts. 1 Tourmen lays out very nicely multiple ways in which the Bayesian net causal model framework has some convergences with Piaget’s model; I will not rehearse those here. She also mentions in one or two sentences some differences which I argue are fundamental, and, therefore, at least partially undercut some of the more expansive claims made for the Bayesian net modeling approach. I first note that Bayes is a decision rule: it yields probabilistic information concerning the “best” selection to be made – the best decision among alternatives – in a specific Bayes’ rule sense. It is a powerful decision rule, but just one among many [e.g., Berger, 2010; Ferguson, 1967]. Decision rules involve varying kinds and degrees of power, with some, for example, being (under some circumstances) specific versions

In-Human Development: A Micro-Cultures Alternative

Abstract: In the intricate process of human development, the social construction and imposition of the idea of race and its hierarchy of categories contributes to “in-human” development. In the USA particularly, racial categories have been delineated around certain identity contingencies [Steele, 2010], and despite being inaccurate and unscientific, they are used to forcefully, yet problematically shape human identities and development. Nearly two decades into the 21st century, globally shared events and innovations work to simultaneously deconstruct and reconstruct the idea of race. The Trump campaign for the Presidency of the USA propagating white identity politics and the rise in Europe of similar political forces are examples of these kinds of pivotal events. The development and pervasive use of social media and other digital texts and tools are pivotal innovations. As innovation intersects with and ultimately becomes events, personal identity development can be enabled or constrained in myriad ways. In this essay we argue that human development is best served by understanding and engaging micro-cultural identities and affinities of each individual in society – attributes and practices that are veiled by color-coded categories of race. Then we suggest how unique micro-cultural positioning, practices, choices, and perspectives of individuals raise important questions for research and educational practices connected to identity and human development. Identity contingencies like skin color, facial features, hair type, and body size are linked to how we are socially constructed and treated in society as well as how we interact with the world [Steele, 2010]. However, in outlining enabling aspects of digital media, Gee [2003] indicated the significance of identity affinities. This idea is that people (and particularly youth) utilize digital affordances to develop selective group affinities through which membership or participation is defined primarily by shared endeavors, goals, and practices, rather than shared race, gender, nation, ethnicity, or culture. Gee [2013] further delineated a collateral concept of “activity-based identities,” the freely chosen practices that contribute to grounding and delineating a person’s sense of self. These practices can reflect resident and emerging forms of social organization, and they can be (but do not necessarily have to be) digitally mediated.

Child Developmentalists Engage the Media: How to Enrich a Rocky Romance

Abstract: The task of informing civic debate over the nurturing of children has long intrigued scholars, from philosophers and developmental psychologists to social scientists and, of late, economists. Comenius sketched likely stages of cognitive growth in the seventeenth century, a scheme from which Piaget drew heavily. But after the Moravian educator had advised Swedish Protestants on how to spread public schools, Polish Catholics torched his home and precious manuscripts [Gilman, Thurston, & Colby, 1905]. Or take pioneering work by Robert Hess and Virgina Shipman in the 1950s, unearthing the denigrating effects on early development from dismal home environs in parts of Chicago. Their work led to a telling contestation of the very construct of inborn intelligence. It also shaped Ed Zigler’s formulation of Project Headstart, building from Yale’s activist history, earlier led by Kurt Lewin. The trumpeting of preschool by presidential candidates – going back to dueling child care platforms of George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis in 1980 – stems directly from the mounting and generally encouraging findings of scholars from allied disciplines. What is new is that scholars and research funders, such as the National Institutes of Health, have gingerly fostered a “relationship,” as authors Robert Crosnoe and Tama Leventhal [2016] put it, with the media and policymakers over the past generation. The scholarly instinct remains virtuous, to inject hard evidence into often ideologically driven disputes – like who or what settings best contribute to the robust growth of young children. Yet researchers often happen upon a rather fickle partner in this liaison, smart and wily journalists who operate from differing motivations, distinct guiding principles, as detailed in this provocative little volume, Debating Early Child Care . For their part, once this intricate romance gets under way, scholars often reveal their own emotions and underlying ideals, not simply their piously dispassionate selves (or findings). There is no simple and unfettered truth spoken to a single font of power, to twist the late Aaron Wildavsky’s [1979] book title. The provocative case on which Crosnoe and Leventhal focus involves the work of the Early Child Care Research Network. This team carried out the monumental