Towards a global theory of child development

Overview:

How do children learn and grow? Many researchers have theorised around different aspects of child development, including how they learn words, how education should work, and how children interact with peers and families. Many of these theories of child development were constructed in similar settings, often based on middle-class settings in the Global North. New theories that represent global childhood need to be created to understand how children really develop in a majority of the world’s communities. In light of this, our interdisciplinary team aims to create new theories through dialogue.

In this IAS RDP, the team will flesh out one planned work package on the topic of child development and futurity. In developmental psychology, infant vocabulary is considered the building block of later language acquisition, predicting cognitive outcomes and school and academic success. Infant vocabulary is measured using standardised tests which are laden with unexamined middle-class assumptions about what words children should know, and what value they should bring to the world as adults. During Nazi rule, Napola schools educated pupils to embody the qualities desired in the next generation of Third Reich leaders. Among the Romani people of Northern England, stories told around the campfire reflect cultural narratives of what children can do, and who they will become. From school curriculum battles to social media restrictions, from climate to demographic anxiety, the stories we tell about children's futures shape the types of learning environments we curate for them.

There have been longstanding calls to understand child development from an ecological systems perspective (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), yet interdisciplinary theory-building is rarely applied to this endeavor. The field of developmental psychology has focused on individuals and their immediate environment (“microsystems”), like their families and schools. In contrast, the humanities (i.e., ‘childhood studies’) have focused on the cultural, historical, and political systems that construct our understanding of childhood (“macrosystems”), and how these change through time (“chronosystem”). By engaging in interdisciplinary dialogue, we aim to develop a holistic picture regarding how imagined futures and desired developmental outcomes actively organize how childhood unfolds.

As a first step, in this project, the team will focus on how the futures we want for children—which are mediated by cultural and historical factors—shape the learning environments we create for them in the present. In a two-day workshop scholars will be brought together from psychology, the humanities, and policy experts to discuss theories of childhood. Each exhibitor will use an object, known as a ‘boundary object’ to present their discipline’s view of childhood, and then in the second workshop members will provide counter interpretations. After meaningful dialogue, a paper will be developed, and an interactive exhibit demonstrating a shared vocabulary and theoretical learnings about childhood.