Ashley E. Maynard

Cultural Teaching: The Development of Teaching Skills in Maya Sibling Interactions.

Psychology has considered the development of learning, but the development of teaching in childhood has not been considered. The data presented in this article demonstrate that children develop teaching skills over the course of middle childhood. Seventy-two Maya children (25 boys, 47 girls) ranging in age from 3 to 11 years (M = 6.8 years) were videotaped in sibling caretaking interactions with their 2-year-old brothers and sisters (18 boys, 18 girls). In the context of play, older siblings taught their younger siblings how to do everyday tasks such as washing and cooking. Ethnographic observations, discourse analyses, and quantification of discourse findings showed that childrens teaching skills increased over the course of middle childhood. By the age of 4 years, children took responsibility for initiating teaching situations with their toddler siblings. By the age of 8 years, children were highly skilled in using talk combined with manual demonstrations, verbal feedback, explanations, and guiding the body of younger learners. Childrens developing competence in teaching helped their younger siblings increase their participation in culturally important tasks.

Burdens and difficulties experienced by caregivers of children and adolescents with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders: a qualitative study.

Aim: The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the burdens and difficulties associated with the experience of caring for youth with schizophrenia‐spectrum disorders.

Implications of Commerce and Urbanization for the Learning Environments of Everyday Life A Zinacantec Maya Family Across Time and Space

In recent decades, Maya ecocultural environments in Chiapas, Mexico, have undergone continuous change from more subsistence based to more commerce based and from more rural to more urban. Through ethnographic observations of one family during a 10-year period in rural and urban settings, activity settings analysis revealed changes on the micro level that reflected these shifts in the macro environment. The development of commerce between 1997 and 2007 led to increased reliance on technology, increases in individuation and individual choice, specialization for economic tasks, and for women, more formal education. Other changes in this period that were greatly intensified by urban dwelling included contact with strangers, contact with people of different ethnicities, and women’s economic achievement. Urban dwelling also introduced freedom for young women to have unchaperoned contact with young men.

What We Thought We Knew and How We Came to Know It: Four Decades of Cross-Cultural Research from a Piagetian Point of View

The major tenets of Piagetian theory, such as adaptation and constructionism, are compatible with a cross-cultural approach to the study of cognitive development, but there have been significant methodological and theoretical advances over the past 40 years. Piagetian theory directly influenced three phases of cross-cultural research, ranging from absolutist to relativist. As researchers incorporated the study of contexts of development, particularly cross-cultural contexts, new methods expanded the available toolbox of approaches. Recent directions in historical research, narrative and discourse research, and cognitive developmental neuroscience have helped to shed light on processes and mechanisms of developmental change and their relationship to culture.

Women's Schooling and Other Ecocultural Shifts: A Longitudinal Study of Historical Change among the Zinacantec Maya.

Womens schooling has been lauded as having a large, important impact on child socialization. Although there may be positive effects of schooling, there may also be effects from concomitant cultural changes that come with modernization. In this article we examine the findings that changes in textile production among the Zinacantec Maya over the past several decades have been coordinated with several cultural changes, including increased schooling for women, involvement in a growing commercial economy, and television. Understanding these various changes leads to a more nuanced picture of the effects of cultural change on womens activities. Our findings indicate that research on globalization and social change should consider multiple possible effects on cultural practices.

Jerome Bruner: Reflections of a Developmental Psychologist

C.L.: You started as a psychologist, not as a developmental psychologist. Why did you switch your interests from adults to children and their development? J.B.: Well, I don’t really think of it as switching my interests. I was always interested in how people get their knowledge of the world, how they organize it to make it fit the situations in which they must live, and how they use their knowledge to change their world and the culture in which they find themselves. That’s what the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’ was all about. And there are many ways of going about such a job. You can study it in the laboratory, or by comparing cultures like an anthropologist, or look at it from an evolutionary perspective, or study it developmentally. Now, as you know, people have lots of different ideas about mental life and how it grows. Some take a very nativist view, others are empiricists, and some of us firmly believe that you can’t really separate the two in a fruitful way that the two interact in subtle and ingenious ways. I was at Harvard in those days, at the newly founded Center for Cognitive Studies, studying perception, memory, attention, and the like. And soon we were into developmental studies. And I found myself brooding about developmental processes – like those that you find in infancy. Reading the literature wasn’t much help. Too little on infancy. I went to visit Piaget; his answers to my questions didn’t help much. Too little about the settings in which children live, or about the differences produced by those settings. Alas, Lev Vygotsky had long since passed away, so I wasn’t able to visit him. I decided I’d better have a look at infancy all on my own – and with the good advice of the likes of my friend and colleague, Berry Brazelton, a renowned expert on infancy who, in fact, had been pediatrician to my own children. C.L.: You did more than that, though. You began studying infancy, taking not only the child into account, but also his mother and her reactions to the child. J.B.: Well, what soon became clear was that mental life – and what we call ‘intelligence’ – is interactive, not just within the individual’s head. Intelligence depends hugely on interaction, on understanding what others have in mind – what we now refer to as ‘intersubjectivity.’ I was struck, for example, at how children direct their attention, how they follow their mother’s line of regard, searching out what she might be looking at or looking for. Or how a 2-year-old tries to get his mother to look at what he’s attending to, even by trying to move her head to what he’s focused on. Things of that sort, it soon occurred to me, were unique to our human species. Perhaps even uniquely characteristic of our species.