PLEASE NOTE: This talk will take place on a different day than usual!
Our seminar room has a limited capacity. Please arrive
early to ensure you get a seat. The talk will begin promptly at 5.
The next talk in the CDC seminar series will be given by:
Heidi Keller, University of Osnabrück
Date: FRIDAY, April 20, 2012, 5 PM
Location: CEU Cognitive Development Center, Hattyú u. 14, 3rd floor
Infancy curricula: Cultural conceptions of natural pedagogy
Abstract: Infancy is the life phase in human ontogeny with the fastest
developmental pace. Psychologists and neuroscientists have therefore
argued that infancy is especially important for laying the ground for
developmental trajectories. From an evolutionary perspective, infancy
does not only serve as a preparatory period to acquire competencies
that are important for later life, but also to adapt to the environment
to ensure survival and thriving. Humans are endowed with behavioral
dispositions that are particularly suited to support infant development,
i.e. with natural pedagogy. Yet, the environmental challenges and
affordances differ substantially, so that there is not one pedagogy,
that fits all infants. In this presentation, infancy curricula will be
discussed from two very divergent environments: Western middle class
families, who cover about 5% of the world’ s population, but determine
largely our mainstream understanding of development, and subsistence
based farmer families, who cover about 30 to 40 % of the world’ s
population but are grossly underrepresented in our textbooks. Families
in these two contexts have completely different cultural worldviews and
infancy curricula accordingly. It is argued that development can be
understood as the cultural solution of universal developmental tasks.
Caregivers are endowed with a universal parenting repertoire from which
cultural styles have emerged. Cultural variation is not random, but has
to be considered systematically if development is to be understood from a
global scale.
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