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.
*Cognitive Science events at CEU:
http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events*
_______________________________________________
Subscribe by sending an empty mail to seminars-subscribe(a)cdc.ceu.hu
Unsubscribe by sending an empty mail to seminars-unsubscribe(a)cdc.ceu.hu