Teaching Students to Think Culturally About Developmental Psychology
Learn how human development varies by culture from Clark University’s Lene Arnett Jensen, Senior Research Scientist, and Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Senior Research Scholar. Teach students to focus on cultural influence.
Lene Arnett Jensen, Senior Research Scientist, Clark University
Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Senior Research Scholar, Clark University
Human cultures are marvelously diverse, and human development from infancy through late adulthood varies vastly according to cultural context. Thus far in psychology’s history, the focus of most research and theory on development psychology has been on a relatively narrow band of human cultural experience: Western, especially American. However, in recent decades, developmental psychology has expanded to include a greater proportion of the world’s people. Also, the United States and other Western countries have become more culturally diverse, due to migration and immigration, sparking increased interest in the relations between psychological development and cultural context. The focus of this presentation will be on ways to encourage students to think culturally about development, within and across countries. The presentation is intended to be relevant to both novice and experienced teachers who wish to learn more about how to teach effectively about the cultural contexts of development.
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About the speakers
Lene Arnett Jensen, Senior Research Scientist, Clark University
Lene Arnett Jensen is Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. She received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology in 1994 from the University of Chicago and did a 1-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to coming to Clark University, she taught at the University of Missouri and Catholic University of America. She has also been a visiting professor at Stanford University, Aalborg University in Denmark, Maharaja Sayajirao University in India and the University of Bordeaux in France. She has taught courses on child development for close to 30 years.
Through scholarship and professional collaboration, she aims to move the discipline of psychology toward understanding development in terms of both what is universal and what is cultural. She terms this a “cultural-developmental approach.” Her research addresses moral development and cultural identity formation. Together with her students, she has conducted research in countries such as Denmark, India, Thailand, Turkey and the United States. Her publications include New Horizons in Developmental Theory and Research (2005, with Reed Larson, Jossey-Bass/Wiley), Immigrant Civic Engagement: New Translations (2008, with Constance Flanagan, Taylor-Francis), Bridging Cultural and Developmental Psychology: New Syntheses for Theory, Research and Policy (2011, Oxford University Press), the Oxford Handbook of Human Development and Culture (2015, Oxford University Press), Moral Development in a Global World: Research from a Cultural-Developmental Perspective (2015, Cambridge University Press) and the Oxford Handbook of Moral Development (in press, Oxford University Press).
From 2004 to 2015, she was editor-in-chief for the journal New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development (with Reed Larson). She served as program chair for the 2012 biennial conference of the Society for Research on Adolescence (with Xinyin Chen), and currently serves on awards committees for the Society for Research on Child Development (SRCD) and the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA). Visit her website for more information.
Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Senior Research Scholar, Clark University
Jeffrey Jensen Arnett is a Senior Research Scholar in the Department of Psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He received his Ph.D. in developmental psychology in 1986 from the University of Virginia, and did 3 years of postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago. From 1992 through 1998 he was Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Missouri, where he taught a 300-student life span development course every semester. In the fall of 2005, he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark; in 2010 and 2011 he was the Nehru Chair at Maharaja Sayajirao University in India; and in 2017 and 2018 he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Bordeaux in France.
His primary scholarly interest for the past 25 years has been in emerging adulthood. He coined the term, and he has conducted research on emerging adults concerning a wide variety of topics, involving several different ethnic groups in American society. He is the Founding President and Executive Director of the Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood (SSEA; www.ssea.org). From 2005 to 2014 he was the editor of the Journal of Adolescent Research (JAR), and currently he is on the Editorial Board of JAR and five other journals. He has published many theoretical and research papers on emerging adulthood in peer-reviewed journals, as well as the book Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties (2015, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press), among many others. Visit his website for more information.
Jeff and Lene live in Worcester, Massachusetts, with their twins, Miles and Paris.