Abstract
This paper describes the influence of Erica Burman’s book Deconstructing Developmental Psychology in one university department over two decades. To illustrate, three colleagues describe their separate geographical and theoretical journeys towards critical study of human development. Ongoing influences of Burman’s work in Aotearoa New Zealand are outlined. In particular, Burman’s view—that development is socially constructed within particular cultural, economic and historical circumstances—has become central to our research and university curriculum.
Keywords
Introduction
This commentary shows how the publication of Erica Burman’s (1994) book, Deconstructing Developmental Psychology, influenced the personal research trajectory of the authors and a generation of university students of human development and developmental psychology in Aotearoa New Zealand. Not only have many students over the past 20 years been asked to engage with Burman’s writing, the ideas have also challenged academic staff, and taken a specific university department—ours—in new directions. The critiques have indeed been “a vital resource for childhood and educational researchers to scrutinise the developmental claims they may be tempted either to invoke or to refuse” (Burman, 2008a, p. ix) and have become central to our department’s research as well as to the curriculum created for undergraduate and postgraduate students of development and difference.
Aotearoa New Zealand is becoming increasingly culturally diverse in the years since our personal journeys brought us here from various parts of the globe. Today our department works to offer a curriculum that reflects the horizon-altering diversity of constant change. For example, recent Ministry of Education figures show 47% of 5-year-olds at school are identified as having ethnicities other than European (Education Counts, 2013), indicating an increasing cultural diversity for future generations. Over a quarter of families with children are headed by sole parents, 83% of whom are mothers (Families Commission, 2012). Burman’s theoretical groundwork gives us important tools for addressing the multiple complexities of children’s lives in our country.
Several specific concerns of Burman’s (1994, 2008a) DDP have been crucial for our department’s approach. DDP has helped us to interrogate the historical, cultural, and socioeconomic settings in which “development” of humans is constructed, a move helpful for foregrounding indigenous Māori perspectives. There has also been support for contesting the measurements used to chart normative progress in development. Finally, our collective work has been strengthened by Burman’s feminist critique of unquestioned assumptions of traditional developmental studies, particularly regarding expected norms of heterosexual partnerships, nuclear families, mothering, and child-centred practice.
Reflections below from three staff in a Department of Human Development and Counselling chart our journeys in developmental study. We highlight first encounters with Burman’s work and describe how this work challenged our views of the status quo and suggested new possibilities for our engagements with “development.” A second section considers ways that DDP continues to shake up our curriculum and assessment in our already geographically shaky country in the Pacific.
How DDP helped us move beyond traditional developmental approaches
Sally Peters
My first taste of child development literature was as a young mother in Scotland reading guides to pregnancy and early childhood and progressed to studying child development. These courses, designed for parents, explored some of the influences on children and families but offered little explicit theory.
A move to New Zealand in the mid-1980s led to university enrolment in teacher education. A first-year course emphasised the work of Piaget and Kohlberg and stage theories were learnt by heart. In a brief acknowledgement of possible cultural differences, the text allowed that the rate of acquisition of concepts might vary but the sequence would be the same. Later in my degree, aspects of the construction of such theories were questioned (e.g. we replicated interviews developed by Donaldson and Hughes to see how language and presentation altered young children’s responses to traditional Piagetian tasks).
When I reached master’s level in the early 1990s, Vygotsky and other sociocultural theorists were introduced. We explored deeper developmental critiques located within relevant cultural, historical and political contexts with writers such as Fleer (1995), James and Prout (1990), and Morss and Linzey (1991). Increasingly interested in how ideas originate in time and place and then travel elsewhere, I analysed examination questions and set texts in education papers over a 20-year period. This assignment allowed me to trace how developmental ideas from Europe and the U.S. had been introduced to Aotearoa New Zealand.
The 1990s was a time of historical re-acknowledgement of the Treaty of Waitangi as the founding document for the country. The work of Māori scholars offered an indigenous perspective for human development that resonated more widely, notably in the development of Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996), our bicultural Early Childhood Curriculum (see Reedy, 2003). Māori scholars (e.g. Tangaere, 1997) challenged Euro-western accounts of development, providing fresh insights for growing critiques within developmental psychology. The juxtaposition of Māori and Euro-western perspectives in university classes threw the latter into sharp relief, e.g. the family could be no longer defined as a traditional nuclear model in contrast to the Māori extended whānau (family). Growing up in England in a family where three grandparents lived in the home with us, and aware of streets where whole families lived in close proximity, I found myself distanced from what was supposedly “my story.” No wonder others were scrutinising and deconstructing developmental ideas!
For me, DDP provided a welcome critique of some dominant developmental theories and a chance to evaluate some of the cultural assumptions underpinning my own knowledge and the university curriculum. In addition, her images and discussion of the single, male child as the subject of developmental psychology, and the way women, specifically mothers, are positioned by our views about children (see also Burman, 2001), emphasised for me the importance of understanding gender as well as culture within developmental frameworks. In my PhD (Peters, 2004), I was able to juxtapose Polynesian and Euro-western views of development to reflect on how different theories shape our understanding and how the child, family members and teachers are positioned by particular discourses.
Ashlie Brink
My earliest recollection of working with theories of child development was in my Home Economics (Domestic Science) class in High School in South Africa in the 1990s. We worked our way through an international textbook that covered Maslow, Erikson, Freud, and Piaget, and that, in many respects, was far removed from our own lives. I could proudly reel off the correct ages, stages, and implications of each of these and more!
What always plagued me, though, was how we were religiously taught that the above theories were the “truth” about child development and that there was little room in the curriculum to critique these details that I had so studiously memorised. I remember wondering how it was that we were learning about proud milestones in a child’s development when I was in an exclusive school for children with physical disabilities, and the majority of my school peers were unlikely to achieve the milestones in quite the way promised in our text. It was not until much later in my adult life that Burman’s writing, alongside work of many others with critical perspectives, provided a space to help me grapple with these perplexing issues and to question the dominant discourses of the time.
As an undergraduate Initial Teacher Educator living in New Zealand, Piagetian tasks still dominated our course at the time. Our readings were traditional U.S. texts that featured Vygotsky and Erikson, but there was more encouragement to explore children’s development from both a Euro-western and a Māori perspective. It was during this time that I hungered for an alternative to the dominant notions of child development that I was encouraged to regurgitate. Burman’s work addressed the oppressive discourses around racism, typical development and gender, all of which I endeavoured to challenge as I was growing up.
My PhD research focuses largely on young children, particularly children who identify neither as children nor as teenagers, but rather as tweens (in between a child and a teenager) (see Kirk, Mitchell, & Reid-Welsh, 2010). Traditional ideas about the chronology of developmental stages offer little room for emerging categories in human development such as “toddlerhood” or “tweens” (Burman, 2008a). When presenting my research to undergraduates, I am often challenged by questions from students about the sexualisation of children and views that young people either no longer have a childhood or that childhood is in crisis. DDP helps to counter the romantic images of the child as innocent, and provides many ideas for reflection around children’s rights and voices.
Lise Claiborne
Critical threads were emerging when I first studied developmental psychology as an undergraduate in Australia. Due to my own ineptitude in figuring out the university system, I had enrolled for an optional popular psychology course that ran alongside a more experimental course taken by students planning to major in psychology. The former course relied heavily on the more prurient ideas of Freud to enliven lectures to bored young students. The entirely different customs and cultural assumptions of contemporary and historical societies analysed by Freud fascinated me, and of course these are threads that Burman has continued in her critical work in developmental psychology and as a group psychoanalyst.
A change of universities allowed me to major in psychology. My cognitive development lecturer was an advocate of Alexander Luria, whom he thought vastly superior to Piaget. His lectures introduced me to critical Russian views, including those of Vygotsky, but since his manner towards young women seemed to me sexist and patronising, I happily turned towards the cognitive revolution sweeping psychology in the 1970s. This was an early wave of anti-developmentalism, where age was seen as an uncontrollable independent variable (because children could not be assigned randomly to age groups) unworthy of serious experimental psychology.
Later, in my graduate studies at another Australian university, I became more interested in Piagetian theory. Though I was still immersed in cognitive ideology at the time, I was intrigued by reports from cross-cultural Piagetians working in indigenous communities in central Australia and Papua New Guinea. The reflective, open-ended discussions about just what was “natural” or “cultural” in children helped to prepare the ground for being able to see educational practices that surveil and monitor the “normal” development of the child (see Walkerdine, 1984). This was the first time I had been exposed to researchers who de-centred the dominant Euro-western perspective, questioning (if not refuting) the received wisdom about young children’s expected difficulties on the path to coordinated movement, logic and social understanding. Historically, this happened after protest activity related to the Vietnam War, which had led to greater (if often simplistic) student concerns about racism and colonialism. These moves towards the de-centring of the dominant, affluent Euro-western or “northern” perspective on development were later put into clearer and more elegant confluence in DDP.
When I got a job teaching human development in New Zealand, a national seminar held at Massey University in the early 1990s brought together a collection of developmental researchers, including indigenous Māori, interested in critiques that could take the field further. John Morss, recently arrived from the UK, was crucial in bringing to the country his own critical views of development (Morss, 1996) and facilitating contact with Burman.
How DDP influenced a university department “down under”
Burman’s work has been pivotal in helping the authors and our university department shape an undergraduate curriculum around the social constructions of “the child” (as well as “the adolescent” or “adult”). We teach a major in human development and core papers for a number of teaching qualifications, as well as offerings for psychology and social work students.
The work helps us to question narrow normative expectations of development and to imagine new ways to think about the worlds experienced by technologically savvy young people who may also experience lives of poverty or abuse in the home, rather than the universal story of developmental progress. We hope that our own students, aided by further engagement with Burman’s work, will challenge us further in our struggles with developmental prescriptions.
Questions asked by Burman have also pushed us to think more critically about how shifts in capitalism have continued to produce new discursive formations around childhood. Burman’s (2008a) coverage of dilemmas around child protection, children’s rights, and gender have been of great importance for our department’s engagement with international concerns regarding the exploitation of women and children, particularly girls, for their labour and sexuality (for the latter, see the work of Child Alert, www.ecpat.org.nz). In addition, our colleague Monica Payne has made a critique of notions of childhood sexualisation a key part of our developmental curriculum.
In our classes students grapple with the way competing discourses may “do battle inside our own heads” (Stainton-Rogers, cited in Jenks, 2000, p. 68). Burman’s texts provide a key tool for making discourses more open to deconstruction. For example, an exercise in one course is based on a suggested activity at the end of a DDP chapter. Students are asked to examine a range of popular and research sources about children in order to consider their normative, sexist and Eurocentric assumptions.
Burman’s (1994) challenge to the myth of norms can be seen in her view that “normative descriptions provided by developmental psychology slip into naturalised prescription” (p. 16), though paradoxically the assumed “norms” describe very few people. This critique is still salient for many professions; e.g. New Zealand teachers are required to measure and report on expected performance by year level. Without such critical understanding, there is danger of an easy slippage from description to prescription that such norms can invoke, making the “contingent conditions – and contestable assumptions – which gave rise to this norm become rendered invisible” (Burman, 2001, p. 9).
Since more indigenous students have come to developmental study in the past 15 years, we make explicit links between the postcolonial stance of DDP and the concerns of indigenous groups in our area. A positive result of our work to encourage students to read DDP—despite its difficulty as a text—is the amazement expressed by our international students, e.g. from India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea, that there is an academic reading that speaks to their worlds, one in which affluence and even survival beyond childhood cannot always be taken for granted. It is Burman’s diversity of engagement with aspects of development in her writing that speaks directly to our students, many of whom are already working as teachers, or early childhood, social, community, or youth workers in regions hit by continuing economic hardship.
Offshoots of Burman’s DDP have been influential around the country. Our department is home for a textbook on human development (Drewery & Claiborne, 2014) used in almost every tertiary education institution in the country. It is the first New Zealand book in the field with a major focus on indigenous Māori viewpoints. These lifespan texts, assisted by critical input from Māori scholar Vanessa Paki and Pacific researcher Cherie Chu, draw on Burman’s broad sweep, social constructionist grounding and political focus to interrupt the smooth flow of developmental narrative usually expected of such textbooks. The result is a “standard” textbook that questions ableist, middle class norms of individual development and normative views about family composition, the latter especially relevant given contemporary legislative changes in Aotearoa New Zealand supporting gay marriage.
In this commentary, we have reflected on the ways that Burman’s work has allowed a space for greater acknowledgment of cultural and historical spaces in which understandings of development are played out, especially with regard to feminist and indigenous critique. Our three journeys from different parts of the world to Aotearoa New Zealand in some ways mirror the changes across time in contestations about what is “normal” in development and what it might be possible to achieve politically and socially with the kind of critical questioning initiated by Burman’s work.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the present and former staff of the Department of Human Development and Counselling at the University of Waikato for their collegial support and constructive debate about many of the concerns raised in this paper.