Human Development and Psychology: The Long View | The Future of Education Series

okay because I have a visiting post are coming in hi could everyone get seated please [Applause] Thank You Howard could you get see thank you Bob good afternoon everyone it is great to be here it's great to be here with so many people I care about it actually feels a little bit like my wedding I want to talk about the plan for today but I also want to just to say a few words about Catherine and Bob and Howard before we got started I met Catherine where's Catherine over here I met Kathryn 35 year

s ago because she was one who was cheek speaking to me about a revision I had to do in my qualifying paper and I was told that she was gonna be pretty direct and I didn't quite know what that meant but I will say that she was direct but she was also fair and generous and insight insightful and insight sieve indecent and she's been those qualities she's been those things for the last 35 years he's somebody I've really gone to and the clutch on many different things and she also to paraphrase the

novelist Walker Percy has an incredibly healthy nose for every species of mayor that flies and I learned early on in my career never to Katherine snow when I think back about my time at HGSE I will think a lot about my walks with Bob Salman and Bob Salman encouraged me during that time to think hard about how I spend my time and how to spend my time most meaningfully that this life is not a dress rehearsal and we better dig into ourselves and figure out what we want to do and I realized that Bob

wasn't choosing to his spend to spend his time taking these walks with me and caring and attending to me and I am he has been a wonderful man under me and many other people and I want to thank him a big heartfelt thanks to him for that Howard I'm gonna say something about at the very end but I want to the Howard is one who inspired this session he orchestrated this session this session is largely in his honor and I've been in planning this session with him I've been very moved by his enthusiasm

his understanding and his enthusiasm for the work of other people including the handful of people that you were gonna hear from today so let me tell you the plan we are gonna start with Chuck Nelson followed by Nancy Hill followed by Katie Davis you're gonna speak for 12 minutes or so then I'm gonna moderate a conversation between Kathy McCartney and Marcello Marcello Suarez Orosco and Bill Damon is going to join us virtually so that we will try to have this virtual part of here part virtual co

nversation and I think we are then we would have time for Q&A we're probably have about a half an hour for Q&A and I'm gonna ask all the panelists everybody to get up on the stage for the Q&A so let's get going you ready to go check great so Chuck as many of you may know explores cognitive developmental neuroscience he runs a lab on cognitive developmental neuroscience and he is going to talk today about some of the key ways that nervous has contributed to our understanding of human development

Thank You Chuck [Applause] so in medical schools usually you start to talk with your disclosures like I own a drug company or I make money from a drug company usually involves drugs and companies I have two disclosures one is I had very bad spatial ability the reason that's relevant is although brick gave me very very detailed roadmap about his expectations I can't read maps so I have no idea what I'm gonna do is what Rick had in mind and the second is that I've been at Harvard a little less tha

n 15 years but only a third of that has been in the ed school and of that third only 25% of me has been here so I don't have the the long historical perspective that many do for example I haven't co-authored papers with Moses with I Katherine and Meredith have on writing a tablet or I haven't co-authored paper there so a Hume the way Paul has in my case my look back really starts in the 1970s and 80s so my job is to integrate neuroscience developmental psychology and education and I'm going to d

o that now in about 11 minutes so in the late 70s early 80s there were a few studies using EEG to interrogate brain function and cognitive and perceptual development but it was really grounded in psychophysiology that is it really didn't pay much attention to deep underlying neurobiology as much as it was a developmental or dependent measure like any anything else would be so you could argue that the fields of developmental neuroscience and developmental psychology had not yet gone they're gone

on their first date in the 1970s and 80s so the reason I introduced bill Greenough is that while developmental psychology was relatively brainless through the 1970s and 80s by which I mean not grounded in neuroscience it was not a pejorative comment I was making that was not true in neuroscience that people in developmental neuroscience were paying very close attention to behavioral development and a good example is the work from Bill green who was an important mentor to me so bill had methodica

lly studied how experience and environments weave their way into the developing brain and he built on work that Donald Hebb actually had done in starting in the 1930s work that Katherine and I were exposed to when we're at McGill and then later taken up by Diamond and Rosen swag on so-called enriched environments which actually eventually led to headstart brenell's work came to the attention I think of developmental psychologists with this very seminal paper which was published in 1987 and this

paper has been cited 2,000 times at this bye-bye now and I think Green knows work would be eventually very important in the field of developmental psychology for a couple of reasons you know it's really hard to see those slides the problem is you can't read without reading glasses and you can't see far away I guess you just can't see so green OHS work was a mechanistic explanation for how experience and environments actually get under the skin he also talked about they came on the heels of this

ascendancy of statistical genetics or behavior genetics and where this was important is that behavior genetics really was very descriptive it parsed the variants by saying 50 percent of IQ is genetic but it wasn't mechanistic at all it failed to identify genes or gene products that are involved in behavior and it was very descriptive and it didn't tell us the fact that genes got expressed in the brain which then regulated the behavior bills work went beyond that by being much more mechanist much

more mechanistic so I was very influenced by Bill's work and which then led about 10 years later to myself and Floyd Bloom publishing this paper which came out in child development around the same time I was an editor child development but there was not a conflict of interest there at all this is not me this is the same mustache but this is Floyd Bloom who when we wrote this paper was the editor of science and we argue that advances in a number of areas of neuroscience had implications for thos

e studying behavioral development one was in neuroimaging so neuroimaging had the promise to elucidate the neural basis of the neural correlates behavior it also taught we also talked about the important role that experience plays in the developing brand which moved us away from this fixed position that genetics determine things we took the position that experience plays a very important role in brain development we talked about critical periods emphasizing that there are windows of opportunity

and vulnerability in brain development that can have a profound impact not just on the short-term but on the long-term and that these critical periods would also limit the kinds of changes in brain function that are possible throughout the lifespan so in the remainder of my talk today I want to give a couple of examples of how I think developmental psychology and education has benefited from neuroscience so the first one is that brain development is powerfully influenced by experience we know th

at children deprived of typical auditory or visual development will wind up with deficits in hearing and in seeing their children who grew up in linguistically impoverished environments will have language that is not as sophisticated or as advanced as children growing up in more enriched environments and that children experiencing profound set the social deprivation early in life will go on to suffer consequences in social-emotional development another is that we know that there are critical per

iods and brain development again these windows of opportunity and vulnerability where the brain is particularly receptive to experience examples again would be children who are deprived whose eyes are crossed or wander or children with congenital deafness or children deprived of adequate caregiving will all suffer consequences in the visual auditory and social-emotional domains but we also know if there's an intervention that happens early enough you can write development to proceed on a typical

and healthy developmental trajectory neuroscience is also I think made some inroads understanding of disorders of development so in one of my lives I studying her in developmental disorders like autism if you think of autism and ADHD and dyslexia are all disorders that are defined behaviorally and this says in a sense limited us in a couple of ways first that doesn't work either the phenotype is such that you have to wait for the behavioral repertoire to become sufficiently sophisticated to act

ually then identify a deviation in typical development so an autism it might be a typical language or a typical social relations in dyslexia it's going to be much later when you fail to learn to read same could go for a number the same could go for any number of disorders and so I think that there are now tools and neuroscience that allow us to bypass behavior and identify the underlying neural substrate that goes awry long behavior long story long before behavior goes awry so Nadine gob has dem

onstrated that in infancy you can already see differences in the brain that will become a brain that that fails to learn to read and I've demonstrated we can predict autism at three months at age three years before you see symptoms of autism I have no idea what this says the other thing neural imaging has done is it helps to elucidate the errors and brain development that lead to these disorders so it's one thing to say this child has autism this child has ADHD but we really want to know is what

's gone wrong in brain development and move beyond again the simplistic explanation of saying well it's a genetic error I see children with a single gene mutation and I can give an example of girls with exactly the same single gene mutation who are identical twins and yet have different developmental trajectories a second problem with relying on behavior is that there's a great deal of heterogeneity so the expression in autism is if you've seen one child with autism you've seen one child with au

tism and the issue here is behavior is rather coarse so I think neuroscience has enabled us to more finely splice behaved disorders so that we should no longer be surprised that if everyone with the same disorder gets the same treatment we shouldn't be surprised that they don't all respond the same way to that treatment only a subset of kids with autism respond to ABA therapy effectively what neuroscience has done has allowed us to more finely splice those disorders into say autism a autism B au

tism C to develop a more personalized and individualized treatment protocol and finally most intervention studies depend on behavioral assays to evaluate the efficacy of that intervention and the problem is that this has limited us in a couple of ways first often we can't evaluate very very little kids because the behavioral repertoire is limited these behaviors may be to course to identify subtle benefits of treatment or intervention that behavior just might not observe but looking at the brain

might and digging beneath the surface might help us understand how these neural measures will detect more changes that are not present and behavior I'm sorry this is really a difficult might allow us to detect treatment effects earlier than if we depended only on behavior so in conclusion the next thing the rest of you who can modify your slides make the font bigger because it's difficult to see this the study of neural development should exist hand-in-hand with the study of behavioral developm

ent that there are enormous implications of how this interdisciplinary approach for education so to give you three examples how to identify children who will subsequently struggle to learn to read to do math to engage in social relationships before the onset of overt symptoms how to identify when in development the brain is maximally receptive to input so think of second language learning for example and when the brain is most receptive to change and finally given the high prevalence of young ch

ildren exposed to adversity very early in life this will give us a sense of how these children's developmental histories will impact their educational achievement and educational attainment and on that note I can say bien thank you Howard Mars did you see Howard win can I sit down yeah you can sit back thank you our next speaker is Nancy Hill my friend and colleague Nancy hill a developmental psychologist who focuses focuses on ethnicity and culture she's also the president of the Society for re

search and child development and she'll be discussing the evolution of human development from her perspective as the president of the Society for the research and child thank you [Applause] today to witness the last two days and to really understand the history in which I came into 10 years ago I am at this for just one decade I have started my second decade and as I look at those around me who are who are celebrating and honoring many decades here I can see why you stay how I ended up here I di

dn't know that I was intended to be here but Kathy McCartney knew I was intended to be here and I would I spent the first half of my career in a department of psychology trying to do interdisciplinary work thinking about prevention science and practice and trying to do research for a common good when I got a phone call saying that there was a position open here and and I wasn't sure leaving my discipline and coming into a School of Education but Kathy was wise and she said come for sabbatical co

me for one year and I don't know one year can i uproot my family and she says come for three and I think what she knew was that once I got a taste of this place that I wouldn't turn back and indeed I have not it's like what I want to talk about today is an integrative developmental science for the benefit of adolescents and as I think about our 100 years here today celebrating with HGSE and I want to give us some well I guess I'm going to start with what my take-home messages are sorry three tak

e-home messages you don't listen to anything else here they are the field of human development is three things one it's consistent in its quest for research to the benefit of human development second it's marked by a quest to define new developmental stages and third it's cyclical in that the field of human development started as a very interdisciplinary science it became more specialized and now we're seeing a season of integration and interdisciplinarity so those are my three take-home message

I could sit down now and you'd have the whole story but I'm going to flesh it out for you a little bit so a hundred years ago there was a move to link research policy and practice and and what you see is one is the launch of the Harvard Graduate School of Education but also in 1925 the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences founded the Committee on child development which became in 1933 the Society for research in child development and in the middle there around 1927 you

saw the start of the child development abstracts which became the Journal of child development which is still one of the top journals in the field and what the goal of the Society for research in child development the goal at that time and still is to stimulate and support research to encourage the cooperation of individuals engaged in the scientific study of child development and to encourage the application of research findings to really right from its start to see the application of science a

nd practice and at the same time we saw at this time a rise in the Institute for child development that were housed in land-grant institutions Howard when you you talked yesterday are about how the faculty that comprised the early construction of human development here many of them came from the flyover States in the Midwest they also came from land-grant universities that have a core mission to give back to society and Graham you were at Purdue which is also a land-grant institution that I am f

rom Ohio State and Michigan State which are also land-grant institutions so there was this deposit here right at the beginning of a land-grant philosophy of doing research for the good of society and to help people and to prepare for the economy and be upwardly mobile also what we see a little over 100 years ago is the quest for a new developmental stage and this is a G Stanley Hall the father of adolescents who received the first PhD in psychology here at Harvard and in 1904 he published a four

teen hundred plus treatise on lessons that was you can see in its title inherently interdisciplinary and what he argued was that we needed and we had a new developmental stage of adolescence and in recognizing that you now had this extended period between childhood and adolescence and you needed this additional time in order to prepare to succeed in in society as American society was moving from an agrarian economy into an industrial economy and related to this at the very same time we saw a ris

e in the high school movement which was preparing people who were coming from the rural areas into the urban area so they could compete in the job market so you saw this rise in the high school era at the same time so again we're seeing this this convergence of research and practice and application and in support of upward mobility and so you saw this idea of the high schools that were preparing many people and this was a time when women were being educated even more so and benefiting from that

so they were prepared in the in the post-world War two ERA to to join the economy and so you had this convergence of preparation for adulthood that was aligned with what we were doing in our in term in education but in the late 20th century things changed in the sense the 1970s and so there's been this question of whether or not we have this new developmental stage and so youth today are reaching many of the milestones at the end of adolescence later than before and so there's been this call tha

t there might need indeed need to be a new developmental stage emerging adolescents or emerging adulthood or extended adolescence but the question is is there a really a developmental stage that's new and this begs the question it's not new to the late 20th century and early 20th century we have seen this before and I'm going to give you one indicator which is age of first marriage I'm going to show you the slide that begins in the 1890s and the average age of marriage in the 1890s was 26 for me

n who's much younger for women and then it declined over the course of the 20th century to reach its nadir in the 1950s and we see this increase increasing when in the age of marriage as we move up host 1970s and so what we had in the early 20th century was this transition to a new economy and this need for new skills and we're seeing that again today and this age of marriage marks very similar kind of markers of age of departing home in developing your own home and all the markers of adulthood

you see the same curve and so what we have now is then if we see this separation or this this disconnect between what our education system is doing in terms of preparing youth for the new economy and so there's this been this quest for a new developmental stage but I don't think that we really need a new developmental stage I think we know what to do with with the data that we have and so our education system as it is it is today is misaligned with what youth need to succeed in the economy but w

hat we have today that we didn't have in the past is an integrative knowledge of the developmental science to better prepare youth and so when you look across the century we've witnessed an increase in research on adolescents because we've defined it as a developmental stage and so we see this in terms of sociological research over the 20th century with people like Dylan elder and his life course theory and the coming of age and the timing of poverty and its relationship to outcomes you see this

psychologically with Erickson as an example looking at identity as a key factor that the adolescents grapple with we look at this cognitively we think about just Piaget and the understanding of abstract thinking is something that's unique to adolescents and then you also see it in neuroscience where people like gede and others have identified adolescents as a period of brain development that creates a unique and new opportunity to make up for past past exposure but really to prepare youth with

the skillsets they need and so when we look at those separately and they've begun to come together in this new report that's been put out from the National so if science called the promise of adolescents and in this report we've begun to integrate I sat on the committee that was part of that author of this report and what we've begun to try to do is integrate what we know from from the social science and from neuroscience and cognitive science so we can begin to create the kind of context that w

e need adolescents to develop and we knew what to do in the early 20th century we need to do it again in a 21st century so what we're seeing is that it's cyclical in terms of interdisciplinary work took more specialized work and now we're seeing an integration of our knowledge on on adolescent development so with this understanding we see adolescents as a new opportunity and with my my colleague and good friend Alexis Reddy we we have a new book that's going to be coming out to answer some of th

ese key questions is there evidence that there is an extended path to adulthood that that existed in Prior generations and we suggest that there is and the question is do you need more time to make this transition to adulthood and some of our data suggests that perhaps they do in part because they need different skills than they had in Prior than they needed in Prior generations if that's true are we short changing youth who we press into maturity at the age of 18 for a wide variety of reasons b

ecause they're not going on to higher education or policies that are that are pushing them into adulthood before they're truly prepared and if that's true what should young people be doing with their time and this is the where Alexis reading and I have used some historical and archival data to understand what we what we know that you should be doing that's not necessarily about grades and test scores but really getting at the kinds of dispositions that youth need and the skill sets they need and

the cognitive flexibility that they need to succeed in today's economy that in part we saw that coming out of the report from the National Academies that I just mentioned but we saw evidence of in a college sample early on and so what what do we do use need to kind of envision and prepare for adulthood we found that they needed a set of dispositions and and skill sets and and one is they need these goals and aspirations that they have that to succeed and and to understand what the economy has t

o offer there but more than that they need a sense of purpose that it that that extends beyond and they do building and it's going to be joining us and a lot of the work that we've been doing really builds on some of his work of understanding this sense of purpose of who they are why they were there here and how do they contribute to society and I - I'm going to have trouble reading my own slides note to self red on blue looks good on the screen but not from a distance here we go so the cycle of

discovery and rediscovering the self that we thought people in our sample would find themselves in college but in turn and they don't find themselves in college they learn the skill set of finding themselves again and again over the course of their lifecycle they need to build new communities and bridges between them that part of going away to college for example you get this opportunity to build new social relationships to endure what it means to be lonely find new communities and then connect

back to your community at home how do you go away and build new communities and then come back I'm learning to make good decisions that will out of what we want to do with our mobility is give people more options but we don't do a lot about helping them narrow those options and so they need good skills around decision making they need cognitive flexibility and divergent thinking so they can imagine a future that they cannot see yet and they need to find strength from their challenges there's no

such thing as bubble wrapping kids until they get into adulthood we need to give them opportunities to try things out to fail at them to learn from them and and and take those those lessons into the future and so these are the kinds of skill sets that that Alexis and I had discovered it in our in our research that's consistent with what we understand around what youth need today and so with that they're doing this in the context of a perceptions of and the actual understanding of the economy th

at this isn't something they just need by themselves in isolation but they need to do this in traction with their understanding of what the economy offers they're doing it and the idea of understanding their development of their own human capital their credentialing is signalling what does it mean to just to have a college degree as a signal and then what does it mean in terms of building the kind of human capital that they need to succeed they're doing this with a sense of strength and sense of

self and efficacy and identity and lastly they're not doing this alone they're doing it in the context of schools communities and family support and learning how to build those structural supports and so with that that brings us back to the field of human development my three things that I want you to take away which are that there's this consistent quest to really link research 2-bit to the benefit of human development and if we understand what you need then we can use that knowledge to build

the kinds of educational contexts that youth need in order to succeed in the transitioning to adulthood secondly there is this quest to define new developmental stages but as they say there's nothing new Under the Sun so we should learn from our prior lessons and take this forward into the future and finally that this work is because both inherently interdisciplinary it benefits from specialization but only to the extent that we can come back and integrate our knowledge for the benefit of youth

and I'll leave this here thank you [Applause] our next speaker is Katie Davis Katie Davis Katie Davis was a student of mine a doctoral student of power she is the author with Howard of the app generation she is a professor at the University of Washington who explores the influence of new media technologies on young people and she is going to speak about how human development contributes to our understanding of young people's use of media and technology hi Katie I think I might be the last formal

speaker and I think you might be happy to know that I only have eight slides including this one so as Rick said my name is Katie Davis and I direct the Digital youth lab at the University of Washington and I know what you might be thinking but don't worry I have been living room in Germany for the last year and a half and I haven't been in Seattle for quite a while so I really feel truly honored and delighted to be here I started actually as a master student in 2001 actually September 12th 2001

and Howard was my first lecturer after 2000 um September 11th and then I was a doctoral student actually in a master's who knows I believe one of the first cohorts and mine Braden education when I came here as a doctoral suit in 2005 I also picked up another master's in risk and prevention and so I've actually spent far more time in the audience of ass with hall than on the stage and I have to admit it feels a little bit overwhelming to look out and see so many of the professors whose classes I

took or whose courses I Teaching Fellow for or in many cases both so I see no Neela's oh she was one of the professor's from my first year doctoral pros M&R Judy taught me about residuals through a comparison of regional French wines which I still think about when I buy wine and John Willett taught me about logistic regression through a lot of gesticulating and Bob Dylan quotes and jumping up on tables which we have already seen a little bit about but of course I spent the most time with my bel

oved adviser Howard Gardner I was his students his Teaching Fellow his collaborator and co-author of the apt generation and I am very grateful that he invited me here today in many ways this feels like a homecoming except it's kind of the kind of homecoming where I feel like I might get a grade at the end so it's a little bit unsettling what could I possibly say to this group of people who have taught me so much my only solace is that my topic technology is not one that this particular slightly

gray-haired audience is especially well known for as being early adopters are at the cutting edge okay so I'm going to address three questions in my remarks I'll start by taking stock of a few key shifts in technology that have affected research involving young people's experiences with technology I'll reflect on what the field of human development has contributed in this area of research and I'll end by talking about the kinds of contributions that I think the field is well poised to make so le

t's start with what's changed when it comes to studying kids and technology say might I think I'm already on slide 4 I think one of the central shifts is well represented by this pair of New Yorker cartoons if you can't see I'll read it out to you the one on the left is from 1983 and I suspect it's quite familiar actually to a bunch of you it shows one dog explaining to another on the internet nobody knows you're a dog so flash forward about 20 years and the dog now recollects a bit wistfully re

member went on the internet nobody knew who you were so as I said I came to Harvard in 2005 to pursue my doctoral studies with Howard and curt Fisher as well and this turned out to be a really interesting time to start researching the role of Technology in adolescent development and that remains the focus of my work today so in 2005 there are some pretty key shifts underway when it comes to technology so if you think of back to that time 2005 what what do you think can you remember what the the

sort of big platform that had just come out the year before was say one no Facebook yes Facebook had just been launched probably just over there a few hundred yards in Harvard 2005 was also the same year that another platform started does anyone know that one that's extra points no myspace was before Facebook this was YouTube so I watched my first youtube video I think someone in my cohort here at Harvard sent me a link to some cat skateboarding or something and 2005 was just a couple of years b

efore the very first iPhone was released so essentially this is when digital devices became increasingly ubiquitous and our online and our offline lives started to become fundamentally intertwined and so what these developments meant for scholarship in the field of human development was a real shift in how we think about the role of network technologies in young people's lives and this was particularly apparent in my area of focus as a doctoral student adolescent identity development which is so

mething that Nancy touched on the literature I read as a student came from the mid to late-1990s and early-2000s and I'm very much aligned with this first cartoon so for teens in particular there was both excitement and a little bit of nervousness that they could go online and enter a completely different world where anything goes which meant they could experience unprecedented opportunities to try out different identities in seemingly low stakes environment however when I started to conduct my

own research and talk to teens around 2008 9 and 10 I was hearing a very different story from them I wasn't hearing them tell me about the freedom they felt to try on different identities online and said they were telling me about the pressure they felt to be always connected always public and visible essentially always on and since their friends were watching them they had to be really careful not to veer too far from how they presented themselves offline so the stakes felt much higher than the

y did about 10 or 15 years earlier and a lot of my work studying identity has focused on documenting the shift in online context between 1993 and 2015 and these two cartoons and really bringing a developmental perspective to understanding how teens approach the opportunities and challenges of identity expression and exploration online and of course there been a lot of other changes in research at the intersection of human development and Technology during this time period and these changes have

affected youth who are both younger and older than adolescents but I would say that many of the changes relate to this overarching shift towards ubiquity and constant connection so in the midst of this shift what if scholars in the field of human development brought to the study of kids and technology first I think the field has done a lot to help put young people's technology use in context and this is I think been a through-line throughout the last two days kids use technologies in a variety o

f different ways for a variety of different purposes and their technology experiences are shaped by the many different contexts of their lives not just online their family life their school and after school experiences and the kinds of communities they live in the kinds of resources available in those communities our collective work in the field has furthered understanding of the developmental underpinnings of young people's technologies and I think this helps us to normalize what you 3rd online

and with their devices recognizing that the behaviors that we're seeing they may be new but the underlying motivations are not and they come from enduring developmental tasks such as forming peer relationships and exploring one's identity on an important part of placing technology use in context like this is also to get super specific steering away as much as possible from looking at how the elusive average child is affected by technology and recognizing instead that the wide variety of ways th

at young people use technology in the context surrounding their experiences means that it doesn't really make sense to say things like Instagram is good or bad for teens or violent video games makes kids more aggressive or three-year-olds like my son should spend no more than one hour a day in front of a screen when we're on a plane he spends a lot more than an hour on a screen so instead we should be looking at how individual children use different kinds of technologies in specific ways and how

these uses lead to a variety of different outcomes and I think developmental scholars are particularly good at framing their research in this way so lastly what contributions is the field especially well poised to make going forward so I'll focus on two main categories of contribution first new empirical and theoretical insights and second real world impact and I think the first category new insights really comes from what scholars in the field of human development are already doing and already

contributing as I've discussed we're good at getting specific and placing children's technology use in a broader context so the specificity will be increasingly easier to do as new methods like the one if you could play in this video the one you hopefully see here playing on the slider introduced I have to say I'm a little bit ambivalent to highlight this particular example because it comes from Stanford and not Harvard but I think it's a good one so I hope you'll excuse the source so researche

rs at Stanford have developed a method of data collection that they call screen omics which captures and represents young people's moment by moment smartphone activities so we don't have to rely on their self port on what they're they're telling us they do with technology or broad generalizations about their uses of technology and said we can see in real time what sites they're visiting who they're talking to and what sorts of content they're consuming and creating and as you can imagine this ki

nd of a method here produces an enormous amount of data so the data scientific methods that Judy mentioned earlier today will become increasingly important for this kind of research and the picture that emerges is from research like this is one of enormous variation across individual youth which is what Chuck mentioned earlier and even within individual youth variation across time and context with respect to their digital media activities and methods such as these will really support the kinds o

f contributions that scholars in the field of human development are especially well equipped to make so I've been thinking about what these contributions might look like specifically while listening to the presentations over the last two days so I'll share just a few of the research questions that I've jotted down in my notebook over the last couple days and and some of them I acknowledge are already being pursued but things like what factors affect children's trust in what in the testimony of w

hat conversational agents like Alexa and Siri tell them as opposed to what adults tell them and when when young children talk to their grandparents over Skype or FaceTime are they more likely to engage and decontextualize or here are now conversations when parents are busy responding to notifications on their phone does this affect the kind of language they use to talk to their children convert rural reality be used to teach perspective-taking skills and empathy I'm really excited to see some of

these kinds of questions being explored and answered by scholars in this field so I'll end my remarks by reflecting a little bit on impact how can scholars in the field of human development use their work to create real-world impact which i think is a real strength of the edge school here with my home base in Seattle again I haven't been there in a year and a half I'm surrounded by technology developers who are inventing the next Instagram or tik-tok or fortnight odds are however these develope

rs know next to nothing about human development and they're probably not talking to the people who do although I'm very glad to hear that John Hanson is at Amazon that's that's great of course scholars in the field of human development can have meaningful impact by explaining the effects on children of existing technologies and that's really important it's one thing that I do but wouldn't it be great if we could also contribute our knowledge and expertise as new technologies are being developed

so the thought experiment that I would like to leave you with today is what would happen if a developmental scholar were added to every child related product team at Facebook Google and Apple thank you [Applause] here's I'm hoping that Kathy and Marcello can come on up we sit here in these creatures I don't know that Kathy and Marcello need an introduction but I'll do a little introduction yeah is my former is a not my former friend my friend my colleague was a colleague was my Dean she's also t

he president of Smith College and there are few you that may not know this but Kathy has also a developmental psychologist and a wonderful developmental psychologist who made tremendous contributions to the field so the life have you here Kathy back Marcela Suarez Orosco I think you all know too but he is also a friend and a former colleague here he is a Dean at UCLA and I am delighted and thrilled to say that he will be the president of UMass so Chancellor a chance unless my my bed Chancellor a

ll right so I'm gonna engage them and his bill joined us yep yeah I can hear you can you hear me yes you're like you're like on the mountaintop you're oracular there okay well I just want to say you know how delighted I am I think that many of my mentors closest colleagues and closest friends are in the room right there so it is a very special privilege for me to be able to join you even at a distance so hello everybody and and I'm just delighted that I made hear this and listen what's going on

well it is great to have you here bill and for those who don't know bill bill is a professor at Stanford he runs the Center for adolescents at Stanford he's done wonderful work on moral development he's been my most important mentor in my work on world development and I'm parenting and he also not does work on purpose so we are delighted to have you here too bill thank you so we wanted to engage in a discussion about the future of human development and where it's going what we hope for what we w

orry about how to avoid the things we worry about how to move it closer toward what we aspire for it to be and but let me start just by asking you about what you've heard in the last couple of days what is rung true for you what might you take issue with anything that comes to mind I'm going to go first I thought I'd say a few things one is when I think about and maybe this was related to the future yep because when I think about the history of developmental psychology I think about the importan

ce of assessment actually and how when you know how to measure something it can really help an area develop so I was very happy to hear about Paula the measure the cows measure for example and that seems like it might have terrific promise but in general I think there are disincentives for people to work on measurement development but imagine the studying attachment without the strange situation yeah yeah so I think we I think that was exciting to me and something that I'd like to see more I was

also excited to see all of the intervention studies that people are doing I mean I checked didn't really talk about his but Meredith ro talked about a really exciting intervention study would get her doctoral students and engaged in and throughout most of my life I engaged in correlational studies because they were real-world problems that I wanted to know the answer to but I do think you're in there are huge advantages to experiments and to offering those kinds of so I was just I'm gonna leave

here today being very excited about the future of human development research I could go on but thank you thank you thank you very happy and so honored to be here at the podium with such wonderful friends especially celebrating Bob Howard and Katherine the Romans the Roman said all roads lead through the Appian Way the epicenter but that happen way was built 2,400 years ago and of course the GPS that got so many of us here it was Pat crab and my journey to Ian way began with many many many years

ago as we were trying to create new endeavor to understand how globalization was changing the world and how the human face of that globalization was going to be the great demographic transition that we're now all living with so I just want to say thank you thank you to the bad and thank you to all the colleagues of course is such a an enormous treat to see Bob one of the Giants in anthropology that did so much to manage the complex conversation between culture and psychology in human developmen

t so I'm simply delighted what I see us I also loved the transgenerational nature of the conversation it was wonderful to hear Katie and her younger colleagues as well as those of us with gray hair what I see as enduring issues that are with us and that are very exciting and there will I think continue to be with us and I just listed a few a the issue of disciplinary and interdisciplinary endeavors in the purposeful organized pursuit of understanding systemically issues pertinent to human develo

pment very very broadly defined in an interdisciplinarity define sort of the earlier iterations I think that Professor Hill made that point very very eloquently and I think those issues will remain with us and interdisciplinarity of course if they're supposed to thing was two things one is the respect and proceeding with caution on matters pertaining to the knowledge that lives for reasons that are very obvious within disciplinary tradition so before you get to the intern you have to have an und

erstanding and and and competence over the Disciplinary domains but interdisciplinarity that's the most for human development now and moving forward in that it interrupts the taken-for-granted categories that come to colonize scholarly discourse within the disciplines and when I saw when I arrived here were these extraordinary conversations Bob took me to meet John Wyden and be why he didn't way way back and of course the conversations on the issues of language moral development and the work of

our of our colleagues so that is a defining feature that I think will is with us and will remain moving moving forward I think the other issue and then I'll stop is the issue of the individual and society this again is part of the totemic ancestry of the field of human development in psychology and I have to mention that a hundred and fifty years ago it was the great Durkheim who had the first chair in Bordeaux in France for the study for pedagogy and of course Durkheim's endeavors flow from an

understanding of the nature of the individual and the collective representations of society and these are the tensions that live in the border lines between psychology and anthropology and the allied social sciences of course Rick Schrader has done so much of the just fundamental work in that in that domain and Durkheim is very important for moral development because Durkheim influenced lucien libel and the purpose of us know the primitive mentality which of course Piaget got imprinted on with l

iberal and dark lines so there's an archeology here there's a kinship that also tells the story of how concerns over the nature of the relationship between the individual and society became constituted and the tensions that flowed from the analytic constructs that came from research psychology and particularly anthropology and the other and the other social social sciences and the last is of course Asia of culture and culture is so fundamental and here the the concern over the the vulgar reducti

onism of sort of culture as a unit of meaning and as a unit of analysis is something that has plagued and visited and revisited efforts in human development and psychology and continuing the conversation about the complexities of human of human behavior I'd like to stop now my next set of reflections will reflect upon what I see is the fragilities and the new challenges that we see that I think flow from another issue that one of our researcher colleagues name which is globalization something th

at I was very happy and fortunate to be so involved with in very very iterations I think I thought the first course here on globalization in education and with door summer we thought it gently both at the college and at GSE yes welcome back Chris thank you myself bill your can we pull you in here yes first let me say that I've really enjoyed hearing the stories of the people of the history the ones I've heard over the last couple of days and the pictures although I will say that the when I saw t

he picture of the Talon put up on the screen I felt very bald and clean-shaven glad to see the bob Salman is not bald but I'd like to just say a couple of things two things about not the people which I know as the center of this occasion it's been wonderful to hear and as I said all the people there mean so much to me but I'd like to say something about a couple of the ideas that have meant a lot to me as a scholar at a bit of a distance from Harvard but what the Harvard School of Education has

stood for that has been I think for one thing very important to the world and courageous and that has come up today in fact one of them is come up in Marcela's common and both Chuck Nelson and Nancy Hills comments so let me just say two quick thing two relatively quick things about two of the ideas that I think Harvard School of Education has stood for in the developmental work that's done one is that it really has stood for a whole person approach to human development and this has not been easy

over the last 20 years as we know the big federal policies the big funders have gone to a narrow view of state that the kinds of things can be that can be tested and standardized tests and so on and the areas that for example Helen referred to as marginal which I think she very correctly said have been the focus of a lot of innovation or also the areas that are at the heart of what young people need to develop in order to have good lives and contribute to society and be good citizens of course

I'm referring to moral development as Helen talked about civic development art music aesthetics of the way project zero has studied it at Harvard and and the cultural aspects to which and I know rich Slater hasn't really been at Harvard he's been at Chicago but I ran into his work really through B widening and other people at Harvard and he was very much on the scene at least intellectually there and so Harvard has and and of course Howard's work on multiple intelligences absolutely set the stag

e for this as did Pat Graham's expansive view when she was Dean of bringing all of these things in so the whole person approach and I think it's coming back now after a 20 20 years in the desert or in the wilderness perhaps but I see it coming up all over the place now in the field of education but Harvard has always been there and stood for it and given given those of us that have believed in this a lot of a lot of solidarity and good ideas and and has kind of thought the good fight at a time t

hat I really was needed in American education in particular so that's one and the second the other one is it's another funny and another another sort of good fight that has to be fought against reductionism and against the idea that people are determined by whatever their conditions are whether it's biology or culture Marcelo just mentioned this that there's a kind of a deterministic view that always has to be fought against and across originally when you go way back to the years of Larry Kohlbe

rg and Bob Salmons were early on it was the cognitive revolution that fought the good fight against at that time skinning a skinner and behaviorism I know that that the first great blows were built by Noam Chomsky against Skinner but he himself in a lot of the work I think drifted towards a kind of a biological or native istic Turman ism and I think the work at Harvard has been truly interactionist and and this is the point I'd make it has respected the idea of the mind of the agency of human be

ings to actually play a role in influencing their own destiny it's not all determined by external factors and I give credit to Howard Gardner who's managed to put the word mind and every one of his books as far as I can tell which i think is a great statement about this but today again there's been a resurgence has been a rediscovery for example Victor Frankel's great work and freckles work not only stood for the idea that people can overcome challenges and terrible conditions in their lives but

also beyond that that people can learn from them and grow and so challenges and and terrible conditions the human agency is such that it can actually provide a source of further growth and development I don't think the fight against determinism and reductionism is ever over there are always for one thing journalists love it because it's a single factor explanation of everything and they can always say well birth order it's all about birth order because first Born's of this and the research does

that have nothing else matters or whatever and I think the version of it today is often driven by interests in socioeconomic conditions ethnicity and in a whole range of cultural issues that are very important to study and very important insofar as they prevent challenges very important for us as citizens to do whatever we can to remove such challenges from young people's lives but as develop medalists we can never give young people or anybody teachers or schools the message that any of these c

onditions determine someone's destiny and the data are there young people all over the world all through history have overcome every kind of condition and we as educators can help show how this is done and how it's possible and that's what schools and educators and that's what our professional life is about Harvard I think has absolutely stood for this Nancy hill state man Chuck Nelson just made a statement today that that showed that the study of neuroscience is demonstrating that you cannot th

at a new scientific condition is not deterministic experience plays a role and I would want to put in the mind plays a role so I have a lot of gratitude for what Harvard has helped me Howard Harvard has helped me understand this and what the people at Harvard all of you people in the room that instantiate addthis who your great work so thank you thank you Bill so let me just pick on pick up on a couple of threads here let me start with interdisciplinarity so I you know in my sense is that we may

mean different things by this word and you know in my experience there's been a lot of shifts in this in human development over the last few decades that if we're really talking about drawing in deep ways from sociology and anthropology and literature and philosophy that these disciplines and some you know through been through many decks have been very siloed and it still are very silos that we don't do a great job of this still in many respects but but what do you think and do you think we sho

uld be doing more of it if you do think we should be doing more of it how do we construct human development program so we do it very meaningfully well maybe I can start by talking about my experience early in my career because I was an assistant professor and what was then called psychology and social relations here and some of you probably know that when they built William James Hall the idea was to have sociologists and anthropologists and psychologists all in the same building so that you wou

ld get more interdisciplinarity and it didn't really work and I've thought about why it didn't work and I think one of the reasons is that we we publish in disciplinary journals those of us who are into the disciplines or and we we belong to societies that are disciplinary in nature so at least I think that's true in arts and sciences right with respect to psychology in this case sociology and anthropology but what happens in a School of Education it mixes it up a little bit yeah so all of you k

now this I'm preaching to the choir I think but when you're in a school of education you are united by the interest in the developing child everybody has an interest in the developing child and you are more interested by nature and translational research so those things are not true in the disciplines in fact if you are a member of the psychology department and there's a psychology colloquium series you know one day you might be learning about the deception of College sophomores in a social psyc

hology experiment the next week it might be about you know cutting up rat brains for some purpose and so on but here at least for me just about every colloquium was of interest to me because again of this common focus on the developing child and that's what makes I think the study of human development in schools of Education so very very interesting just one more anecdote that I that goes to the importance of translational research when I was in graduate school I went to the Society for research

and child development meetings and I I still do when I can and but in graduate school there was a big debate about whether or not the discipline should be involved in social policy at all and I think at that time so this is this would be kind of the late 70s through the early 80s there was a debate at the business meeting about whether or not SRC D should be involved in social policy research at all and I think it looked like there was going to be vote not to have you know social policy Journal

or not to have an office in Washington DC and so on and at Ziegler who was at Yale where I was studying stood up and said something like social policy is going to get made for children with or without our input and shouldn't it be with our input and you know he explained about bills in Washington that were going to happen with or without our input and I think that argument maybe coupled with critical theory which was just beginning to reach our disciplines and maybe helped us be a little bit hu

mble about truth the capital T helped the Society for research and child development really embrace translational research but it is still the case if you're in the typical psychology department and you're doing translational research that it's suspect in some way so I think we shouldn't take for granted just how special it is to be able to beat a place like this where there are some common beliefs that we take for granted and yes one is the importance of doing research that matters directly in

the lives of children I really want this to be a convert I really wanted this to be a conversation so we can go in order or build marcella you want you want to jump in here you want to say one of the most beautiful lines in the Spanish language Babylonia Duda writes sorry muchos but what Whitman I think meant when he said I contradict myself I contain multitudes sounds better in Spanish that's the point of interdisciplinarity in the context of a focus on a series of whether it's in the translati

onal domain or in the domain of practice have a special life and a special set of appeals to younger scholars particularly so we are many things and our ability to respectfully and again avoiding the vulgar and I think the term that bill used is so important this is the vulgar reductionism that sort of psychically as a professor he'll mention sort of comes in and out of a vote but where many things and I think interdisciplinarity at its best creates a kind of a culture of trying to listen and tr

ying to understand different sort of fundamental constructs and I think that's what's been best about the tradition of human development and psychology at GSE certainly during my time here and of course it was Bob and Sarah and the Whiting's but then so many others that wasn't the the schema that I think I did so much of of our work certainly our work with refugee children immigrant children immigrant families displaced families we've always endeavoured to develop tools in the what lady Strauss

calls the very collage mode of just the tools that will get you closer and closer to an understanding of the issues as frame by a multiplicity of communities and stakeholders yes if I can just celebrate what both Cathy and Marcello at 7:00 and just to add one note about how important it is the message the talk that Harvard sends out the work that Harvard has done a school of education on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary meaning bringing in all kinds of things that other plate that other p

laces have not seen fit to venture in and I'll just give one example that recently came up in in my experience and has to do with art the Harvard's interested in art education which is very unusual and very special and I was at a meeting about a month ago that my friend Marcelo organized with Pope Francis who gave a little talk to our group and ended with a comment and my my eighth grade Spanish is probably not exactly right with Marcelo can corrective I got this wrong he ended with the comments

saying you know one of the things I that I always judge when I judge what a good good school is doesn't produce any poets yes exactly exactly okay so I understood that correctly so just this idea that schools and children children as individuals choices and schools should provide them and we should have ways of educating across all of these different disciplines that's so important not just for the study of course for the study of human development it's important for what our gardener in a very

expensive note called studying the good beautiful in truth that's and that takes all of our capacities but also for children for children of schools and and I just loved I loved what Pope Francis said I love the idea that that schools who have a responsibility to do all of these things and Harvard has absolutely paved the way and studying it and encouraging it and helping schools do this in all of these areas that that then Helen indicated is marginal she's absolutely right they're marginal the

y've been marginal in the field of education but they are certainly not marginal in human experience I promised we would leave time for Q&A so I think we only have time for one more question but I would love your thoughts I'm sort of the big question where do you where do you hope you feels will go and yeah where do you hope the field will go well I was really trying to take a big-picture perspective today listening to the Ranger and yesterday listening to the range of work that's happening and

I was thinking about the fact that even in graduate school I was really interested in what the child brings to interactions so this would be you know our nee-sama Roth's work on on exactly that what the child brings to interactions and also influenced by Robert Plomin who wrote a seminal paper on gene environment interactions and correlations and I think what has kept us from sort of taking these ideas forward is method actually Judy Dave Kenny at one point had a very complicated program that I

managed to use where you could model mother effects and model child effects and model partner effects but not sure where that kind of research has gone but I think we really need to think about that and when I was listening to Chuck say you know if you know one autistic child you know one autistic child that's essentially what I'm talking about so what does the child bring to the interaction it's so easy for us in education to want to model the things that we feel like we can manipulate right so

maybe we can manipulate the home environment by training teachers better or maybe we can manipulate the school environment in any number of ways for the curriculum or teacher training all of these things and we might think that we can't manipulate the child and even if we can't it doesn't mean that our interventions wouldn't be better if they were tailored to individual differences and predispositions in the child so I would very much like to see more of that thank you I think inequality is the

greatest threat to the liberal democratic order of the world over and I think that rethinking and recalibrating how the tools of Education can be deployed to disrupt these extraordinarily radioactive formations that again every family is unhappy in its own way to go to a Russian writer increasingly the world over issues flowing from obscene levels of inequality are at the forefront of the challenge to the liberal order and education is maybe one of the most significant tools that can be a part

of us thinking about the destruction of these just very obscene and very unsustainable parents of both consumption and the growth in inequality and I think that this will have to be a part of the agenda of our thinking and our research you know in our schools I think Harvard should be at the forefront of those conversations certainly the land-grant universities universities I come from this is very much defines the center of the of the of the project we at UCLA have a network of extraordinary co

mmunity schools in the most underserved neighborhoods in Los Angeles and there are extraordinary examples of what and we done to work with extraordinarily underserved populations in ways that are to simply create a kind of an effervescence and a kind of an engagement in the young people that are fantastic and that show what can be done with good faith and with good resources and with good engagement but I think that inequalities the fundamental issue for us now I'm also stunned by the return and

this is something that Bob will smile at they heard Aryan ideal that the cephalic that the language and the territory and the blood were part of a package for human development and the flourishing of the human being in the Aristotelian sense that that idea has come back with a vengeance to me I find it and it's the frontiers pushing against the cosmopolitan or order of tolerance and of appreciation of other forms of life to me this is the second grave threat this vulgar theories of culture that

Boas Enterprise was unmaking coming back with in the form of the politics of the ethno-nationalism 'z again they're not just in our country they're today they're the world over so I would say that those are the two concerns right no well i like i mean ii what kathy said and what Marcelo said and simply say that as we engage with determination in these difficult social conditions and as we learn more about them and as the world changes and presents new challenges and new problematic conditions t

hat we keep our eye on the great possibilities of human development and that we use what we know as educators and developmental ist's help young people not just adapt to the conditions but find ways to thrive and I think that's that's our role as developmentalist stew to keep that perspective and keep the faith thank you all right it's all of your turn we would love to hear your questions thoughts comments I'm gonna ask do we want people to go to that to the mics just Thank You Jess thank you fo

r doing this and I will also ask folks to be brief yeah I'm sorry Chuck Nancy and Katie could you come back up at the stage that would be great so these are questions for all of these folks just because there are a lot of you I will ask you to try and keep it brief your questions are coming so who would like sighs excuse me Rick I would like here's a question yeah the Society for research in child development was supposed to be a multidisciplinary organization but in fact it's totally controlled

by psychologists and that is a serious thing Nancy is the is the president over but but here you know it is so psychological there's no great thank you Bob Nancy you are yeah I can take that president yeah but even so you're exactly right the the SR CDs cited for research and child development was designed to be interdisciplinary and over the years they've had various and sundry rules around alternating between psychologists and and and other discipline in their heads in the present so there's

a concerted effort in every other year every other election to have a non psychologist as president and there is considered concern about the state of the of the membership and an interest in attracting people from different disciplines into the field and into the society but I think what often happens is that if you're in psychology or Human Development to study child development SRC D is your home but if you're an economist or a sociologist or a story and you're you will find homes other place

s and so I think what happens is that SRC D ends up being a secondary home for people who aren't psychologists but if you're a psychologist or study human development you're not going to go to a PA you're gonna come to SRC D and it's going to be your home or SR C D and s are a the Society for research on adolescents and so I think it's it's in part the fault of SRC D to in trying to attract a more diverse membership and governing council but I also think it's the nature of where people like us l

ean in and find our intellectual home you know if you all don't mind introducing yourself briefly that would be great hello my name is Matthew Kenny I'm a current student in HTTP and I'm interested in to how people find a sense of purpose through developing their own personal narratives and I'm interested in how we can best prepare young people and people throughout the entirety of the lifespan to reflect on their complexity of self the complexity of society than the complexity of themselves wit

hin society well I'll just say a word I agree with you about the importance of self-reflection throughout the lifespan and some of us have do it or find ways to do it at Smith College they actually have but we have a center that is Howard has visited it it's the Wordle Center and the whole idea is as a narratives project but I probably need to be thinking about ways for adults to do it in there are strategies you know I gotta go to engage in this kind of behavior seems like every other day is wr

iting some advice about self care and advice and so on but I think you're right that it it leads to a more fulfilling way of life and so maybe finding ways to promote that in high schools and in colleges will enable that kind of tract to become a practice I guess that's what I'm trying to say but it's a great question it is a great question other people have thoughts about this so build your thoughts about this well my thoughts would take up the rest of the time we have written a lot about and a

ctually a little part of the part of the global pact on education that the Pope will present in May is will be about education for a life of purpose which I've written about actually a chapter for that and so if you want to send to me rather than try to do it here if anybody is just sense to me I'll be happy to write the most recent version of this which I wrote from our solos conference and book on education for a life purpose I'll be delighted to send that along I assume Marcello that I can do

that without violating any copyrights or anything like you can do that without violating copyright it does strike me that there are people that we need to motivate to want to understand their complexities and there are people who need the capacity to understand that but I think those skills are the kinds of skills that people are going to need going forward as we become a more global society to understand how to move from one community to the next to understand what you know what's part of thei

r core central self and what they can learn and adapt to in the context of people who are at who are diverse I think one of the ways in which we come to understand who we are is to see ourselves in relation and and reflection and in similarity and in divergence with people from a wide variety of walks of life and so we think about continual self-discovery over the course of the lifespan it's in part putting ourselves constantly in a position where we can learn new things be exposed to new ideas

and new people and you know get out of our shells where we like to be with people who are just like ourselves and I think if we train that up early on in our high schools that are diverse our college campuses are incredibly diverse but we don't take advantage of the kinds of programs and practices that to help people to really understand how to be their core self but also lead in and adapt to diversity yes my name is Martha Shiro and I work in language development so I think I have a comment or

a doubt about interdisciplinarity because I find that some disciplines cannot be mono disciplines they are inter disciplinary and language development is one of those and as I'm a linguist and it's a minority in the field of language development I feel that there is a difficulty in combining views of one object of study with the other object of study and then combining it with in that theory because it's always psychologists were the majority in this field have a view of language which is not al

ways the same as we linguists have about evolving our views of language so that's one comment or reflection I have on interdisciplinarity and then I have a curiosity related to technology and that's a question and it's about literacy and how this fast changing technology effects literacy in such interesting ways it expands it in a way that we can have believed I think that children younger than two already read and write in a certain way because they type and at the same time I think the way we

read and write has been transformed by this technology maybe for the better or sometimes reducing it in many ways I would like your thoughts on that sure I mean I think that not so much these days but I think maybe five or 10 years ago there was quite a lot of hand-wringing about net speak and text speak and things like that really diminishing young people's language but at least within the scholars that I interact with most I think there's an increasing recognition that the traditional literaci

es that are taught in schools are still very important but the kinds of literacies that young people are encountering in online spaces they may look different but they are still very meaningful and very rich and and and they're just as important to understand in this new environment as more traditional literacy so I think both of them can live side by side and and actually be integrated with each other there's a beautiful little book by Alberto man again not the history of reading but a book cal

led gone Borges with Portuguese I don't know if it's in English he was a young man Naruto who read was one of the poorest was blind and he had wieners and Alberto was his reader in all the German and the book is con Boris is this 12 year old boy who goes to the great man of letters was blind and he reads the Warriors and I think the point of the little book is that why we read we read to converse do Garcia Marquez put it Vivi de perak on para meaning we live and we read to converse to have the e

xchanges that I think was such a part of one of our papers and Megan Catherine's session so the purpose of the reading is also that human interaction the question then becomes with the new instruments how they either detract or or enhance the idea of a text as a point of entry to a conversation and that katie is a question they did more for you hmm well I mean or even just transform the way we communicate meaning so if you think about if you have sent a message through text or I use whatsapp a l

ot to communicate with my relatives in Bermuda I often will deliberate very hard about what kind of emoji I'm going to use to display just exactly my kind the reaction that I'm feeling and I use very different reactions when I'm interacting with my father versus my mother or my partner and there's there's a little bit of an art to it I think and and increasingly actually twenty somethings thirty sub things have been writing novels on their cell phones and using this sort of new language and emoj

is and things like that and I think you know it's it's very interesting I think all it's doing is broadening our language I don't think it's diminishing it mm-hmm if I can comment on something that was behind your question so we've had this discussion about interdisciplinarity and implicit in that are pros and cons and how to deal with that but we have another risk factor which is insularity and so as our now insularity so as our knowledge and any given discipline is expanding exponentially ther

e's been this natural splitting off so a classic example would be you know 20 years ago you were a biology major now there's molecular biologists cell biology neurobiology and it goes on and on and on I'm on the steering committee for the mind brain and behavior group at Harvard and we've been discussing having a cognitive science concentration separate from psychology separate or neuroscience and so if this continues they'll be disciplines that just don't talk to each other at all anymore so is

that the alternative to disciplines trying to talk and I don't know the answer to that but I think we need to be very mindful of both the implosion and explosion you've been very patient go ahead um thanks for the wonderful piano my name is wen I'm a visiting scholar to Harvard University my field is higher education studies I have a question about AI and it's like relation to to Educational Studies well in many parts of the world we are seeing that programmers are playing more and more signifi

cant role in educational practice so my question is that what do you think the impact of of AI I mean the development of AI Educational Studies and was a human development studies in not only in terms of research topics but were so in terms of like methodology and also like paradigms thank you I'll take a step so I think actually I'll hug him back to John Hansen's comments and I think what he was talking about in terms of because behind AI just algorithms and what I think is super important is k

eeping the human judgment that's one thing and I'm really glad that John talked about that and I'm also really glad that Amazon hired him because I think that's super important and then I think the other aspect is who is creating the algorithms and a lot of the times in Silicon Valley the people who are creating that algorithms are not necessarily representative of the broader population and that concerns me in terms of just technology development but in terms of Education I really hope that whe

n we start to increasingly introduce AI into methods and interventions that the people behind that and their human judgment are representative of the broader population and the children who I'm supposed to be served by these interventions I would add to that is is we think about AI and we think about algorithms sometimes we perceive those to be static and what one of my doctoral students Avril Epps darling is looking at is how these algorithms adapt to our interactions with them and how that put

s children at particular risk because as adults we know that these algorithms are driving or what ads were getting on our what on our apps or our surfing on the Internet or what have you but what she's showing is that these algorithms are diverging adolescents in terms of their identity development so adolescents that have a strong identity development are able to navigate these algorithms and turn back from a road where an algorithm is going to send them deeper into an area and that's where you

get you knows people talk about the you know the radicalization that happens on on the Internet as you get teased with some things and you're you're you're carried along in a way that is machine learning but we aren't really skilled at helping adolescents and young people talk about that and understand that we know how to talk to them about stranger danger right we know how to think about monitoring but we don't know how to help them see that the pathways that they're taking on the Internet tak

e on allies a life of their own they know to stay away from the stranger on the Internet but do they see the algorithm themselves as something that's dynamic and in interaction with them and driving them places that they might not necessarily go on their own briefly I think one thing we need to be mindful of is AI has made major inroads and health using health records to make predictions about health it's only a matter of time before the same thing happens in education taking what goes on in the

classroom and making predictions about academic achievement and progress and things like that and the data you put in is determines what comes out and so we need to be extraordinarily careful about that when we use test scores in performance in any number of things joonie maybe we have time for physically is it brief well it's more comments well Americans will come and set a question about the challenges of interdisciplinarity one of the things that I've observed the main dilemma I see is that

disciplines have canons and disciplines have accepted methods and when you go to another discipline you're not speaking the Canon and you're not using the methods and the fear and this is a cautionary tale for you as the president's elective SR CD is that if you let in a lot of disciplines and there aren't dialogues about the methods you risk becoming a RA where there are no standards anymore my personal view no standards because there there aren't well accepted methods that are talking across t

hese fields so what I'm seeing is that the multi and I'll use the word multidisciplinary is people who are multidisciplinary have depth and they have the methodological expertise in those different fields and they can navigate those divides in a way that interdisciplinary people fall into a chasm because they're neither and fish and they're not fat fowl and you see this also in emerging fields Chuck was talking a bit about some emerging field I'll talk about the data science is an emerging field

there are deep disagreements between the statisticians and the computer scientists about what the Canon is what the methods are the National Academy of Sciences had a consensus panel on data science and they couldn't reach a consensus on a definition on what students at the undergraduate levels should learn so you've got these disciplines each with well accepted canons that are pretty well respected yet they can't reach a consensus on it and I think this is an issue for emerging fields and it's

definitely always going to be an issue for professional schools because professional schools at their core their strength is that multidisciplinary lens so it's not there thank you Judy big thanks to all of you I know Nonie wants to get up and yes some remarks and a gift but I made a t-shirt for Howard and off our panel the signup you can read it but it says King for truth beauty and goodness I wanted to reassure you that we will continue to search for truth beauty and goodness long after you'r

e gone and to thank you you've been an inspiration for all [Applause] gathering and experience in fact I was just thinking this morning that in an era of too much email and so much remote work and these massive conferences with too many sessions these last couple of days have been a major exception and a great reminder of the importance of coming together to look back and reflect to look ahead and to engage in dialogue as an academic community they've also been as many have said a testament to h

ow unique the HGSE community is and the HDP tradition within it so before we sign off in this room I have a few thanks to offer first Jared and Jess and Jason and the IT team have been instrumental in this [Applause] Carolyn Crozier and the team in operations and Jody Bennett Smith our Events Manager have put a tremendous amount of time into this event as have folks in the dean's office meg McDermott Mitsuki Nishimoto and Meredith Lamont and with all the logistics in place and the great planning

and thank goodness for the timing we were able to be joined by so many fabulous scholars and friends and so I think a great big round of applause to all speakers and special guests [Applause] so finally it was Howard and Bob's and Catherine's idea to hold this homecoming of sorts and so I can't let us wrap up without honoring them and to acknowledge that in large part it is because of their sustained contributions and dedication to HGSE as faculty members and citizens that this kind of program

and set of conversations comes together I have a special gift for each of them from the dean's office and even more than that I want to say that you have brought us together as an extended community to rekindle relationships and dialogue and make this so memorable and meaningful and I know I'm sure I speak on behalf of many when I say I am grateful for that here is some wine from the dean's office [Music] [Applause] so with that we hope all of you walk across the road to Guttman conference cente

r for a reception thank you