When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up? Share any experiences that illustrate your emerging aspirations, passion, curiosity – and changes along the way.

When I was little, I didn’t know what a psychologist was; certainly not what an historian of psychology was. Instead, I wanted to be a marine biologist.

My parents used to rent a summer house on the beach in Nag’s Head on Cape Hatteras. And I’d spend all day playing in and around the ocean: bodysurfing in the waves, snorkeling, digging up sand-critters with my sister, fishing off the pier, flying kites, and playing with the neighbour-kids who thought we sounded funny (we’re Canadian) but still let us join their fun in the sun. I have lots of good memories.

That house is gone now. It was swallowed by the Atlantic. It’s such a shame: it was an amazing, magical place. I would have liked to return with my nephews. It was so easy to explore there, in the sun and the surf.

How do you characterize the understanding and processes of development? What does it mean to you to be involved with development, its research, science, practice, education…?

From the perspective of that first love of biology, and getting a bit technical, “development” is change that occurs within a generation; within the individual lifespan. So it’s a higher-plasticity process than evolution (change that occurs across generations). But it’s also slower than the next level up in the plasticity hierarchy: behavioural change and learning are much, much faster.

From this perspective, development is what happens to a body after behaviour and learning have had their impact on the self and the situation (the Baldwin Effect and niche construction). From this perspective, too, development isn’t just a process. It also provides a physiological record of what couldn’t be accommodated behaviorally, learned, or anticipated by inherited evolutionary processes.

So development isn’t about following a preset program to arrive at a correct solution known in advance; that’s maturation. Development requires confronting and engaging with the unknown and then changing to meet its challenges. Theorizing development means understanding how we become the kind of person that can respond well in situations previous generations didn’t have to worry about.

That’s a big part of what interests me about Piaget’s work. Most of my historical research focuses on his later theorizing: after his introduction of “genetic epistemology” (where genetic means genesis rather than genes). But he wrote about this both at the end of his life, when he referred to Waddington’s epigenetics in regrounding his biological metatheory, and at the beginning. You can see its origins even in his early studies before he turned to psychology.

When Piaget was moving from biology to philosophy, then began to study child development, he made direct comparisons between children and snails. He explained that it’s easier to see the history of development in a snail’s shell than it is to see it in a child’s thinking: you can’t read kids’ thoughts directly like you can a shell.

I quite like that comparison. I think it also explains Piaget’s experimental games, like the Three Mountains Task or the Conservation Experiments: those aren’t psychiatric interviews of the sort he learned in Zurich during his first postdoc and applied in the intelligence-testing that he did in Paris during his second postdoc. Rather, they’re semi-structured interactions meant to elicit behaviors that you might not otherwise see; to do more than ask questions about how knowledge-claims are justified; to try to uncover their reasons. The logics of these reasons were then theorized in such a way that the elicited responses could be understood to group together into clusters, just like species are groupings of individuals that could be named collectively despite their differences. And these groupings are the basis for the “stages” we read about in textbooks; they’re highly variable, and we see this clearly in Piaget’s early writings, but you can refer to them in various ways that make them seem stable.

This historical connection from the children to the snails is not at all how we think of Piaget today. I think that results in misunderstandings. Knowing more of the history could help to ensure that the inevitable future fights are about the right things.

How does your work engage with ideas from Piaget (and colleagues of his era) as originally articulated or as have evolved over time? What drew you to the work that engages you most?

I started studying Piaget because my favourite psychology professor at the University of Toronto compared him to Thomas Kuhn in a discussion of the development and evolution of scientific thinking. (“How neat that these two massively influential thinkers were working on fundamentally the same thing!”)

He said it was a shame that so few of Piaget’s later works about “genetic epistemology” had been translated. And also that it was a shame that contemporary psychologists didn’t have the language skills to dig back into them and find what we would value today about what science and knowledge are from a scientific perspective. Then he pointed at me and said, “Hey, J: don’t you speak French?” (I do!)

Unfortunately, speaking the language isn’t sufficient. You also have to be able to share what you find with the audience in a way they’ll appreciate.

I’ve done a bunch of standard historical work. And I’m proud of the best bits. But it took me several years to invent methods to show quantitatively of Piaget what historians had spent decades demonstrating qualitatively in their studies of the Americanization of Wundt via Titchener. Now, though, I can offer a general method that will work to show meaning-change whenever an author of lots of books has had their work translated over many years into several other languages. I’m hopeful that that will help catalyze similar projects.

Let’s break this down a bit. Obviously, the choice of what to translate reflects the interests of the receiving audience. (Titchener brought over Wundt’s experimental works, not his völkerpsychologie, and then Watson replied to Titchener in his “behaviorist manifesto” which in turn set up the cognitive revolution to which the affective turn was a response and so on.) But so too do the relative rates of subsequent citation also reflect the interests of those who are doing the citing. So more importantly than the fact of meaning-change having happened in two canonical cases, Wundt and Piaget, I also argued—more generally—that there’s a kind of Matthew Effect (of accumulated advantage) that occurs with contemporary translations of historical texts; a primacy effect that’s disconnected from the original source’s publication.

I called this the Levi Effect: what gets translated first shapes the perception of what gets translated later, even if the later translations are actually about something else. So combine this with genuine scientific interest, by an audience with its own concerns, and you sometimes end up with a systematic, structural skew. A bias of perspective.

(Levi is thought to have been Matthew’s original name, in the Bible, but we aren’t sure because of translations and time. And I thought that the originator of the Matthew Effect, Robert Merton [1910-2003], would appreciate this enough to allow it a different name.)

Everything is understood—in translation—according to the logic of the receiving audience, rather than by the logic of the producing source. And when we know there’s a pressing need at the time of reception that didn’t exist originally, like the Cold War, that difference in context provides a strong influence that sometimes results in a quite different understanding. Invisibly, but “obviously” if you look.

To do research with texts that have had their meanings change over time, in this way, requires a kind of Piagetian leap to understand them. And actually, this is what Kuhn said he learned from Piaget that led him to write The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: in order to understand what someone is thinking, you have to “climb into” their head (as he put it). You can’t interpret what they saw with your reasons; it has to be with their reasons.

Summarize and highlight one or more examples from your work and experience that you are excited to share. Why are you keen for others to learn from your efforts?

Big picture? What Kuhn identified in Piaget’s writing about children underlies pretty much all contemporary History of Science in one way or another: their logic is different from ours, and that difference needs to be understood (typically, historians say “contextualized”) if we are also to understand the perspective of the Other. And that’s such a useful insight. I think it should be part of the basic curriculum for all psychologists: an easy entry-point for more complicated later conversations about inter-cultural competence. And also a good place to start to make more difficult histories possible.

Consider how COVID, and post-COVID, conditions affect the work and community.

I think Covid has made me gentler; less intense. You never know if someone is struggling to hit a deadline because they’ve been sick. Or if they’re caring for someone who’s sick. So I’ve doubled down lately on the Principle of Charity: assume the best, not the worst.

More concretely, because I know this is a real problem at the journals on whose editorial boards I serve: if I think I might not be able to do a peer review, I write back immediately to the editor and say so. Then at least they don’t have to wait for me to figure out if I can take on the additional work.

Please tell us about a hidden talent and/or a non-academic hobby that you enjoy.

After a quarter-century away from the sport, I’ve returned to playing hockey. Even when I fall, I can’t help but keep smiling.

When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up? Share any experiences that illustrate your emerging aspirations, passion, curiosity – and changes along the way.

For some reason, quite unbeknown to me at the time, I decided to become a school teacher when I was in primary three. And, given the persistence (pigheadedness) for which I am well noted, I have continued along that path for well over half a century, even to retirement. I moved from being a teacher in primary to being a high school physical education teacher. From there I moved into teacher education, with a background in developmental and educational psychology at the Townsville College of Advanced Education which was then amalgamated into James Cook University. That focus on pedagogy has always been a central part of my personality – including being in charge of training with the Australian Volunteer Coast Guard and the many workshops I have run conducted in Rasch measurement. On reflection, I have concluded that my selection of teaching as a career was probably based in large part on the fact that teaching was one of the very few employment roles in which I’d seen adult men portrayed.

How does your work engage with ideas from Piaget (or colleagues of his era, or Developmental Science more broadly)? What drew you to the work that engages you most?

My idea to conduct my Bachelor of Education honours research on David Ausubel’s ‘advanced organiser’ principle, was dismissed by my supervisor Dr Ian Jackson. He suggested what the world needed was a theory-driven test of formal operational thinking given his recent experience in 12 to 20 Studies of Australian Youth. I borrowed a copy of The Growth of Logical Thinking (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958) from the university library as well as an introductory text on symbolic logic. I then ordered my own copy of GLT, and that decision has haunted the rest of my academic career. I took a sabbatical with Michael Shayer at Kings College London in 1987; his was the closest English-speaking formal operational research centre to Geneva. At the 1987 Cour Avancé, I met with Bärbel Inhelder, Mimi Sinclair, Magali Bovet, as well as Americans Bill Overton, Terry Brown and, most importantly for me, Anastasia Tryphon, who would become a key co-author in the latter part of my career. Attempting meaningful quantification of Piaget-style developmental data led me to understanding the Rasch model for measurement. Although my innovations in using Rasch measurement principles for developmental data, published in the Archives de Psychologie, were important, they led to the 2001 publication of Applying the Rasch Model, in which cognitive developmental data figured prominently. Although I became a legend in my own lunchbox in the field of Rasch measurement, my first passion for Piaget’s theory in general, and formal operational thinking in particular persisted. Our latest paper published in History of Psychology focuses on the documented evidence behind the publication and translation of Inhelder’s Magnum Opus – GLT.

How do you characterize the understanding and processes of development? What does it mean to you to be involved with development, its research, science, practice, education…?

During half a century of involvement with cognitive developmental research, I have tried to bridge the intellectual gulf between the constructivism of Geneva and the quantification required by the Anglophone research world. With French as my second language, my visits to Geneva have allowed me to interact with many who worked directly with Piaget as well as to read his own work in French, as well as primary and secondary research published in that language. It has been quite challenging (and educational) to see how the early uncritical adoration of Piaget in the US, exemplified in the establishment of the JPS, slowly slipped away as a consequence of poorly conceptualised, philosophically barren, empiricist investigations of important cognitive developmental concepts; indeed, death by a thousand cuts. I have always strived to conduct philosophically informed empirical research using quantification techniques that were sensitive to the developmental sequencing underlying research into the processes of cognitive development and their educational consequences, right across the K-12 age range.

Summarize and highlight one or more examples from your work and experience that you are excited to share. Why are you keen for others to learn from your efforts?

It is now half a century since I opened the library copy of The Growth of Logical Thinking for the first time. Given my obstinacy and pigheadedness, that oeuvre has been the immovable object of my research. I guess it is very important to me – in a special sense – that my latest published research in this area was an exposition of the research and personal background of Inhelder’s seminal research work that provided the empirical evidence that was the focus of GLT. With the financial support of research bursaries of the Fondation Archives Jean Piaget, and the collaboration of my Genevan colleague, Anastasia Tryphon, access to the academic documents retrieved from Inhelder’s home after her death culminated in an article selected as the History of Psychology ‘editor’s choice’. Another exemplar for that group of senior JPS colleagues who routinely dismissed me as being “too close to Geneva”.

5. What do you see as important changes/advances in the work or field that you are involved in?

My peculiar orientation was to the quantification of cognitive developmental data; to find, to develop, and then to communicate genuine measurement techniques sensitive to the felicitous representation of changes in cognitive development over time that were central to the psychological aspects of Piaget’s constructivist epistemology. Ideas based on ‘true score’, such as correlations and factor analysis, produced less than completely meaningful empirical evidence of underlying developmental processes. Piaget had already claimed that quantification procedures of his era were conceptually flawed in that there was no meaning in the ‘units’ that traditional techniques adopted. The application of Rasch measurement to developmental data is the consequence of my obsession with trying to resolve those issues.

How did you become involved in the Jean Piaget Society? Please consider answering this question in a way that might encourage others to participate in JPS.

In the 90s, I made several presentations about using Rasch analysis in cognitive developmental settings at meetings of the Jean Piaget Society – that’s a big commitment from Australia. The oft-repeated question at the end of those presentations was, inevitably: ‘Can you tell me how to do that analysis – in about 10 minutes?’ Even though I really wanted to write a book about Piaget’s formal operational thinking, it was obvious that I needed to think about writing a book about Rasch analysis for colleagues such as those and their research students. Judy Amsel, senior editor for Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, and wife of a long-term JPS member, told me that if I ever intended to write a book about Rasch analysis, I should give her publishing group the right of first refusal. “There is a space in our catalogue for that book, and clearly you have the capacity to fill it.” Fellow JPS member Bill Gray introduced me to “new hire” Christine Fox when I visited the University of Toledo. So, from a launch pad provided by JPS meetings, the most influential publication in the field, Applying the Rasch Model was foisted on the world.

Please tell us about a hidden talent and/or a non-academic hobby that you enjoy.

As a genuine francophile, I must admit that following the Tour de France around that country provides an excuse to eat and drink our way through all the regions of France. From my first visit in 1987, when I rode up the iconic Alpe d’Huez at age 40, until I repeated that same climb with my younger brother at age 72, I have cycled most of the iconic climbs of Le Tour as well as a few from the Giro in Northern Italy. Still crazy after all these years.

When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up? Share any experiences that illustrate your emerging aspirations, passion, curiosity – and changes along the way.

My earliest memories include wanting to be a writer, a ballerina, and a pianist. And indeed,during those early years I wrote, I danced, and I played the piano to my heart’s content. Eventually books and storytelling occupied most of my time and attention and I started dreaming about studying and living abroad (I was born and raised in Mexico) and being able to read and write in other languages (my first language is Spanish). I think it’s fair to say that curiosity and passion have been the constant thread in my long and unconventional academic trajectory: a BA in Literature gave way to an MA in Linguistics, which finally transformed into a PhD in Comparative Human Development with a focus on language socialization. In between all that, I was lucky to accomplish my dreams of living and studying abroad and of becoming a reader andwriter in other languages.

How does your work engage with ideas from Piaget (and colleagues of his era) as originally articulated or as have evolved over time? What drew you to the work that engages you most?

Interestingly, I think that my first Piagetian experiences happened when I attended a Montessori school as a child. Many years later after having taken a developmental psychology course as a graduate student I realized that I needed to revisit Montessori’s ideas (which I did as a side quest by completing a Montessori training) and from there I started exploring more in–depth the work of scholars like Piaget and Vygotsky. Since then, I have engaged the most with academic work that explores children’s developmental processes in socio–cultural contexts.

How do you characterize the understanding and processes of development What does it mean to you to be involved with development, its research, science, practice, education…?

To me, the study of human development needs to be done from an interdisciplinary perspective that considers the interrelation of individual and collective processes and that acknowledges the ideologically mediated nature of the questions that we ask, the concepts that we take for granted, and the extent to which we consider the diverse array of human experiences and developmental trajectories.

Summarize and highlight one or more examples from your work and experience that you are excited to share. Why are you keen for others to learn from your efforts? 

My work explores the inter relationship between language, culture, and the intergenerational creation, (re)production and transformation of knowledge with a focus on bilingual and multilingual families and communities. I am equally proud of my work on early language socialization in contexts of language shift as I am of my work with students in the classroom. I am motivated by the goal of contributing to dismantling prevalent deficit views that directly affect racialized and marginalized families and communities globally.

What do you see as important changes/advances in the work or field that involves you? Consider how COVID, and post-COVID, conditions affect the work and community. 

COVID and other ongoing global challenges are pushing us to be more flexible in our questions, our methodologies, and in the ways in which we disseminate our research. These challenges have also made more evident than ever that we need to (re)center communities and care in the work that we do.

How did you become involved in the Jean Piaget Society? Answer this question in a way that might encourage others to participate in JPS.

I learned about JPS through mentors and peers from my graduate program when I was still a student. The first conference I attended was in 2019 and I thoroughly enjoyed the diversity of presentations and the presence of scholars from different parts of the world. I attended a couple of conferences virtually after that and this year I am happy to be attending an in–person conference again.

Please tell us about a hidden talent and/or a non-academic hobby that you enjoy.

I enjoy listening to music and singing along. I memorize lyrics easily and they stay with me forever. Whenever I can, I follow a song that pops into my brain and start a listening/sing along session. I can do this on my own, but I also like sharing the music that I enjoy with other people. I am lucky that I have always found people who are willing to join me in these listening/signing sessions.

For a piece by Dr. Bustamante https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/aeq.12487

When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up? Share any experiences that illustrate your emerging aspirations, passion, curiosity – and changes along the way.

As a child, on a piece of paper, I made 12 blocks. In each block, I put one thing I wanted to do when I grew up. One was a scientist; one a ballet dancer; one a violinist; one a housewife with lots of committees – that’s my mother. I wanted to dance. When I was 13, the Halifax dance company I was in, went on tours. We did Swan Lake on Toes! I was a Little Swan! I love ballet; I loved the dance teacher; that time of my life! A little later, I had to choose between ballet and violin. My father was not happy with ballet as a career. I chose violin. 50 years later, I went back to dancing!!

How does your work engage with ideas from Piaget (and colleagues of his era) as originally articulated or as have evolved over time? What drew you to the work that engages you most?

I happened to study with Jean Piaget on a scholarship [from Canada]. I knew a little bit of French, they sent me to Paris, it was 1957. I got fascinated by Piaget’s work, more philosophically. Epistemologically. I was there for three years. I eventually did my doctorate there, but it wasn’t yet.

I was one of the only people in North America who ever worked with Piaget. I got a job at the Elementary Science Study, a wonderful organization, to develop curriculum for elementary school children. I was the only staff who didn’t know any science. There weren’t any children on staff. So I became the child that everybody tried their ideas on. And that was a terrific education for me. They never told me anything. They just asked me what I would do with this or how I would go about that. And it was terrific. I loved it, and I loved learning that way. And it was the first time really I learned in my own way.

In developing the curriculum, when they took it into the classrooms, I went along to try to figure out what the kids were thinking about it. It was exactly what I did in Geneva as a research assistant. Talk to kids and find out what they’re thinking about something, keeping them thinking more and talking more. Then I started teaching teachers. I did exactly the same things in teaching as I did, in researching, asking questions, not saying yes or no to answers. It ended that I loved to work with teachers. And having them think about what it means to learn something. How did people learn things and what can anyone do to help you?

Summarize and highlight one or more examples from your work and experience that you are excited to share. Why are you keen for others to learn from your efforts? 

Piaget and Inhelder are at the heart of all of the work I’ve done in education. My question is how do people learn things? And what can anyone do to help?

The attitude that I had as a Genevan researcher was the best attitude to have with them, asking what they thought about this and that, and never giving any clues as to what I thought about it. I loved playing that. I loved that role and getting kids finding how interested kids got in their own thoughts and then puzzles and how hard they would think, and so on. And gradually I realized that was a pedagogical approach. What I think of as teaching now is: getting people thinking about interesting and important topics. Having them work out their own ideas, come to their own commitments of what they think about it. Not by somebody else telling them what they should think about it. That came straight from Piaget and Inhelder, and it’s the heart of my work.

I started teaching at Harvard Graduate School of Education in the 1980s. Like a bridge between Piaget and education, I gave graduate students cool stuff to study. For example, I’d come into the classroom, I had one student stand here, another student stand there. I’d ask them, where on the wall, should they put a little mirror, so that person can see that person? I never tell them anything that’s right or wrong.

How did you become involved in the Jean Piaget Society? Answer this question in a way that might encourage others to participate in JPS.

The first thing is that I translated Piaget’s lecture. That was at the second JPS meeting. So, that’s how I learned about JPS. I translated Piaget for the first time around 1964. Whenever he was invited, he said they had to invite me to translate. So that’s what happened with the JPS. I remember feeling very warmly towards the women who had created this society. Lois McCumber and Jeanette Gallagher and others. I just remember they’re doing this great job creating this great association. And, knowing that they were teachers, they came from education, which is where I came from, too, by that point. That seemed important to me. My sense is that the sessions were about education and its place in education. They weren’t very focused on psychology research of the day. They were more interested in educational practice of the day and how Piaget and Inhelder could help.

JPS seemed like a home base. For some time, I think the society was paying less attention to education, and I was hoping that our work could draw interest back to education in that society. I always felt at home at Piaget Society meetings and was happy to introduce students there. I have a sense that, there’s a good home for education again.

Please tell us about a hidden talent and/or a non-academic hobby that you enjoy.

I learned about a dance class for people over 55. I didn’t want to do it then, because I thought I would be too heartbroken (after not dancing since youth). I was 58 before I had the guts to dance again. First class was fantastic! There I was dancing! So I kept dancing. I am still dancing!! I performed last weekend.