2025 Award Recipients

The JPS Board of Directors is pleased to announce Nancy Budwig as the recipient of The Chris Lalonde Exceptional Service Award. Because of its exceptional nature, this award is not given annually, but to those rare individuals who have provided an extraordinary level of service to the Jean Piaget Society that goes beyond the normal duties of a Board Member or Society Officer. Christopher Lalonde, the award’s namesake, provided a template through his decades of service to the JPS; Nancy Budwig, notably and appropriately, is the second recipient.

Nancy has served the Society tirelessly for many years and in many roles – as board member, conference organizer, publications editor, and president. She has been generous and brilliant in all these roles, shepherding the Society through several important transitions, including the changing nature of our publications and publishers. What sets Nancy’s work apart, however, is her unwavering commitment and efforts to build community. Was your paper session unfortunately scheduled next to an invited symposium? You likely saw Nancy in your audience. Were you presenting as a graduate student or a scholar who crossed oceans or international borders to be with us? Then Nancy surely attended your session and made a point of asking thoughtful questions or drawing out interesting issues about your work. Nancy also is a builder of collaborations, regularly finding opportunities for people to connect with ideas and each other. And behind our public-facing scenes, you can count on her quick praise and gratitude for the work of others. Whether you helped put together the Guidebook or the program schedule, completed editorial work on our latest special issue journal, developed a proposal for a conference, rebuilt the website or worked on any other of the essential, arduous tasks required to keep our Society up and running, you can count on Nancy to recognize your work and effort. It is in recognition of her own work and effort on our behalf that we bestow the Christopher Lalonde Exceptional Service Award.

Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont studied psychology in Geneva (Switzerland), with Jean Piaget, and she graduated in Geneva and Lausanne; she did a MA at the University of London, where she met the work of Basil Bernstein, and then undertook her PhD under the supervision of Willem Doise, a Belgian social psychologist Piaget had himself invited to join his team. Anne-Nelly Perret- Clermont was appointed as professor at the University of Neuchâtel – Piaget’s birthplace – in 1979, where she became an emeritus in 2014.

Her trajectory led her to define a distinctive attention to the social dynamics at the heart of learning and development. Her PhD was thus on the role of social interactions in cognitive development, and she was part of the group that developed the concept of “sociocognitive confict” – the idea that a social disagreement (between two persons) may be solved, internally, as cognitive new construction. Her interest for the social dimensions of learning and development, which she expanded through social psychology and they then emerging field of Vygotsky inspired cultural psychology, took a variety of aspects.

First, she continued basic research on the social conditions of the emergence of thinking. To further understand the process of cognitive development, she focused on careful analysis of the unfolding of meaning-making in interactions, which eventually brought her to study argumentation in children. She also diversified the context of study, studying children in the classroom, with all its cultural diversity, as well as leading projects studying young people learning a trade or profession.

She maintained long-standing collaborations with teachers, psychologists, and professionals interested in life-long learning. She has always been very active in developing research communities in Switzerland and internationally; she personally has supported Piagetian scholars in troubled social and political environments; she was active in developing networks, communities, journals and institutions; she has always been very generous in encouraging and promoting younger scholars; many of her former students and colleagues are still active in the Jean Piaget Society.

In close to 400 publications, and many scientific honors, including the Lastis Prize (the Swiss equivalent of the Nobel of science) Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont’s wide interests and interdisciplinary orientations brought her to develop a model capturing the multiple psycho-social determination of the condition of learning and development, which she called the “thinking space;” as can be seen, her whole professional trajectory is devoted to promoting such thinking spaces.

The influence of epistemological assumptions on educational approaches: A multi-level analysis

Epistemological assumptions in educational theories about how students acquire new knowledge are often implicit and require careful tracing. This dissertation is a compilation of 6 theoretical review papers and one intensive ethnographic analysis of the “epistemological dispositions” of 15 teachers in a school following the practices of Rudolf Steiner. Across these papers, Dr. Gennen develops a multi-level analysis that contrasts several approaches to education in terms of their epistemological assumptions and the consequences on instructional practices and outcomes. For example, instructivist approaches teach directly; empiricist approaches start from the perceptual aspects of children’s lives and work to connect abstract principles to them; constructivist approaches from Piaget to Bruner to Papert focus in part on discovery, experiential, problem-based and inquiry-based learning, and Developmental Teaching is a Vygotskyan-influenced approach (e.g., Davydov 1972/1999) that emphasizes that children learn best when given fundamental abstract conceptions along with concrete information. In making explicit the implicit epistemological commitments and consequences of these and other educational approaches, Dr. Gennen provides a valuable roadmap of the pathways to learning. And in his final paper, he draws upon the expertise he gained by observing alongside teachers in Steiner-influenced schools for five years. The Awards Committee felt that Dr. Gennen’s thorough work nicely exemplifies a part of our name: “The Society for the Study of Knowledge and Development.”

The relationship between teachers’ historical imagination experience, students’ historical imagination experience and history learning

Finalist Dr. Julio Mainardes Waiga holds a Ph.D. from Universidade Federal do Paraná, Brazil. His dissertation, The relationship between teachers’ historical imagination experience, students’ historical imagination experience and history learning, focused on “historical imagination:” the essential mental skill of using rational, emotional and asesthetic means to construct rich historical narratives. Essentially, this means converting biographies, written sources, films, maps and artifacts into something closer to lived experience, as described by Chilean researcher Francisco Varelas. Dr. Waiga’s studies first conducted a micro-phenomenological coding system of interviews with 9th grade students and teachers in a Steiner/Waldorf school in Brazil about their processes in learning and teaching history. Outcome measures of their learning, when compared with those of a Montessori school, showed advanced comprehension and longer comparison of historical information.

Disagreement prompts young children’s metacognitive reflection

Finalist Dr. Antonia Langenhoff was awarded a Ph.D. in Psychology from the Social Origins Lab of University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation, Disagreement prompts young children’s metacognitive reflection is built upon the foundational assumption in Piagetian theory that interpersonal disagreement on cognitive tasks promotes deeper understanding. Specifically, across 5 studies in children from 4-9 years old, this dissertation examines whether such disagreements metacognitive reflection in 3 areas: 1) their reason-giving, 2) their confidence monitoring, and 3) their belief revision and suspension of judgment. Results showed that 1) 5–9-year-old children shared more reasons for decisions in the disagreement condition than in the agreement condition regardless of whether the children were from China, the U.S. or Kenya; 4-6 year olds became less confident in their judgement when faced with disagreement from a confederate and searched for more information—this was especially true when the confederate whas seen as having more knowledge. Finally, while both younger (4-6 year olds) and older (7-9 year olds) revised their views when a confederate had stronger information, only the older children suspended judgment when contradictory information was equal between the two sides. Thus, these studies show the beginnings of metacognitive reflection even in young children.

Dr Gönültaş’s work consists of over 30 publications, using constructivist perspectives on intergroup relations to shed light on a pressing international problem: combating prejudice and discrimination against migrant children. It uses Social Reasoning Development Theory to examine the interaction between group identity and morality in the development of prejudice and discrimination across childhood and adolescence. She has identified ways that childen apply their theory of mind abilities to members of ingroup (e.g. Turkish) vs. outgroup (Syrian refugees) members. She has examined bystander intervention and victim retaliation in a number of different bullying scenarios, studying individual, school, peer, and family dynamics of bullying as part of a National Institute of Justice project. This has led her naturally to consider the factors that affect whether peers intervene in bullying scenarios. Thus Dr. Gönültaş’s work in the U.S., Britain and Türkiye examines children’s and adolescents’ anti-immigrant attitudes from the perspectives of social cognitive development, moral reasoning, in-group norms, group identification, cross-group friendship and feelings of threat. As anti-refugee bias increases in many countries, Dr. Gönültaş’s current work, funded by the prestigious Marie Curie Horizon Widera Fellowship, is focused on giving students the tools to stand up to intergroup bullying.

coming soon!