2026 Award Recipients

The JPS Board of Directors is pleased to announce Jan Boom 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. 

To say Jan does a lot for the society would be a serious understatement – at this point we could not run it without him. A long time JPS board member until his recent retirement, Jan continues in his role of webmaster and the IT Vice President. As such, he maintains the JPS website, the membership site, the conference application, and all conference-related questions, comments, and concerns. His skill in maintaining our membership site has allowed us to easily accommodate last-minute changes and scheduling conflicts with a few lines of code and a couple of quick keys. His experience organizing JPS conferences is incredibly useful, and he serves as a constant set of eyes on all details of conference management from the rooms at the venue to appropriate hotels and restaurants. He also provides input for financial considerations, catching places where the organization can spend money more thoughtfully and strategically. Importantly, Jan does not mince words. If he likes your idea, he will say he likes it. If he thinks something can be done better, he will say it can be done better. He attributes his direct style to his heritage, but those of us who have got to know him over the years understand that it is a symptom of the passion that he holds for this organization – he gives it his all to make sure things happen professionally and properly and does what needs to be done to make sure those standards are maintained (even if this means meeting many times a week). Much like Chris himself, Jan possesses an affinity for the organization that leads directly to its success. It is in recognition of his own work and effort on our behalf that we bestow upon him the Christopher Lalonde Exceptional Service Award. 

Time in Developmental Science

This talk focuses on time in developmental science, and on time in my research thus far. After a brief review about time in our field, I will explain how time is a human technology and, if we use it that way in our research, we can make some interesting untimely discoveries about the human condition. Drawing on my research with young people sped into adult responsibilities by violence and research with educators adjusting to policy reversals endangering their undocumented students, I will illustrate how studies inviting children, youth, and adults to interact brings subjectivity to life in ways that complicate assumptions about a progressive developmental march forward. My argument is that creative use of time in research methodology is especially urgent now to address challenges to humanity, such as by AI, longevity science, political violence, and climate change. If we model research with the richness of everyday reveries (such as in narratives) and dreams (such as in policies), we can learn about human complexity that designs requiring metrics of future progress may obscure. The culmination of these brief remarks will be to express my sincere and heart-felt appreciation to the Jean Piaget Society for this honor.

Children’s Moral Reasoning about Social Inequality

As they navigate societies shaped by social inequalities, children encounter many disparities in resources and opportunities. A core line of my research program asks how children first begin to recognize these inequalities, how their explanations for them change with cognitive development and social experience, how their reasoning informs their judgments about which disparities are acceptable and which are wrong, and how relationships with parents, peers, and educators shape who is likely to act when given the chance to make a positive change. This talk will share insights from my research in this area to date, including creative methods for studying these questions early in development. I am grateful to the Jean Piaget Society for celebrating science that seeks a more just and equitable future for the next generation.