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Eleanor Duckworth: What is teaching?
Teaching 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.” Check out our Members Celebration page where Eleanor describes early inspirations of her work on teaching and children’s learning, and the educational roots of the Jean Piaget Society.
JPS Awards
Each year JPS bestows several awards to individuals at various points in their scholarly careers. Detailed information regarding nominations can be found at piaget.org/awards. Here is a quick overview.
The Pete Pufall Travel Awards Due date January 6, 2025.
We are pleased to offer two travel awards of $550 each, plus free conference registration, to presenting authors who are Emerging Scholars (see https://piaget.org/emerging-scholars/ for details and https://piaget.org/membership/ for special rates). These awards are made possible by a generous gift of the Pufall Family. Awards are granted to the highest-ranking proposals from Emerging Scholars, with at least one being from a low/middle income country. To be considered for the award, please nominate yourself when you submit your presentation proposal for the annual meeting. Awards will be announced prior to the conference, and monies will be received by awardees at the annual meeting. Emerging Scholars receiving the award, and their presentations, will be highlighted in the program.
NOTE: To be eligible, the first author (presenting author) must be a graduate student or post-doctoral fellow.
Jean Piaget Society Doctoral Dissertation Prize Due date; January 20, 2025.
The Prize, of $2000 plus meeting registration and reasonable travel expenses will be awarded to a new scholar who will deliver at an annual meeting of the Jean Piaget Society an address based upon her or his dissertation completed 24 months prior to the submission date on an historical, epistemological or empirical subject, that focuses on the study of knowledge and development. It should be in the broad tradition and spirit of, but not limited to the theories or work of Piaget and Inhelder.
Jean Piaget Society Early Career Award in Developmental Science. Due date: January 20, 2025.
Recognizing individuals’ different career trajectories, nominees must be within 10 years of receiving their Ph.D. Nominations should include a CV and a nomination letter of 2-4 pages describing the nominee’s work, including its coherence and broader impact on the field, as well as a statement regarding how the nominee’s work connects to the mission and aims of JPS. The letter also should describe the nominee’s involvement in the Jean Piaget Society (e.g., membership in the Society and attendance and presentations at annual meetings). Either self-nominations or nominations by others familiar with the nominee’s work are acceptable. The winner will be asked to give a presentation at the JPS 2025 Annual Conference.
Distinguished Contributions to Developmental Science Award. Due Date of Nomination Letter: December 1, 2024.
This award is given based on a nomination letter sent to the President and forwarded to the Awards Committee. It is conferred by vote of the Board. The nomination letter should include descriptions of: (a) contributions to developmental science that are aligned with the aims of the Jean Piaget Society to further an understanding of the developmental construction of knowledge; and (b) the nominee’s involvement with the Jean Piaget Society, which may include Board membership and attendance at, presentations at, or organizing of annual meetings. We are especially interested in scientists who have made important contributions to developmental science and JPS, and we encourage nominations of those whose work has been generative and broadened perspectives in different ways, including through mentorship, collaborations, and interdisciplinary work. Given the nature of the award, it is expected that this award will be given to senior scholars in field. The winner will be asked to give a presentation at the JPS 2025 Annual Conference in Belgrade. Inquiries or nomination letters should be sent to Stuart Marcovitch, President, s_marcov@uncg.edu .
How Context Travels
Violence and climate change have forced the relocation of many millions of children and youth worldwide. UNICEF reports that violence alone displaced more than 47 million children by the end of 2023. According to Colette Daiute, these children are not simply removed from one context and dropped into an entirely different one — they are not passive pieces moved about in a geopolitical game outside their understanding and control. Viewed instead as active agents, children create meaning, engage socially, wield resources, define and redefine experience according to their needs.
Colette’s work moves decidedly away from trauma-based approaches in order to explore how children engage with and make sense of disruptive circumstances. As a plenary speaker at our 2025 conference in Belgrade, she will discuss the theory underpinning her scholarship and the unique methodologies she has developed to pursue it.
What is “context”?
The organizers of our upcoming 2025 conference at the University of Belgrade, Rethinking context as process when studying human development: Implications for theory, practice, and policy, promise to steer us away from “traditional views studying context as external and static”, as “external settings or arenas of development”. The invited speakers will invite us to consider alternatives that allow for more dynamic and interconnected conceptualizations of development.
Abstracts provided by the invited speakers suggest their work, although varied in specific focus (forced migration, student learning, violence prevention), is built on a common bedrock of contextualism, a broad, synthetic theory that roots thinking and knowing in the historic event. According to Stephen Pepper’s original formulation, the historic event isn’t some expired, bounded thing that happened in the past, but is an act, dynamically and dramatically alive in its present — alive in its context. Taking the historic event as a point of departure commits us to thinking about things in terms of verbs: making, moving, laughing, creating, solving, imagining, desiring. “These acts or events”, writes Pepper, “are all intrinsically complex, composed of interconnected activities with continuously changing patterns. They are like incidents in the plot of a novel or drama. They are literally the incidents of life.”
Come to Belgrade to hear and discuss how these ideas play out in the work of our invited speakers.
Is an Education for Peace Possible?
“Is an education for peace possible?” Piaget asked and attempted an answer to this question in 1934, in response to the League of Nations’ largely failed effort to promote international collaboration. He called for honesty: “education for peace” hasn’t worked; nations continue to be distrustful and view each other as impediments to their own nationalistic goals.
One problem, he argued, is a generational divide between youths and those who experienced the horrors of the first world war. The latter understand the reasons and merits of educating for peace. Youths, in contrast, view such teachings as yet another instance of adults preaching and moralizing over issues that have little meaning to the circumstances of their daily lives.
A second, related problem is pedagogical in nature. Although the teaching of international cooperation was widely embraced, it was “exceedingly superficial and avoided the real psychological motives of actions”, seeking to “fill the minds of students with… ready-made opinions (rather than) bring out in depth the intellectual and moral tendencies conducive to true collaboration”.
Piaget maintained that a true education for peace requires understanding the viewpoints of others, especially those that diverge from one’s own. The ability to adapt oneself for the purpose of foreseeing and explaining the “motives of the stranger”, requires distance from “false ideas and personal prejudices”. Our obligation, then, is to “learn to place ourselves in the community of other people”. “Above all let it be understood that, in all things, truth is never found ready made, but is laboriously elaborated through the very coordination of these viewpoints”.
Translated excerpts of his paper appear in an issue of The Genetic Epistemologist (Piaget on Peace and War, Vol. XVII, No. 3, 1989), JPS’s journal for many years. JPS members can access our archive of the GE on the membership page.