1. 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.

I didn’t think about future jobs and careers very much at all when I was young – the messages I encountered were something like “do well in school…” but with a vague “because” associated with that expectation. My work recently is teaching me how common it was at that time to treat school achievement as a common-sense article of faith among people with backgrounds similar to mine. In any case, I wasn’t a great student in terms of motivation and focus in those years, and I had no idea why school seemed to click for some of my peers (as well as my identical twin brother) and I couldn’t get much traction on it psychologically.

Looking back, late high school was when my interests and activities began to point in the general direction of my current work as a developmental researcher. I had met a few teachers who were involved in experiential and outdoor education – “alternative” educational approaches that first exposed me to a critical perspective on conventional middle-class ways of organizing learning. Although I’m not involved in these fields today, I’ve been working to understand the developmental implications of different cultural ways of organizing learning in childhood ever since.

2. 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, asking and addressing developmental questions involves finding connections between individual and cultural processes or, in other words, relations between the kinds of social and psychological work people do and how that work creates patterned and consequential situations for learning and development. I have very little interest in knowledge about development that is not built on thorough cultural, historical, and political contextualization.

3. 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?

One of the fundamental lessons I associate with Piaget, among others, is the importance of taking an “actor perspective” (versus an “observer perspective”) in developmental research (language I borrow from Steele, 2010). Piaget contributed immensely to this epistemological commitment in developmental science, and was systematically concerned with understanding how knowledge can be viewed as a process of personal sense-making among young children. As a cultural psychologist, I work at different timescales than those which were central to Piaget; however, he reminds me that agency is no less active in cultural and historical processes than it is in ontogenetic and microgenetic processes.

My work positions me as a cultural psychologist just as much as a developmental psychologist, and I see both as deeply compatible with Piaget’s commitments. Candidly, I think too great a proportion of research on “culture” is focused on differences between social groups leaving cultural psychological questions about origin and history – where does this psychological or developmental pattern come from? What gives rise to it? – relatively under-emphasized. For this reason, Piaget’s interests in genetics resonates quite deeply in my work.

4. 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? 

One line of my research is focused on the cultural values and practices that give rise to children’s collaborative initiative in everyday helping, as well as whether these differ between some communities and others. Indeed, there are striking cultural differences out there [e.g., Alcala et al., 2014; Coppens et al., 2016] but at least as interesting to me is how and why children’s prosocial development seems to diverge. In recent studies [Coppens & Rogoff, 2021; Coppens et al., 2020; Rogoff & Coppens, 2024/in press], parents’ proleptic expectations – like future-fulfilling cultural expectations – seemed very important. Parents who saw toddlers’ early attempts to get involved in household chores as an intention to help, structured children’s engagement in ways that seemed to give rise to more helping. Parents who saw toddlers’ attempts to get involved as play structured children’s day in ways that allowed for more play… and less prosocial helping.

This past-future dialectic is a central thread in my developmental research; I think it is always present and a primary way that “culture” works in relation to learning and development. A newer line of research looks at how archetypical identity stories work in relation with both educational and workforce trajectory decisions among young people from rural backgrounds [Seaman et al., 2023].

5. 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 have found the Jean Piaget Society to be deeply inclusive. I’ve presented papers and research at JPS meetings that were never ostensibly about classical Piagetian concepts, but always felt welcome among a group of thinkers interested to see connections and relations. In this career, my work has benefitted most from conversations with people who were just far enough afield to show me a new way of thinking about or interpreting a problem, but not so far afield that my own work did not provoke them. JPS has often embodied this sweet spot.

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

 I am friends with anything involving two wheels and turns. Bicycles and motorcycles are favorites.

• When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?

As a young kid, my first known career aspiration was to be a ballerina. These days the closest I come to a stage is teaching my undergraduate Introduction to Human Development class.

• How do you characterize the understanding and processes of development? What does it mean to you to be involved with questions of development?

Among other things, studying the processes of development offers insights into why individuals and groups treat each other unfairly and what can be done to create a more just society from the ground up. In terms of personal meaning, my research is a way of making a positive contribution towards those goals.

• 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?

As a moral development researcher in the social domain theory tradition, my work is directly influenced by Piaget’s constructivist perspective on the origins of morality.

• 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?

So far, I am most excited to share my research on children’s perceptions of social inequalities, including how children acknowledge, explain, evaluate, and respond to inequalities pertaining to race, social class, gender, and nationality. This work stretches current theories to consider how children think about the hierarchies of their social world and identifies the relational processes and social contexts that foster (or suppress) resistance to injustice early in development.

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

One recent change I’ve been happy to see is greater recognition of areas of research that have always had equity as a core focus as well as new generations of developmental scientists who intentionally claim this as central to their work.

• How did you become involved in the Jean Piaget Society?

I was introduced to JPS in grad school by my mentor, Melanie Killen. As a faculty member, I was encouraged to deepen my involvement by my colleague, Judi Smetana. As a society, JPS is unique in its strong theoretical focus and its genuinely international membership.

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

If I have a hidden talent, then it’s very well hidden because I haven’t found it yet. I do enjoy being in nature and love a good weekend hike.

• When you were little what did you want to be when you grew up? If your trajectory changed, what contributed to that?

When I was little, I wanted to be a clown. My trajectory has changed, though I think the joy that I associated with becoming a clown is something I strive for everyday in my professional work. As an education researcher who collaborates closely with teachers and students in local schools, finding joy and creating joy remain a north star for me. I came to this country from India when I was two years old and for a very long time, my parents said I could be anything I wanted to be–including a professional clown. Of course, as time went on, the pressures of neoliberalism, ideologies of gender, and the respectability politics of being the “right kind of immigrant girl,” took hold and I found myself becoming an electrical engineer. In the evenings, I gravitated toward community service–first, as a domestic violence counselor, and later as a tutor for incarcerated youth and adults seeking a high school diploma equivalency degree. They were the ones who influenced my later decision to leave engineering and become a fulltime mathematics teacher before going on to graduate school and eventually, finding my way into the study of mathematics teaching and learning as a researcher.

• What drew you to do work in developmental science?

I rarely identify as a “developmental scientist,” but that is a matter of what the field might see me as more so than any reflection of my own thinking. I identify with work at the intersection of critical theory and Learning Sciences, where a developmental approach is fundamentally a cultural analysis of people in relation to their social worlds both immediate (family, school, neighborhood) and distant (nation, globe). The richness of thinking about learning and development as cultural ways of knowing, being and valuing–what some would call epistemology, ontology, and axiology–keeps me motivated in my work. So, I am a developmental scientist in so far as I care greatly about issues of power as they play out in who children are and are becoming in mathematics learning; of who they can be and become amidst the constraints of racially stratified societies.

• Can you please highlight a couple of findings from your work that you are particularly proud of and why?

My current work explores the role of imagination in teaching, learning, and development. I suppose I turn to imagination, in part, as a way to undo the constraints my prior work shows are at play for children in schools. For example, in a recent piece I follow the year long experiences of a Latina 9th grade student in a low–track math class, I found methodological ways of tracing the nested positioning that shaped her development. Specifically, how she positioned and was positioned by peers as an “undesirable” learner, how her class was positioned within the school as an “undesirable” track, and how her school was positioned as “undesirable” among district high schools based on its racial composition and academic achievement. In short, I trace how racial capitalism–neoliberal ideology–permeate the multiple levels of her social worlds (district, school, class) in ways that create her marginalization (undesirability) as the only student to fail the course that year. These findings, published in Anthropology & Education Quarterly, appear 30 years after an “anthropology of learning” first appeared in that journal. I find such accounts of children’s development–accounts that shift the unit of analysis from individual persons to interactions and contexts that afford and constrain what is possible–especially compelling. Certainly, how I position and have been positioned as a woman of color scholar has likely informed my capacity to understand these nested contexts of being and becoming, and the ideologies that govern them. That is, my journey in being made a “successful” scholar is not far removed from seeing that student’s journey in being made a “failure” in school.

• What do you see as important changes/advances in the field especially in light of both our COVID and post-COVID eras?

I am not sure I can speak to this issue as yet–we are not post–COVID and are likely never to be within my lifetime. The inequalities in schools and societies that the pandemic laid bare should move us as scholars but how it moves us–advances and changes us–is to be determined. I think that will depend a great deal on our courage to be changed and advanced by such a global humanitarian travesty.

• How did you become involved in the Jean Piaget Society?

I was introduced to the thinking and writing of Jean Piaget in graduate school and have since spent many a night grappling with the work as I became someone tasked with teaching him to others (as a professor). I feel that is where I likely first became involved, since JPS is but a collection of people who are taking seriously his legacy by extending, building, and elaborating it, but we all probably first got involved by first reading his work. I was invited to join the board soon after I met Dr. Larry Nucci, whom I would describe as one of the most gracious and thoughtful scholars I have ever met. As a new board member, I am still learning who we are and can be, as JPS. The pandemic has presented us great challenges–as a global organization, the separateness is real and meaningful as regards learning with and from one another. I am hopeful, however, that as my history with JPS lengthens, so too will my understanding of how we have been impactful and how we can continue being so in consequential ways to people the globe over.

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

I am not one to easily identify a talent–hidden or otherwise. My children, however, find it quite novel that I can clap with one hand. While some may ask what the sound of one hand clapping is, I can actually clap with one hand and listen in. I attribute this to years of my parents insisting I learn piano and in the process, developed quite a finger span!

• When you were little what did you want to be when you grew up? If your trajectory changed, what contributed to that?

For most of my high school years, I wanted to be a medical doctor. I always got good grades in the sciences, and it seemed to be a natural direction. However, when it came time to select a major in College (McGill University), the “typical” medical fields of Biology and Chemistry did not excite me. I ended up making the tough choice between Psychology and Mathematics, with math winning out – but I did complete a minor in Cognitive Science which covered Psychology, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Computer Science. As I graduated, I realized how much more I enjoyed my Cognitive Science minor than my major.

• What drew you to do work in developmental science?

Oddly, I did not take any developmental courses in college, although I was exposed to developmental theory in my Cognitive Science capstone class. When it came time to consider graduate school, I was excited by what little I knew about development (at the time, I still held the naïve view that developmental research was constrained to children) and wanted to explore it further. I expected to have to take an additional qualifying year given my lack of background, but my cognitive science mentor assured me that I would catch up quickly if I entered any program. I was fortunate enough to be accepted to University of Toronto to work with Phil Zelazo, and although I immediately took graduate level developmental classes, my first exposure to the undergraduate class was when I was the instructor 18 months later!

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I have a clearer view of what excited me about the developmental program at Toronto and the field in general. What began as a curiosity about children and their behavior, has now blossomed into a full blown appreciation of mechanisms in context changing over time. I now find myself puzzled at my colleagues’ research presentations as they seem only to be interested in how adults are performing at one point of time, ignoring the layered information we get from understanding how we got to that stage and where we are going.

• Can you please highlight a couple of findings from your work that you are particularly proud of and why?

In a pair of publications (Marcovitch, Boseovski, & Knapp, 2007; Marcovitch, Boseovski, Kanpp, & Kane, 2010), my co-authors and I demonstrated how errors in task switching can be framed as goal neglect errors, and how these errors are magnified in context where maintenance of the goal is not strictly necessary to perform the task. What I particularly liked about this project was that it was the first time (but not the last) that I was involved in translating a task used with adults into one that was appropriate for 5- and 6-year-old children – this is not uncommon in experimental developmental research, but has a host of unexpected challenges associated with it. It was also the first time in my research career (and maybe the last) that the predictions matched the actual behavior of the children.

Although the academic influences of working on a variation of the Dimensional Change Card Sort task is unsurprising given my graduate training (thanks Phil!), I drew upon a personal child experience in conceptualizing the processes involved. Our bathroom light experienced a short so that when it was turned on, the entire house lost power. My father told us repeatedly not to turn the light on. And, of course, my siblings and I would invariably turn on the light every time we entered the bathroom causing my father to utter words that are not said on network television. I finally came up with the idea (I was a promising 12-year-old problem solver) of putting a piece of tape on the light switch – that tactile sensation served as a cue to reflect upon the new goal of not turning the light on.

• What do you see as important changes/advances in the field especially in light of both our COVID and post-COVID eras?

For many developmental scientists, COVID slowed down or stopped research activity, forced unwanted changes to ongoing and upcoming work, and compromised data collection. Others found new creative ways to conduct research studies and seemed to benefit from the larger reach remote testing can offer. So, the big changes to the field are dealing with over two years of inactivity or compromised research (and that direct effect on the careers of graduate students and emerging scholars), while at the same time opening up the possibility of larger research projects on grander scales where geography no longer serves as a major constraint. Both of these issues have to be thought about seriously, and it is organizations such as JPS that can suggest guidance on how to best navigate our way through this time and into the future.

I will point out what I have been saying for a few decades now – techniques may change with time, focal interests wax and wane, technology advances some of us while leaving others behind, but the one constant has been the importance of careful, experimental research. It is still the only way to ask direct questions about causality (and no, longitudinal designs do not completely resolve this issue). Experimental child psychology may look different over time, but it will always have a place in developmental science.

• How did you become involved in the Jean Piaget Society?

My graduate mentor encouraged my involvement in the society, and I had the opportunity to attend my first JPS meeting in Chicago in 1998. My future spouse (and former JPS board member Janet Boseovski) and I stayed with a friend (thanks Jessica!!!) and had the conference fee waived in return for volunteer hours. It was a terrific event – I had the opportunity to meet senior scholars in the field, to attend talks in related areas, and to watch the Bulls win a playoff game in a bar with U Chicago grad students and faculty.

Since then, I attended as many meetings as I could, preferring the intimacy of JPS to the meetings of more generalized societies. JPS members have a way of making you feel valued as a researcher without sacrificing scientific rigor, and this is precisely the way most science is conducted (yes, the Big Bang Theory is just a TV show). It is an organization simultaneously dedicated to the investment of emerging scholars while still honoring the career wisdom of veterans. You can email any JPS member and receive a courteous, enthusiastic response in return.

As an experimental cognitive developmentalist, I have been trained that research ideas are generated from strong theoretical perspectives. Piaget’s theoretical perspective and large corpus of work remains relevant to all research today, even when researchers are seemingly disproving some of his ideas (and yes, disproving ideas is the prominent tenet in science which even strengthens Piaget’s ongoing influence) or claiming that our modern techniques were beyond his reach. To study any element of knowledge and development means that you have been influenced by Piaget, even if that influence is after several degrees of separation. Ironically, as my colleagues are trying to get credit for unique, ingenious ideas, I think that they would be better served tracing the development of these ideas from its theoretical roots to their current state. Similar to people, the development of ideas gives us a stronger understanding of the rich contextualization that arises from our contemporary studies.

The influence has been strong on my own work – I still take a theory driven approach to my research, and every student who works with me or who has taken a class with me, knows that I’m not simply satisfied with “cool ideas” unless they are theoretically bound. And I am equally excited about research that challenges theories (even my own) as I am about research that is consistent with theories.

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

In my younger days, I would have impressed many by the sheer amount of food that I was able to consume (JPS 2019 in Portland – I promise I had more donuts in the 15 minute break than anyone). But now the appreciation of quality food has become a passion. And a slice of Brooklyn pizza can excite me as much as a 5 course Michelin star meal.

Thanks to the food passion, I have also developed a hobby of exercise which has me running or strength training every day. For those of you who do not exercise at meetings, may I suggest you reconsider. It is invigorating to attend those early morning sessions having just experienced a workout, you will fell less guilty about eating the delicious snacks, you will look forward to the special dinners, and you can meet interesting people with similar hobbies. JPS running club, perhaps?

• When you were little what did you want to be when you grew up? If your trajectory changed, what contributed to that?

One of my earliest memories involves lining up all of my stuffed animals for weekday lessons. Apparently the very young Dr. McKenzie was quite the taskmaster! Though my interest in teaching has been long-lasting, my research interests developed somewhat more recently. My experience studying abroad in Italy as an undergraduate ignited my curiosity about how culture structures the life course. Living in Italy, and then in Thailand post-graduation, sparked some very legitimate questions about how globalization affects youth development and family relationships.

• What drew you to do work in developmental science?

When I returned from 14 months in Thailand and applied to graduate programs, I was convinced that I was a social psychologist-in-the-making. I trained in a social psychology research lab, spoke with potential social psychology mentors across the U.S., and applied to social psychology PhD programs. One afternoon, I received an email from Dr. Lene Jensen (who would later become my graduate mentor at Clark University), which was along the lines of, “I noticed that you applied to our social psychology PhD program, but you sound like more of a developmentalist…”

Lene was right. I am a developmental scientist because I study how the self comes into being, and how that coming into being is shaped by culture. I am especially interested in how cultural change (via globalization, and immigration) influences young people’s beliefs, behaviors, and relationships.

• Can you please highlight a couple of findings from your work that you are particularly proud of and why?

I am especially proud of my work that contributes to the theoretical base of the psychology of globalization. For example, alongside students in my Human Development & Culture Research Lab, I have written about globalization-based cultural brokerage. This work highlights how adolescents in northern Thailand broker their parents’ participation into media-driven culture, in turn shifting power dynamics in a nation that has traditionally been characterized by age-based hierarchy.

In another recent study, I trace how local and global values are negotiated among remotely bicultural youth in northern Thailand. This piece, which I shared at a recent Jean Piaget Society meeting, unveils psychological strategies that adolescents employ to integrate local and global values (e.g., by reshaping local values to encompass global values, and by dividing up the life course such that global and local values take turns directing one’s life). This study also highlights integration-related challenges, whereby some adolescents experience local and global values as antithetical, and are therefore forced to endorse one value system over the other.

Both studies speak to how young people in the rapidly globalizing Thai context internalize global values, and how local values are at once transformed and maintained in the face of sociocultural change.

• What do you see as important changes/advances in the field especially in light of both our COVID and post-COVID eras?

I’d like to offer an exclusively optimistic answer here, but I see both challenges and opportunities. I believe that cultural developmental research is fundamentally relational. In my experience, people invite you to understand their lived realities if you offer your presence—psychological and physical.

In this COVID/post-COVID era, universities are understandably wary of sending faculty abroad to conduct research. Administrators at some U.S. universities, for instance, have curtailed their support for research-related travel, with the justification that COVID has taught us that much of our work can be conducted virtually. I worry that this mantra may stymie fieldwork that is central to obtaining high-quality cultural developmental data. How do we establish relationship and presence when we are not present? In the future, we will need to insist upon physical presence as the backbone of our work.

On the other hand, COVID has inspired creative research methodologies (e.g., digital ethnography, social media analysis, Google Trends analysis) that will most certainly broaden the scope of developmental science, and push us to reconsider the meaning of “data” in years to come.

• How did you become involved in the Jean Piaget Society?

I was introduced to JPS by Drs. Maricela Correa-Chávez and Allison DiBianca Fasoli (thanks, you two!) several years ago. Both suggested that I would appreciate JPS because its members tended to think about developmental science rather deeply, and because JPS meetings are far more intimate than larger developmental conferences.

When I attended my first JPS meeting in Portland, both promises were fulfilled. During that meeting, I reconnected with colleagues I hadn’t seen in years and forged new professional relationships. I was especially grateful to JPS for the dynamic set of invited speakers, the careful integration of academics at various points in their careers, and the many opportunities to socialize in hallways before and after meetings. One of the things I have missed most during the height of COVID was the opportunity for naturally unfolding conference conversations over coffee and croissants (which JPS also does quite well).

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

Though I’m fortunate to have had a number of powerful teachers over the years, my two most influential non-academic teachers are just as important: nature and my two-year-old son. When I’m not working, I’m generally “at school” (that is, spending time outside, or with my son – and ideally, both). I have always been most fulfilled when completely unplugged during multi-day backpacking and camping trips. Pre-baby and pre-COVID, these trips spanned Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America. More recently, I have concentrated on exploring locally alongside my son and husband, and have fallen in love with the natural beauty—so many memorable teachers—of California.