Advanced Developmental Psychology

A graduate seminar that treats child development as a theoretical battleground rather than a list of milestones — you read Piaget, Vygotsky, Bowlby, Tomasello, and the neuroconstructivists side by side and argue about how mind, representation, and social understanding actually emerge from infancy through middle childhood. Weekly work is presentation-driven: you lead discussions on primary sources, write reports, and defend a position against competing frameworks (action-based constructivism vs. nativism vs. socio-cultural accounts). It sits upstream of empirical developmental research, so the goal is less to memorize findings than to learn which questions are worth asking and which experimental designs can actually answer them.