I became interested in psychology in the tenth grade when my geometry teacher taught a course in psychology. I had no idea what psychology was, but I had a favorable opinion of Mr. B. In that time and place, it was very unusual for a public high school, serving a rural, largely working-class population, to offer a course in psychology. Somehow this course captured my imagination. A vista opened, but on what? At the time I could not have said.

This slender thread was enough to prompt me to major in psychology when I went to college, the first in my family to seek higher education. Without ever uttering a word on the matter, my parents had conveyed their ambition that my younger sister and I would go to college. This was financially possible because my father worked shift work, seven days a week, at a paper mill. However, when it came time to apply, Dad offered me a used car if I would live at home and commute to the local junior college. When I refused, he drew a boundary with a fifty-mile radius. My guidance counselor, Mr. X, saw eye-to-eye with Dad and lobbied heavily for a nearby college with a so-so reputation. He told me that I reminded him of his wife, who had taken her studies too seriously. “But, then, she had a baby and everything fell into place.” He concluded … I can still hear his voice … “What you need to get things into perspective is to have a baby.” I was seventeen.

Mr. X was a dope, but my English teacher was a treasure. I was lucky enough to have him for two years. Mr. S. taught us to read poetry and short stories and walked us through Shakespeare – six weeks on Macbeth and six weeks on King Lear. He was furious to discover that we had only a rudimentary grasp of English grammar and punctuation, even though we were in the highest academic track. He insisted that we stay after school every day for several weeks for remedial instruction. In senior year, our most important assignment was to write a college-level term paper and revise it until it was perfect. We learned everything, from choosing a topic to formatting footnotes. I wrote my paper on psychopathology in Chekhov’s short stories.

The psychology curriculum in college was heavily weighted toward learning theory. One evening, after running experiments, my friend and I got stuck in the elevator with our rats and Skinner boxes. Learning theory sank even lower in my estimation. Much more interesting was a course in language and cognition, which I took at another university. This was my introduction to Chomsky. I also loved a course in Old Testament, in which I learned that the Bible was actually a patchwork of texts by different authors. Having spent countless hours in church and Sunday school, I was floored.

In the summers of my college years, I worked as a research assistant for Professor Ruth Wylie of Goucher College, who was writing a book about the self-concept. One of my college professors, who happened to be Ruth’s friend and housemate, recommended me for the job. This was my first encounter with people who did intellectual work for a living. We three ate lunch together every day on their back patio. I remember the casual way in which learned topics came up. When I told them about the pet pig that walked on a leash in my Baltimore neighborhood, they launched into a discussion of the high intelligence of pigs, citing relevant sources. Sometimes they argued about the position of women in the academic world. Unlike her friend, Ruth had spent her entire career teaching in women’s colleges. In the late 1950s, she applied for a position at the University of Illinois, where I would teach many years later. She received a rejection letter, explaining that it would be unfair to hire her because, as a woman, she would never be promoted.

The next phase of my life took place in New York City. After graduating from college in 1972, my boyfriend and I moved there so that he could attend a professional school. I was at a loss to know what to do next and ended up pursuing a MA degree and then a PhD degree at Teachers College, Columbia University. My parents were appalled by my move. To them, New York City was terrifying, the epitome of all urban ills. In deference to their worries, I kept mum about being accosted on the street and mugged in my building. But I loved the anonymity of the city, the exotic food, the films, and art museums. Like any exile from the provinces, I still get a thrill when I see the New York City skyline.

Professor Lois Bloom’s course on language acquisition inspired me to study child language. I became a research assistant in her lab, and she directed my dissertation. I was drawn to the beautiful systematicity of child language – such tiny children, such creativity! I was also drawn to Lois’s methodological approach: longitudinal observations of children in their home environments, followed by meticulous transcription. Each child’s words and word combinations were then analyzed separately because it was assumed, in the wake of the Chomskian revolution, that each child had his or her own linguistic system. Why was the method of careful observation so irresistible? I realize now that it echoed a mode of life that had become second nature to me. My family were keenly interested in the natural world, alert to everyday wonders – a ring-necked pheasant in the adjacent field, rabbit tracks in the snow, a nest of baby barn owls, the first jack-in-the-pulpit in the spring. This is an example of how the place I came from was a touchstone, not always conscious, in my work.

The children Lois studied, like those from other child language labs at the time, were middle-class children, mainly from university communities. I saw this as a limitation, especially since the prevailing view in psychology at the time was that poor and minority children were linguistically deficient. Two individuals helped me grapple with this problem. The first was pioneering linguist William Stewart who taught a course on Black English. I was wowed by his erudition. I learned about the bedrock variation in American dialects and the sociopolitically fraught history of Black English, with its roots in slavery. The second was Bambi Schieffelin, a graduate student in anthropology and Lois’s co-advisee. In the 1970s she would do her dissertation research in Papua, New Guinea, and in 1984 she collaborated with Elinor Ochs on a classic paper in the then nascent interdisciplinary field of language socialization. This paper revealed that the Western middle-class model of language socialization – dyadic, face-to-face, conversation-like interactions – was not universal.

Colleagues have asked me how I got from the study of child language to the study of cultural practices. The link was Lois’s seminal insight that the semantic/syntactic relationship between the words in children’s early sentences could be inferred from the immediate context. When a child said, “mommy sock” while holding a sock that belonged to her mother, the analyst could infer that the child was expressing the relationships of “possession.” My intellectual encounters with William and Bambi led me to a greatly expanded understanding of context and of language itself.

This understanding would deepen as I conducted my dissertation study in the White, working-class community of South Baltimore. I used a hybrid design that combined psycholinguistic observations with ethnographic fieldwork. Although one of my questions was whether low-income children would produce the same semantic/syntactic relationships as middle-class children (they did) (Miller, 1982), the big surprise lay elsewhere. In striking contrast to the prevailing view that low-income and minority youngsters were linguistically deprived, the South Baltimore children inhabited a world that was densely populated by complex verbal genres, such as explicit instruction, teasing, and pretend play. But most eye-opening, I discovered that oral stories of personal experience were ubiquitous (e.g., Miller, 1994). Family members of all ages loved to tell stories; many adults were virtuoso narrators; and young children were able to co-narrate stories by two years of age.

The following story, told by the mother of a child in my study, is one of hundreds of stories I recorded:

I caution that encountering this story as a written text is nothing like hearing it and seeing it as a fully embodied performance. For me, this kind of verbal display stood in mind-boggling contrast to the taciturn people and long silences of my rural Pennsylvania Dutch upbringing.

South Baltimore is my second touchstone. It turned my attention to oral narrative, in all its glorious profusion, and set me on a path of studying early narrative in other communities within and beyond the USA. It led me to conclude that received wisdom in developmental psychology is sometimes far off the mark, especially with respect to marginalized groups. And it taught me the indispensable value of ethnography in understanding people on their own terms, within shared practices and systems of meaning. Narrative was not on the map in the study of child language, where sentence-level development was the focus, and it was nowhere near the map for proponents of language deprivation. But it was all over the map in South Baltimore.

I was happy with my dissertation and so was my committee, which consisted of two psychologists, two anthropologists, and a linguist. But looking back, I was abjectly naive about how the academic world worked. To take one example, although interdisciplinary inquiry was in the air even then, I did not know this was a matter of lip service only. I had no idea how much misunderstanding such work would engender or how many obstacles I would face in publishing my research. Now that interdisciplinary inquiry is a buzzword, I don’t know what to think. Another example is social class. Social class is an open secret in the USA; that much I knew. But I did not know what an uncomfortable subject it was in psychology. When I gave an early talk on teasing as language socialization and verbal play, a senior scholar in the symposium chastised me for “romanticizing the poor.” On another occasion, in a small working group, I presented recordings of teasing interactions, after having provided copious context about the participants’ lives. This time I was told that the interactions were “obviously pathological.” I never again presented the tapes.

These reactions taught me that my home discipline had a serious blind spot. The default assumption was that poor, working-class, and minority families were deficient or pathological; therefore, any evidence of strength was not credible and could be dismissed out of hand. This is not just a historical footnote. Four decades later, it would take many failed attempts before we were able to publish our empirical challenge to the “Word Gap” claim (Sperry, Sperry, & Miller, Reference Sperry, Sperry and Miller2019), and our related symposium submissions were never accepted for presentation at the biennial meetings of SRCD (Society for Research in Child Development).

Returning to the early 1980s, I did postdoctoral research with Professor Catherine Garvey at Johns Hopkins University and worked temporarily at the Catholic University of America, where I found stimulating and supportive colleagues in Dr. Anca Nemoianu and Professor James Youniss. I then moved to the University of Chicago, where I was jointly appointed in Educational Psychology and the Committee on Human Development (now the Department of Comparative Human Development). The latter provided the most intellectually congenial university environment of my career. Not only was interdisciplinary work appreciated, but everyone – not just anthropologists but also clinical psychologists and biopsychologists – believed it was impossible to understand human development without taking cultural context into account.

During my time at the University of Chicago, I worked with a host of talented graduate students. This was the most rewarding part of my job. Professor Susan Goldin-Meadow, who was an extraordinary colleague and mentor, ran a weekly lab group that became my model. Following her example, I established weekly lab meetings with my research assistants, doctoral advisees, and other interested students. Each week, one of us would present our work in progress, and the group would respond while eating Pepperidge Farm cookies. The students also practiced their conference papers, dissertation defenses, and job talks. I wanted these meetings to offer a low-key venue for brainstorming, community-building, and professional socialization. And, like many of my students, I needed a respite from the go-for-the-jugular style of discourse that flourished at the University of Chicago.

Until this point, I had mainly worked alone, but now I had the pleasure of student collaborators. Linda Sperry was a co-author on my earliest articles on narrative in South Baltimore, and I directed her dissertation on early narrative in the Black Belt of Alabama. I also directed the dissertations of Wendy Haight on everyday pretending, Suzanne Gaskins on infant development with the Yucatec Maya, and Heidi Fung on the socialization of shame in Taiwan. All of these relationships evolved into sustained collaborations.

I also launched a new research project on early narrative that built on my South Baltimore work, on Heidi Fung’s preliminary study of middle-class Taiwanese children’s stories, and on Randolph Potts’s preliminary study of the stories of low-income African American children. Everywhere we looked tiny children (two-and-a-half-year-olds) were telling stories. In a White, working-class neighborhood in Chicago, William narrated a sledding accident, with encouragement from his mother: “I didn’t hurt my face … Eddie said I’m fraidy cat … She was supposed to catch me … I didn’t get catched.” In Taipei, at his grandmother’s bidding, Yoyo co-narrated that he misbehaved and his mother spanked him, concluding with the moral coda, “I won’t push the screen down (again) … [then] mom won’t hit … [mom will give me] a tender touch.” In a working-class African American neighborhood in Chicago, Angela told a story about her friend, Jason: “He wanted to play with me and he said, ‘Can I play with you?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’” Later, while sitting on her treasured bike, she told her mother a story about a squabble with Jason. Midway through the story, she paused, picked up some empty soda bottles, and took them to the garbage can in the kitchen. When she returned, Angela climbed back on her bike, picked up the narrative thread, and continued her narrative performance.

After I moved to the University of Illinois in 1991, I continued this project, which eventually evolved into two major strands of research, one comparing middle-class European American families in Chicago and middle-class Taiwanese families in Taipei (e.g., Miller et al., Reference Miller, Fung, Lin, Chen and Boldt2012) and the other comparing American communities that differed by class (e.g., Miller et al., Reference Miller, Cho and Bracey2005). My appointment at Illinois, which was split down the middle between the Department of Communication and the Department of Psychology, positioned me well to appreciate the theoretical advances of the 1990s. I was excited by new understandings of human development in cultural context, including the reemergence of cultural psychology. I was influenced by Jerome Bruner’s vision of cultural psychology, by Rick Shweder’s version inflected through psychological anthropology, and by Michael Cole, Barbara Rogoff, and James Wertsch’s version inflected through Vygotskian theory. I was also influenced by the work of Dell Hymes, Elinor Ochs, and Richard Bauman, who demonstrated that language transcends Chomsky’s narrow definition and is thoroughly entangled with the social world.

To me, the neon-lit through line in this theoretical landscape was the idea of cultural practices as contexts for development. Although I had been working with this idea for a while, it did not crystallize until Jacqueline Goodnow, Frank Kessel, and I edited a small book on the topic (Goodnow, Miller, & Kessel, Reference Goodnow, Miller and Kessel1995), under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Committee on Culture, Health, and Human Development.Footnote ¹ In the Committee and in many other contexts, Jacqueline was not only a lucid and original voice but also a mentor and protector of younger women. Jacqueline and I wrote an introduction, in which we claimed Bourdieu as a practice theorist and defined cultural practices as “actions that are repeated, shared with others in a social group, and invested with normative expectations and with meanings or significances that go beyond the immediate goals of the action” (p. 7). We also offered a set of propositions about how this idea could be useful to developmentalists.

These propositions have informed my research ever since. My collaborators and I found that when little children first encounter narrative, they do not encounter a neutral medium into which cultural values are later injected. Narrative practices are culturally saturated from the beginning, carrying distinct interpretive frameworks. As children participate routinely in these recurring practices, they ground themselves ever deeper in these frameworks while also co-creating alternate developmental pathways. Like other cultural practices (Miller & Cho, Reference Miller and Cho2018; Rosengren et al., Reference Rosengren, Miller, Gutiérrez, Chow, Schein and Anderson2014), narrative does not hew to a uniform developmental pathway (e.g., Miller et al., Reference Miller, Fung, Lin, Chen and Boldt2012).

The remarkable agency of young children is another insight that a practice perspective brings to light. When I began my research in the 1970s, a common view was that children were passive recipients of socializing messages. Nothing could be further from the truth. Children are not cultural replicas; they are meaning-makers. All children are constrained by the shared cultural practices of their community, but each child brings unique personal perspectives to bear in the meaning-making process. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Jean Briggs, Cindy Clark, and William Corsaro, I have followed individual children as they engaged moment by moment in unfolding discourse and as they navigated and nuanced narrative practices over longitudinal time (Miller et al., Reference Miller, Fung, Lin, Chen and Boldt2012; Miller & Cho, Reference Miller and Cho2018). My own children and grandchildren have also contributed immeasurably to my appreciation of child agency.

My engagement with practice theory deepened further during illuminating fellowships at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities in 2005–2006 and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (now the Harvard Radcliffe Institute) in 2006–2007. The latter is a unique hub of diverse disciplinary and international perspectives. The people and ideas I encountered challenged me to probe the history of cultural practices and led me to revamp my projects accordingly (e.g., Miller & Cho, Reference Miller and Cho2018).

It must be obvious from all that I have said so far that I have been incredibly lucky in my colleagues and students. Even though I am a shy person who needs a lot of solitude, I could not have done my work without their contributions or survived the academic world without their support. During my twenty-year tenure at the University of Illinois, I did collaborative work with Nancy Abelmann, Susan Davis, Anne Haas Dyson, Michele Koven, and Karl Rosengren, and, again, with many talented graduate students, including Kristin Alexander, Eva Chen, Grace Cho, Joseph Gone, Isabel Gutierrez, Julie Hengst, Brinda Jegatheesan, Chung-Hui Liang, Shumin Lin, Todd Sandel, and Douglas Sperry.

The hardest thing to give up when I “retired” in 2011 was the opportunity to work with graduate students. My favorite seminar was ethnographic methods, which alternated between the two departments and attracted students from many departments and many ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Another favorite was a theories course in which I taught Bakhtin, Bourdieu, and Vygotsky. Every iteration of this course, with its new crop of students, uncovered fresh meanings in dense pages. The most memorable moment occurred when rhetoric student Jermaine Martinez leapt from his seat and declared, “Bakhtin is my soul brother!”

If Frank Kessel had asked me to write this story earlier in my career, it would have been a different story. I continue to collaborate with Doug and Linda Sperry, who bookend my career; co-edit a book series at Oxford University Press; and swap manuscripts with Susan Davis and Suzanne Gaskins. But I am no longer in the fray of academic life. This has made it easier for me to cast a positive gaze on the past and omit or downplay tough times. I can now say proudly, “I was only fired once.” For the sake of readers who are young in their careers, I wanted to foreground the pleasure and excitement of the work itself, because, in the end, the work itself is the most reliable reward. But I must add, in all honesty, there are aspects of the academic world to which I have never been able to adapt: the constant talking (so wearying!), the competition (so stressful!), and the self-promotion (so boring!), all of which are diametrically opposed to the values I grew up with.

As for the future of developmental psychology, culture has moved from the outermost reaches of the field toward the center over the course of my career. This is cause for celebration. Another hopeful trend is that there is much more awareness now of the ethnocentric bias of developmental psychology in its study participants, theories, history, and institutions, a bias that inevitably creates harmful deficit narratives about other-than-WEIRD groups.Footnote ² In my opinion, one of the biggest threats to building a genuinely universal developmental psychology is narrow-mindedness about methods. A second related threat is blindness about marginalized groups within the USA and other societies. Because we are surrounded and inhabited by stigmatizing discourses about poor, working-class, and minority groups, it is especially challenging to see these groups clearly. My current work requires that I re-engage with many of the problems that motivated my dissertation so many years ago (e.g., Sperry, Sperry, & Miller, Reference Sperry, Sperry and Miller2019). I am haunted by a sense of déjà vu.