In developmental processes and outcomes, the individual and the context are inextricably connected throughout the lifespan. As an individual from an unorthodox background, my academic career is full of continuities and discontinuities, as one of the most influential books from my advisor, Jerome Kagan, asserted. In retrospect, my upbringing gave me the cultural, ethnic, minority worldview. From the start my education gave me the opportunity to have essential intellectual tools and eventually become bicultural and critical of our academic field. Consistently and strategically, my scholarly, administrative, and volunteer work led to questioning and pushing boundaries of the dominant academic canon; this was achieved by making critical connections with like-minded scholars and institutions, and working directly at the top of mainstream scholarship, educational institutions, and professional organizations. A contextual developmental analysis of my academic trajectory provides evidence of the constant, powerful dialectic relationship of the individual and the context. It all makes sense now.
Born in 1953, in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, into a matriarchal family with no father or siblings present, I have had the most unlikely life trajectory. Perhaps my nontraditional origins attracted me to ponder about families, child development, and the like. But as a good developmental psychologist and a child of the 1960s, a lefty, liberal, activist for human rights, feminism, and postmodernism, I have to acknowledge the origins and lenses that permeate not only my personal life, but also the questions and answers that I pursued through my academic work.
Origins
I come from a Caribbean Island recognized by many world entities as one of the oldest colonies in the world – 400 years plus as a part of Spain and 130 years plus, and continuing, as a territory of the USA. In the 1950s when I was born, Puerto Rico was going through a process of dismantling agriculture and going into industrialization. The times were optimistic and future oriented. Our state university was well funded, and many of us were encouraged to go to mainland USA to pursue graduate education.
Throughout my childhood, I was encouraged by my mother and grandmother, and many teachers alike, to be the best I could be academically. I remember fondly learning and mastering reading, writing, mathematics, and science, as well as my academic achievements. My personal joke remains that school was my heaven … and I have never left!
Although I got into trouble constantly in school – probably from a lack of understanding of an unrecognized and undiagnosed ADHD – I thrived, looked forward, and excelled in school. Home was lonely; we all had to work and do our job; but that is what was needed and had to be done in our island.
In seventh grade, I fell in love with science. I became the science teacher’s pet, graded exams for her, and became enthralled with scientific methods, theories and understanding nature; with the beauty of systems, of interactions, of multiple and/or mutual influences. When I studied Piaget in graduate school, I realized that the emergence of my own formal operations, that universe of possibilities, was nurtured by receiving an excellent secondary and tertiary education at the University of Puerto Rico in science, math, history, and art.
The Zeitgeist of the 1960s in the USA was also present in its colonies: on our island our generation danced merengue and salsa but also listened to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and drooled over Woodstock. We also got involved in protests against Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC),Footnote 1 the Vietnam War, and our own colonial status. We experimented with drugs, sex, and went to music festivals; but I managed to always do well in academics. It was a time of questioning authority, any canon, and feel the power of youth against social, economic, and historical injustices. Inspired by young leaders all around the world (e.g., Fidel, El Che, Salvador Allende, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, and Malcolm X), we thought we could eradicate poverty, and institute human rights for women, the gay community, and children and people with disabilities. It was a magnificent time to be young!
Completing high school and college at the University of Puerto Rico opened my mind profoundly to questioning, critical analysis, unraveling my own creativity in a completely bicultural learning environment. Unfortunately, living in a colony, I learned more about US and European history than Puerto Rican or Latin American history. But we were also exposed to Ravi Shankar, Joan Manuel Serrat, Pablo Casals, and Leonard Bernstein, amongst others, while some teachers did try to expose us to Latin American novelists, writers, and thinkers.
Medicine, Clinical, or Developmental Psychology?
When I was asked as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always answered, at least according to my mother … a doctor (which meant a medical doctor).
Thus, after my first year as an undergraduate, I moved to take all the basic requirements for applying to medical school. Within a year, I had a great understanding of biological processes, but no interest in pursuing that field. My middle and high school had taught us how to analyze, criticize, and create our own funds of knowledge. But memorization was not my strength, and thus I slowly drifted into the social sciences where my political and human rights interests could find a niche.
Sociology was fascinating and enticing, but it just so happened that the Psychology Department at the University of Puerto Rico was looking for students for a new undergraduate program to prepare ten of us to go to the mainland, get our PhDs in academic psychology and come back to our university to help establish a graduate program in psychology; there were none on the island. Two friends from high school and I decided to apply, and we got in, just like that.
After completing my BS in psychology, I thought I was more than ready to move to mainland USA for graduate school; but some barriers became evident. When I took the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) for college entrance in Spanish I was in the ninety-eight percentile; however, when I took the GRE (Graduate Record Exam) in English I landed in the fortieth! How could that be? I had learned both English and Spanish in school from second grade, some of my textbooks and readings for classes were in English, many of my professors taught in English, and I had pretty fluent conversational English. But in a test situation, my bilingualism became a hindrance. And for over forty years, I had to observe that pattern in my own children and my students, writing letters of recommendation explaining my students’ brilliance despite their relatively low scores on the SAT, GRE, or MCAT (Medical College Admission Test).
Acknowledging context as a main determinant of developmental processes and outcomes, including my own – an overall perspective that I discuss below – I must admit that if affirmative action was not in place at the time of my admission applications to graduate schools, I would not be here writing this chapter. I proudly state and, yes, reaffirm, that affirmative action gets you in, but you have to graduate yourself! But affirmative action was not present in clinical psychology programs, given the demand for admissions. I was rejected by every single program where I applied; but because I was interested in children and adolescents, I ended up in developmental psychology.
Both graduate programs, at the University of Florida for my master’s degree and Harvard University for my PhD, had to disregard my GREs in the admission process. Two professors – Barry M. Lester, at University of Florida, and an acquaintance of his and leader in the field, Jerome Kagan, at Harvard – made my academic career possible. I call these “low frequency, high impact experiences”: relationships, events, circumstances (sometimes serendipitous) in one’s life that open new horizons and doors, creating opportunities that you only dreamt about and thought impossible. Of course, given the chance, you still have to do the hard work!
Little did I knew that Development would become my paradigm to understand not only children, adolescents, and families, but life … processes and trajectories! I see development in biological and social processes in humans, plants, and animals, in relationships, in organizations – a fundamental process of anything that lives, learns, adapts, evolves, and dies.
Welcome to the Rat Race
Entering Harvard’s Williams James Hall, the modern fourteen-story building built for what was then called the Department of Psychology and Social Relations was simultaneously intimidating and thrilling. A poster in the graduate student lounge had a white rat running a maze, and the caption “Welcome to the Rat Race.” I was one of fifteen first-year students; only seven survived the first year. In such a fully resourced environment – minds, space, and equipment – it certainly felt as though you had been chosen, for something.
Intimidation reigned during my four years at Harvard. My classmates came from long-standing family wealth, intact large families, with generations of Ivy League graduates; being there was part of their family tradition. Showing your intellect and questioning professors was a standard and admired practice, but one that was deemed disrespectful and distasteful in my culture of origin … I had to become bicultural. All the professors were White males, except one that I stuck to for survival. Dante Cicchetti joined our faculty, as a first-year professor, when I entered the program. Both of us coming from nontraditional backgrounds made us soulmates as we survived, and even excelled, in the proclaimed “rat race” (as I graduated in 1982) – a long-lasting friendship that continues today.
Onwards
Finding a job in academia was not easy, especially when my partner and I were academics in the same field. I had to stay in the Boston area and landed at Brown University thanks to Lew Lipsitt, who introduced me to William Oh, head of neonatology at the Brown Program in Medicine. I turned out to be a fish out of water, the first psychology PhD hired in the hospital and medicine program. But since feeling different was a real-life experience for me, I continued to build a niche. It was a comfortable place. There was no tenure in the medicine program, but promotion to associate and full professor was possible. This allowed me to be socialized to produce at least three publications a year, and to collaborate in an interdisciplinary setting with pediatricians, nurses, biologists, and others. It also allowed me to have and take care of three children, not an easy task in a dual academic family.
My last child was born in 1990. That same year, at the invitation of Margaret Spencer and Vonnie McLoyd, I published a literature review that shifted my interests and my purpose as an academic within Developmental Psychology. I was commissioned by them to do a critical analysis of what we knew about minority populations and how ethnicity, racialization, and culture were depicted in our knowledge base about developmental processes during the infancy period, zero to three.
Up till then, although I had been working for fifteen years with infants, my emphasis had been on what the baby was bringing to the world: temperamentally (behavioral inhibition and difficult temperaments) and because of pregnancy and birth complications (e.g., intrauterine growth retardation, intraventricular hemorrhage, prematurity, diabetes).
That contribution to the Special Issue of Child Development (CD) on Minority Children shaped the rest of my career. In a recent commentary published in the Journal of Adolescence (Garcia Coll, 2022), I described my significant realization of how the field was erroneously depicting developmental processes in minority populations as a function of contributing to that special issue of CD. This perspective was comprised of several seriously mistaken assumptions.
(1) Culture was a construct of interest only in faraway places, for example, Japan, Africa, Guatemala, but not relevant in middle-class “America.” As a corollary, what we observed, measured, and analyzed as developmental processes in our laboratories in the 1970s and 1980s, was considered normative for the species. Contexts, aside from mother-infant interaction, did not matter.
(2) A seemingly progressive stance then was to consider that minority children were disadvantaged because of their parent’s culture, especially parenting patterns. Children had to be rescued from such “cultural deprivation.” Head Start, created in the sixties and widely implemented in the seventies, was based on these premises, and we have found that many contemporary early childhood programs still represent this legacy (Garcia Coll & Ferrer, Reference García Coll and Ferrer2021). Parent involvement was thought of as crucial for early childhood education, but parents had to be taught or trained on how to be “good parents.” Many parenting programs were created and are still operating in the USA with this deficit view, trying to teach Brown and Black parents to be similar to middle-class, White “Americans” (Garcia Coll & Ferrer, Reference García Coll and Ferrer2021). Their contexts – work, poverty, racism, culture – did not matter.
(3) Similarly, the Child Development field in those decades characterized all BILPOC populations (Black-Indigenous-Latinx-People-Of-ColorFootnote 2), their communities, families, and children as “problematic.” For example, even if most teenage mothers, school dropouts, juvenile delinquents, and drug addicts were found in Caucasian populations, most studies of these populations were conducted on poor, BILPOC samples. Moreover, the results were generalized to all members of Brown and Black populations: for example, the Black and Latina teenage mother was considered the norm rather than the exception. And normative studies of minoritized populations were rare; and none captured the strengths of these parents living in very challenging conditions, low resourced environments due to racist segregation policies. Context did not matter.
(4) The final limitation of the field was the prevalence of studies in Henrich et al.’s WEIRD (White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) populations. Not only were our minoritized populations categorized as problematic and studied with deficit models, but also the primary orientation of the field was to conduct normative studies in mostly WEIRD populations and to interpret these findings as universal. Even when international, cross-cultural efforts were made, the great majority of samples in the high ranked journals were WEIRD, and their findings were simply extrapolated to indigenous, agrarian, minoritized populations all over the world. Moreover, cultures were used as “social addresses” – that is, Bronfenbrenner in 1979 – without measuring the “on the ground” contextual processes that influenced the similarities and/or differences in cross-cultural comparisons. These black boxes – social addresses, large ethnic, racial categorizations – needed to be studied deeply but were not. Context really did not matter.
The Need for a Paradigm Shift
Starting in 1991, I took a leave of absence from Brown for three years, exploring how to shift my career to rectify what I saw as an ethnocentric, non-valid science, with colonial attitudes regarding the rest of the human population. I felt I was an indigenous individual looking directly into the colonizers’ eyes – my friends, my colleagues, my peers, my superiors, and the research and scholarly production under the dominant paradigms. My political, activist background, and sociological and historical lenses, were allowing me to see clearly what needed to be done. And I took the challenge head on.
In addition, during those three years I was at Wellesley College directing the Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies, surrounded by feminist scholars and researchers. This space allowed me to delve into critical analyses of dominant research practices and premises, to feel free to question my own assumptions and that of others who were maintaining a cannon, where not only women, but anybody else categorized as “others,” were measured against an ideal defined by White middle-class North American ways of being.
Moreover, with funding from the Bureau of Maternal and Child Health, a group of us (Garcia Coll et al., Reference García Coll, Lamberty, Jenkins, McAdoo, Crnic, Wasik and Garcia1996) embarked in a four-year project that culminated in a publication in Child Development, framed by an integrative model for the study of developmental competencies in minority populations. Historically, this was the first time that variables that were highly significant for non-middle-class-White populations of families and children, variables such as racism, prejudice and discrimination and segregation, and where all the oppressive systems and influences that impinge on these populations, were acknowledged as important predictors and valid for scientific study.
In 1993, the then president of Brown University, Vartan Gregorian, facilitated my transition back to Brown University as an associate professor of Education, Psychology, and Pediatrics with tenure. Realizing that as in any human organization, one needs to get into power positions to create real change, I could have founded alternative journals to Child Development and Developmental Psychology; but they would always be considered second-class journals. I needed to bring the change from within, redefine the standards of the academy – challenge the establishment – and rectify the errors committed in our field. Bring about a more expansive, truly valid developmental science reflective of the full, rich range of human experiences, competencies, and contexts.
Both outside and inside Brown in the 1990s, I slowly but deliberately moved into a position of power and encouraged others to do the same. Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) governance and publications became one of my arenas, as well as helping to promote and secure tenure in prestigious institutions for individuals who were also contributing to this paradigm shift. At Brown, I worked in numerous committees on diversity, but also as president of the faculty; we instituted a family leave policy, started to maintain statistics of faculty of color and their promotions, pushed for target-of-opportunity hires, and converted Columbus Day weekend into Indigenous Weekend Celebrations.
At SRCD the struggles have been fierce, nasty, and enduring. We have been striving to shift many fundamental assumptions and commitments of the field for thirty years! Significant confrontations have occurred at conferences all over the world, behind doors in governance and publication committee meetings. Given the resistance to change and to relinquish power, and the ensuing redefinition of what is a good science, this process has not been easy, even as many of us became part of governing councils, publications committees, editors of journal, heads of departments, and the like.
Where Are We Now and Where Are We Headed?
Despite the ongoing struggles, I still believe that we stand on the side of a genuine, representative science, a moral endeavor that will study developmental processes and outcomes in their contexts – social, cultural, economic. Guided by that ethos, I have benefited from great theorists who enlarged the view of child development from the dyad to the village. My work has been intertwined with the perspectives of Bronfenbrenner, Glen Elder, and perhaps even Vygotsky, twentieth-century scholars who saw developmental processes as a dynamic product of both individual forces and collective, historical, cultural ones. And this related, encouraging note: the integrative model to study minorities children, originally published in 1996 (Garcia Coll et al., Reference García Coll, Lamberty, Jenkins, McAdoo, Crnic, Wasik and Garcia1996), is now cited more than ever and has been revised and used with many populations and across many disciplines. And my latest iteration of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model, arguing that culture permeates all the concentric circles of his developmental contexts, with fluid boundaries and multiple directions of influence (Velez-Agosto et al., Reference Vélez-Agosto, Soto-Crespo, Vizcarrondo-Oppenheimer, Vega-Molina and García Coll2017), has also been widely cited.
It is happening. The new generations of developmental scholars are getting it. As I retire from academic work, I look back at all the struggles, pains, disappointments, fights that needed to happen. I was just there at the right time and place, and somebody had to do it.
Control, power, and resources in academia are not easily given up. But I think we are on our way toward a profound paradigm shift: a truly global, representative, valid science that understands developmental processes – universal and individual processes – as a continuum of adaptations to contextual forces, shaped by both personal experiences and cultural and historical processes.
Never be afraid to pursue your truth; it will not be easy if you are going against the predominant paradigm, so be sure to create a village anywhere you go. It can’t be done alone. Patience, persistence, and mutually meaningful connections are key.
