Mehta – developmentalism

The underpinning of developmentalism is that there’s a universal trajectory of how children develop.  So, for example, if you look at past theories or developmental theories, they mainly focused on one singular lens. And it looked at really a European ideal of how children develop. 

And we now know that that is not really an accurate representation of how children develop. And what we need to start doing is looking at multiple perspectives. 

And so when we think about the ages and stages approach, it’s a very traditional view of how children progress through stages in a very linear way. And it actually has been criticized for several years. 

And so when we look at developmentalism, there are some great foundational aspects to it. However, we need to take critical lenses to this approach and think about ways that children are developing in different socio-historical, socio-political, socio-cultural contexts, because that is something that’s missing. 

When we look at traditional developmental theories, let’s say, for example, Piaget’s cognitive development theory, it’s really based on a particular set of children and how they developed. And even if you look back at Arnold Gesell and Gesell’s ’work, Arnold Gesell really focused on white children and how do we better the white race. And really that was the focus. Other children were not put into research, and that is common throughout and threaded throughout many of the traditional theories that we see today in early childhood education programs.