Much effort goes into helping students develop a shared analytic and methodological vocabulary. Initiation to collaborative research . Throughout the four-semester sequence, but particularly during the second year, students begin to develop projects with interdisciplinary goals under the guidance of the primary teaching faculty. Considerable faculty effort is spent both within and outside class directing students toward this approach. As an example, over the past four years a group of students from anthropology and psychology has worked on a project exploring the culture of childhood.
Children think differently than adults, speak differently, and behave differently.
These differences are patterned and not trivial. On the other hand, treating childhood as a cultural phenomenon is curious from the perspective of developmental psychology, which treats childhood as part of the patterned transformation of immature beings into mature ones. For most developmental psychology, adulthood is the endpoint, not a competing cultural tradition. Both ethnographic and experimental work has been conducted, presented at conferences, and is being prepared for publication. It is fair to say that this would not have happened in the absence of Culture and Cognition.