Psychology Prof. Sandra Waxman was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her research on how children learn to understand their environments.
Out of the almost 2,800 people, who applied for the fellowship, only 189 recipients received the Guggenheim, which carries an average award of $35,000. The award goes to promising researchers who have already made significant contributions to their field.
Waxman studies have centered on children in Indonesia and America – particularly members of rural Wisconsin’s Menominee Indian Tribe.
Waxman and her team of researchers discovered that children develop widely varying beliefs about nature based on how adults talk about the environment.
“How we think about the natural world influences decisions we make about it,” Waxman said.
For instance, Menominee children are taught that they are an “intricate, intimate part of the natural world,” while majority-culture Americans learn simply to appreciate and take care of nature, she said.
“We think that we’re the pinnacle … rather than a piece of nature,” she said of majority-culture Americans.
As a result, children and adults who grow up in cities have difficulty seeing plants and the environment as being “alive.”
Before this project, Waxman’s main area of study was early childhood language acquisition. In both areas, she has expanded upon the traditional study of suburban, white, middle-class, English-speaking Westerners. She is currently studying the effects of both nature and nurture among children who speak Mandarin, French, Spanish and Italian, as well as those who grew up in rural and other non-Western environments.
Although Waxman is a professor now, she said she was not always fascinated by the idea of working in a college setting.
“I tried to drop out of college; my father wouldn’t let me,” she said. “I hated college, I hated studying.”
But after attending two undergraduate institutions, she emerged with a degree in occupational therapy from the University of Pennsylvania. She took several more years to develop an interest in psychology before returning to Penn to earn her Ph.D.
Now she’s happy with her career path.
“I feel like I’ve died and went to heaven,” she said.
Waxman’s enthusiasm often spreads to her colleagues as well.
“She’s very organized in her presentation of ideas so that it’s really clear what she’s trying to say,” said Jennifer Woodring the project coordinator for Waxman and her team. “She’s really good at pulling interesting things out of the research and then making them clear to other people.”
Waxman said she plans to use the added flexibility that the Guggenheim money provides to write a book that she hopes will appeal even to those outside of cognitive psychology.
“Understanding how children think, how their brains develop, is very important to understanding child development,” said psychology department chairwoman and Prof. Alice Eagly,. “We’re all interested in that.”
Reach Julie French at [email protected].
