Sheina Lew-Levy

Understanding how children learn in diverse settings is foundational to shedding light on how culture is acquired and changed within and across generations. While the study of childhood learning spans academic disciplines, interdisciplinary research on this topic has been challenged by methodological differences and a lack of shared explanatory theoretical frameworks for cross-cultural variation. As ‘big data’ approaches to understanding human behaviour become more common, and disciplinary lines become blurred, the time is ripe to create a unified field of study on childhood learning across cultures. During a three-day workshop held online in September 2022, participants from diverse disciplinary backgrounds including anthropology, archaeology, psychology, and education will (1) develop robust, comparable and flexible interdisciplinary methods, and (2) identify axes along which we expect cultures to vary. Our discussions will culminate in the publication of a field guide to best practices for cross-cultural research on childhood learning. We will also record interviews with workshop participants to create a short video aimed at highlighting cross-cultural approaches to learning for the public. Our workshop will help generate novel and productive hypotheses about the ontogeny, variation, and evolution of cognition, behaviour, and social interactions which is relevant to researchers in evolutionary anthropology, cultural anthropology, and developmental psychology.