The developmental period of adolescence, characterized by rapid and profound social, cognitive, and physiological changes, provides a unique context within which to understand how age-graded and socio-culturally informed experiences evolve and interact to shape young people’s identity development and adjustment. Furthermore, the malleability of the adolescent brain, coupled with adolescents’ increased awareness of and attention to their social contexts, provides a unique and powerful opportunity for intervention. This presentation will illustrate three themes from a long-term program of research that (a) initially focused on understanding adolescents’ ethnic-racial identity as a developmental process and identifying key contextual factors (e.g., family, peers, school) that informed its development; (b) evolved to focus on examining the potential for school-based interventions to promote this important developmental competency; and (c) is now exploring opportunities for this work to contribute to building a more global developmental science – a science that respects the limits of universality but is flexible and open to the opportunities that cross-country collaborations can provide for scientific discovery.
Adriana Umaña-Taylor, Ph.D. is the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Professor of Education at Harvard University. Her work leverages developmental science to promote adolescents’ positive development, reduce ethnoracial disparities in psychological and academic adjustment and, ultimately, promote social justice. She has collaborated with school districts and community organizations for over two decades to design and implement longitudinal school- and community-based data collection efforts with adolescents. She developed the Identity Project, an ethnic-racial identity school-based intervention that promotes adolescents’ academic and psychological adjustment. Her recent studies test the efficacy of the Identity Project; explore strategies to better prepare educators to engage in conversations about race, ethnicity, and identity with students; examine the role of peer relationships in adolescents’ ethnic-racial identity development; and explore the universality of ethnic-racial identity as a developmental competency among adolescents in Latin American and European contexts to promote a more global developmental science. Her work has been widely disseminated and supported via funding from the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, the William T. Grant Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation.
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