Professor

Sara Harkness has always been fascinated by other cultures and languages. As a high school student, she learned to speak Swedish while living with a family in Stockholm and attending high school as an American Field Service exchange student. In college, Sara majored in comparative literature, then taught English language and literature at two universities in Colombia before returning to the U.S. to begin doctoral studies in Social Anthropology at Harvard. Her first research project as a graduate student was a study of children’s acquisition of basic color terms in two different language communities in Guatemala, one Spanish-speaking and the other Mam (a Mayan language).

At Harvard, Sara met and married the love of her life, Charlie Super, and together they travelled to Kenya where for the next three years they carried out research on children and families in a rural Kipsigis village of the western highlands. While there, Sara investigated children’s language socialization, the psychology of childbirth, and moral reasoning among men leaders and non-leaders. After returning to the U.S., Sara and Charlie’s work was supported by a combination of research grants, teaching, and consulting, while writing up their Kenya research and enjoying time with their growing family in Cambridge. Sara also earned a Master of Public Health degree at the Harvard School of Public Health, and subsequently taught in its department of Population Sciences. During this period, Charlie and Sara published a conceptual framework for the study of children’s development in cultural context, the “developmental niche,” which has been widely used by researchers around the world.  A further elaboration on the niche idea, “parental ethnotheories,” led to a series of studies on how parents’ culturally shared belief systems are expressed in parenting practices and interactions with their children, and how parents themselves are influenced by other “expert” sources such as pediatricians.

This research agenda continued when the Harkness-Super family moved to central Pennsylvania for jobs in HDFS at Penn State University, but they soon developed a new geographic focus: cultural variability among Western societies. Returning to “the field,” but now in The Netherlands, they discovered that Dutch parental ethnotheories and practices offered a striking contrast with the hyper-focused American middle-class concern with “stimulation.”  In particular, the “Three R’s” of Dutch parenting – rust (rest), regelmaat (regularity) and reinheid (cleanliness) – guided parents to avoid too much stimulation and promoted a regular schedule with plenty of sleep as the key to healthy development. A subsequent cross-cultural study of parental ethnotheories and children’s transition to school in The Netherlands, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Poland, Australia, and the U.S. brought Sara and Charlie back to The Netherlands for a full year of research with parents and teachers, in collaboration with colleagues in the other countries.

Upon returning from Europe in 1996, Sara and Charlie began a new chapter in their academic careers with a move to UConn, where Charlie became Dean of the School of Family Studies for what turned out to be its last 10 years of existence, and Sara was appointed as full professor in the same school. Organizational changes at UConn resulted in the School’s becoming a department within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, but Sara and Charlie’s research trajectory remained constant. In 2009, their research was recognized by the Society for Research on Child Development by its inaugural award for “Distinguished contributions to cultural and contextual factors in child development.”

A continuing motivation in Sara’s work has been the desire to “make a difference” beyond the creation of new knowledge for its own sake. Together with colleagues in the Neag School of Education, Sara helped lead a GEAR UP project (a federally funded program to promote academic achievement for students in disadvantaged schools), where the team worked with three cohorts at a K-8 school in Hartford, following them through high school to support learning and engagement in education oriented to post-secondary education. This project was recognized in 2006 by an award from UConn for Excellence in Outreach and Public Engagement. In 2012-2013, Sara spent a year in Washington D.C. as a Jefferson Science Fellow, working as a Senior Advisor in Education and Health in the Latin American and Caribbean Bureau of the U.S. Agency for International Development. A highlight of that year was working on a project to promote early literacy development, especially among indigenous children in Guatemala, Peru, Honduras, and Nicaragua. She has also enjoyed working with colleagues at the Connecticut Office of Early Childhood on evaluations of intervention projects designed to support vulnerable families and their children. As director of the university-wide Center for the Study of Culture, Health, and Human Development, Sara developed a graduate certificate program to train doctoral students in inter-disciplinary approaches to issues of health and development in cultural context. Most recently, the CHHD leadership team – including HDFS faculty members Alaina Brenick and Caroline Mavridis, Clewiston Challenger in Counseling Psychology, Saskia van Schaik at Radboud University (The Netherlands) and co-director Charles Super – put together a video entitled Making Voices Heard: Diversity, Disadvantage, and Discrimination in Educational Settings. Funded by a grant from the President’s Commitment to Community Initiative, the video was launched in April 2021 as a Webex Event, with opening remarks by Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer Frank Tuitt, a further note of welcome by President Katsouleas, and over 150 people in attendance including HDFS faculty members and students. The video is now posted on the CHHD website, where it will be available for teaching and training purposes free of charge.

In the summer of 2019, Sara and Charlie returned to the village in Kenya where they had started their research, and their family, so long ago. They were amazed to be warmly welcomed by the people of the village, and they have since established a non-profit organization, Friends of Leldayet Kokwet, to support education at the secondary and post-secondary levels through scholarships for students as well as restoring and equipping schools in the village.

When she isn’t working, Sara enjoys playing her beloved cello, tending home and garden, and visiting with her children and grandchildren. Despite the strictures of the pandemic, Sara is grateful for the wonderful relationships that have blossomed during this time, even if remotely.

Congratulations to Terry Berthelot (Assistant Professor in Residence), who was selected to receive the 2021 NAELA John J. Regan Writing Award for her article, “Medicare Appeal Navigation,” published in the 2020 NAELA Journal. The John J. Regan Writing Award is presented annually for the best article published in the NAELA Journal during the previous calendar year. The award selection is made by the members of the NAELA Journal Editorial Board.

Professor Beth Russell  and Professor Eva Lefkowitz quoted in an article in the CT Post on the importance of maintaining personal connections during the pandemic. Read the article here.

Associate Professor Laura Mauldin, 2021-2022 UConn Humanities Faculty Fellow. Congratulations Laura! Read the announcement in UConn Today.

Associate Professor

Dr. Alaina Brenick is a scholar-activist dedicated to the interdisciplinary and translational approaches fundamental to the field of Human Development and Family Sciences. Drawing from social and developmental psychology, education, social work, and sociology, she is interested in identifying and examining individual, micro-, and macro-level factors that contribute to intergroup conflict, as well as the conditions necessary for reducing prejudice, discrimination, and victimization across development. Specifically, her research focuses on how diverse groups of children, adolescents, and young adults in the U.S. and in other regions of the world—sometimes with vastly different societal structures, norms, and expectations—experience, reason about, and respond to intergroup relations and group-based victimization (e.g., discrimination, denial of rights, bullying, exclusion based on one’s group membership/identity). She is committed to translating her work into practice. Her work provides a fundamental knowledge base for creating contextually and developmentally appropriate intervention programs, designed to reduce individual prejudice and systemic oppression and promote social equity and positive intergroup relations.

A first step of scholar-activism in Dr. Brenick’s work has been to develop assessments appropriate for the minoritized groups with whom they are used. She believes that when working with minority groups, especially dealing with topics of social inequity and victimization, it is critical to accurately reflect and assess their lived experiences. As a result, she is working with members of the transgender and gender non-binary communities directly to develop a comprehensive measure of individual and institutional discrimination experienced by this community. Previously, in collaboration with Dr. Linda Halgunseth, she worked directly with immigrant youth and their parents to develop a measure of bias-based bullying of immigrant youth. The voices of these communities are now empowered in the field through precise representation.

A second step in Dr. Brenick’s scholar-activism is to decenter the U.S. dominated ethnocentrism in the field of research. Across her career, including during her graduate studies, her post-doctoral training at Friedrich Schiller Universität in Jena, Germany, and her current work, Dr. Brenick has collaborated internationally. Applying a systemic approach to her research, she has explored not just the influences of schools, families, and peers, but also the larger socio-political and historical contexts of youth intergroup dynamics. Her work has assessed the hierarchical social structure of immigrant groups in Germany, children who had or had not been displaced by the Colombian civil war, and the ongoing relations between Palestinian, Palestinian-Israeli, and Jewish-Israeli youth.

An anti-racist perspective guides Dr. Brenick’s work, emphasizing foci on undoing systems of oppression. In the Middle East, she has designed and evaluated numerous multi-level prejudice reduction interventions. She has collaborated with Sesame Workshop to effectively implement media-based educational programing on Sesame Street to increase understanding of others and reduce prejudice among Palestinian, Palestinian-Israeli, and Jewish-Israeli pre-kindergarteners. Dr. Brenick has also designed interventions that teach social-emotional skills such as empathy, or that provide opportunity for contact between Palestinian-Israeli and Jewish-Israeli children, allowing them to get to know one another and build meaningful relationships with one another. These interventions have been tested longitudinally and in comparison to control groups; they been highly effective in reducing affective, cognitive, and behavioral prejudice and increasing positive bystander interventions in the face of discrimination toward the outgroup. Finally, Dr. Brenick and her colleagues designed a mindfulness intervention in which the ongoing conflict was not mentioned at all. This intervention helped Jewish-Israeli elementary students learn to care for the self, to care for others who were close to them, and then to care for others in general (even those they don’t like). The mindfulness intervention reduced affective prejudice and stereotyping and increased willingness for contact with the outgroup. Dr. Brenick’s intervention work shows great promise for anti-racist action even in the midst of ongoing conflict.

In a recent chapter adopting an anti-racist approach, (No) space for prejudice! Varied forms of negative outgroup attitudes and ethnic discrimination and how they develop or can be prevented in the classroom, Dr. Brenick and her colleagues systemically reviewed the literature on prejudice in schools. The chapter is published in the Handbook of Children and Prejudice: Integrating Research, Practice, and Policy—downloaded over 40,000 times! https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-12228-7 —and emphasizes turning knowledge and awareness into practice and policy. It is also being turned into a video series, with the Center for Culture, Health, and Human Development, to help make educational environments safer and more inclusion for all students.

Finally, Dr. Brenick’s scholarship and activism are deeply connected to her mentorship model. She is dedicated to mentoring undergraduate students, especially first-generation students and students from underrepresented minority backgrounds (64% of her mentees). Her student mentees are integrally involved in her work, having co-authored 22 manuscripts and over 60 international and national conference presentations. Additionally, Dr. Brenick has sponsored or PI’ed eight small research grants awarded to her undergraduate mentees to promote their active and early engagement in research. In honor of her mentorship success, she was awarded the UConn Honors Faculty Member of the Year Award and nominated by her mentees for the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring Award.

Dr. Brenick will always call the charm city, Baltimore, MD, her hometown. Another point of great pride for Dr. Brenick is that Lizzie’s food truck on campus has a veggie burger named for her. Additionally, she loves to garden and tends to over 40 indoor plants (and more every day), to eat when others cook, to knit and crochet—especially fun stuffed animals for her niblings, to take long walks while talking to good friends, and to travel and learn about new people and places. Dr. Brenick’s most important roles are as co-parent to Trent and as World’s Greatest Tanta to her many niblings.