Talking about Transgressions: Adult Lecture

Dr. Holly Recchia
Assistant Professor, Department of Education, Concordia University

Lecture Title: Talking about Transgressions: The construction of moral agency in children’s conversations with their mothers

Lecture Description: In this talk, Dr. Recchia will present a constructivist perspective on how mother-child conversations contribute to moral development. Recchia relies on a corpus of conversations between 6- to 16-year-olds and their mothers, in which dyads discussed children’s experiences of harming their friends and siblings. Analyses focus on how these conversations may either support or hinder the development of moral agency; that is, children’s understanding of how morally-laden actions are related to their own and others’ desires, beliefs, and emotions (Pasupathi & Wainryb, 2010). Dr. Recchia uses excerpts from conversations to illustrate some noteworthy patterns and thus provide a window into the process of moral socialization in action.