For the first time in nearly 30 years, the famed Barnard Center for Toddler Development has a new Executive Director. Anna Shusterman, a developmental psychologist and psychology professor, took the helm of the Toddler Center over the summer.
Shusterman has focused on conceptual development in children, exploring the relationship between language and conceptual development, particularly in the domains of spatial and numerical cognition. She has spent much of her academic career working on ways to implement findings from developmental science in practical spaces such as preschool classrooms. She earned her undergraduate degree from Brown University in neuroscience and completed her doctorate and post-doctoral fellowship in the Laboratory for Developmental Studies at Harvard University.
“I am thrilled to be steering the future of child development research along with the incredible team at the Barnard Toddler Center, while also helping individual children and their families grow together,” Shusterman said. “In this role I hope to set a new vision for the Toddler Center to help meet the evolving needs of children and their families, as well as to seamlessly connect the Center to the academic part of the College’s psychology department.”
The Toddler Center, which was founded in 1973, is a research, education and training center that serves as an intentional, nurturing, family-supportive environment that prioritizes the needs of the child. Assistants at the Toddler Center include Barnard and Columbia students enrolled in a year-long developmental psychology course, which allows the center to offer a low student-teacher ratio of 2:1, and toddlers only come in for short sessions, usually once or twice a week depending on their age.
“Our team has designed a program that is fully centered around what a child at this age needs and what’s going to help them lay a strong foundation for their development – as a human, not just as a student,” Shusterman said. “
Shusterman notes, though, that the Toddler Center’s mission to create an environment that is wholly centered around the needs of young children isn’t always going to meet the needs of their families as a whole, and that her goal is to find a way to make the programming at the Center more accessible to more families.
“The pressures of society can pull families away from their children, but children need a lot of support,” Shusterman said. “The future of the Toddler Center entails finding a way to make the rich expertise at the toddler center a community resource for a wide range of families.”