Catholic University of America

The study of developmental psychology at the Catholic University of America (CUA) has a long and rich history. It can be traced back to the 1920s, when a “center” was established to assist families whose children were experiencing educational or psychological problems. At that time, (Rev.) Thomas Verner Moore, a pioneering cognitive psychologist, was the departmental chairperson and saw the study of development as a theoretical as well as a practical tool for improving lives. One of his students, (Rev.) Paul Furfey, did his PhD dissertation on the topic of assessing children. He used a qualitative, holistic approach that was designed to situate each individual youth in a well-rounded sociological and psychological context. Furfey, who was a founding member of the Society for Research on Child Development, was, as was his mentor Moore, a priest. Later in the 1930s, Furfey refocused his work on bridging social science with social activism that was predicated on a commitment to Christian social justice. Thereafter, he left the field of development for radical social action and promotion of broader sociological studies that sought to combat the narrowness of the logical positivism that was prevalent at the time.

Moore's original interest in applied development took new form in the 1940s, with the formal establishment of the CUA Child Center. Its research, training, and service delivery staff offered assessment of children with problems in a manner that would not be considered cost-effective today. Each child client was seen by a psychiatrist, clinical psychologist, social worker, and educational specialist, who together framed the problem and outlined a therapeutic course. This model of diagnosis and treatment pictured child clients in an integrated way and served as a unique vehicle for training interns in an interdisciplinary perspective that would be considered radical today. This model proved to be increasingly expensive during the 1960s and for this reason had to be abandoned, thus giving way to the intradisciplinary segmentation that marks much of contemporary service and training.

This loss was compensated for in part by the hiring of Hans Furth, who joined the psychology department in 1959 to head a training and research program that was supported by the Vocational Rehabilitation Administration (VRA), an agency within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS). This agency was designed to support research and psychological services for people with physical disabilities, and Furth's focus was on the deaf community. It is worth noting that his interest in development was shared by other grantees in the VRA program, for example, Clark University, where Seymour Wapner and Tamara Dembo were Furth's VRA counterparts. [Page 208]Furth's research agenda proved to be quite generative and largely defined the course of developmental psychology at CUA for the next four decades.

Furth began a series of studies of deaf children in order to address the question of just how much the development of thinking or intelligence depended on language. At the time, the majority of deaf children born to hearing parents were virtually stymied in language acquisition because of a warp in speech pathologists' preferred approach. When parents brought a child to a speech center for diagnosis, the standard recommendation was for the parents to adopt an “oral” strategy. Parents were told that if they desired their deaf child to speak English, they must never use signs or gestures, but speak clearly and train the child to read lips. For severely deaf youngsters, the hearing of speech was per force limited, and lipreading was more a hope than a real possibility. Thus, many deaf children were virtually without a language during their early years, which were spent with limited communication with other persons.

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