Daniel A. Wagner (PhD: Developmental Psychology, 1976) was very surprised by the acceptance letter he received from Michigan’s Experimental Psychology program in the spring of 1970. After graduating from Cornell in 1968, Wagner had joined the Peace Corps to work as civil engineer in a remote village in the Atlas Mountains of south-central Morocco. Living in a house made of mud bricks with no electricity, running water, or phones, he received the news via a letter that had made the long journey across the Atlantic and up the treacherous mountain roads to reach him.
Of that letter, Wagner recalls: “It said, ‘Dear Mr. Wagner, two years ago, you applied to our program. Are you still interested?’ That was surprising enough under the circumstances. But then it said, ‘By the way, we're very impressed by your article on the cover of Science magazine.’ I was shocked by that part. I knew nothing about an article published in Science, and I had no idea that Michigan was still interested in my application. But they said, ‘Are you coming to join our Experimental Psychology program in the fall of 1970? We think you'd find a good home here.’ Eventually, after thinking about it for a while, I wrote back: ‘Yes, I'll be there.’”
That day was just one of many unpredictable turning points in Wagner’s professional life. Now a Professor of Education and the inaugural UNESCO Chair in Learning and Literacy at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), he has hundreds of publications (in multiple languages) and has founded and directed many education-focused programs throughout his career. But he initially stumbled into the field of psychology through a series of fortuitous coincidences. Born in Chicago to a family of engineers, he began his postsecondary education as an engineering student at Cornell. While he did finish his engineering degree, he acknowledges in retrospect that he found his psychology courses (including those taught by luminaries like fellow Michigan alumnus Urie Bronfenbrenner) much more interesting.
Back in 1970, Wagner discovered that the mysterious Science article was a paper he and a graduate student had co-authored at Cornell. Written under the supervision of a professor who had previously worked with (future) Nobel Prize winner Herbert A. Simon, the paper analyzed decision-making and problem-solving among skilled chess players. That research would later provide foundations for work leading to Deep Blue, the first computer system to defeat the world’s top chess players in the mid-1990s.
But Science cover article notwithstanding, Wagner felt very unprepared when he arrived in Ann Arbor late that summer. Most of his cohort already held undergraduate degrees from top psychology programs and had years of relevant research experience. He had an engineering degree, a few psychology classes, and a single very visible publication—and he had spent the previous two years off-grid in the mountains, no less. “It was a culture clash if there ever was one!” Wagner laughs.
After a few months of concerted studying, he soon caught up and was approached in his first year by Walter Reitman, a cognitive psychologist performing early AI research. Reitman had read the Science article and recommended Wagner build on that work to develop a master’s thesis. Reitman explained that he was about to take over as editor of Cognitive Psychology and could help Wagner publish his thesis there. Wagner took the advice and became the first student to publish in that journal.
Despite those high-profile successes, however, Wagner began to lose interest in the narrow, behaviorist focus of mid-20th-century experimental psychology. His time in the Peace Corps had affected him deeply, and he came to realize he was more intrigued by questions about how culture and environment affect learning and development.
During his second year, that burgeoning interest led him to the office of newly arrived developmental psychologist Harold W. Stevenson, who would become one of Wagner’s most important mentors.
But Wagner did not know what to expect from that first meeting. “Harold’s reputation preceded him,” he says. “He was known rather widely in the inner circle as a driven person who was not easy on either graduate students or colleagues, but I remember going to meet him that day. He had just come to campus, and his office was empty. He maybe had a pencil on his desk, but that was it. He said, ‘Who are you?’ And I told him who I was. And he said, ‘Well, why are you talking to me? I'm in the Developmental Psychology program. You're in Experimental. Why are you here?’ And I said, ‘I'm here because I was in Morocco. I have been using the word culture in experimental psychology, and they don't like it.’ And he said, ‘I like that story!’”
Although he was a developmental psychologist, Stevenson’s own prior work was also rooted firmly in the experimental/behaviorist tradition. Still, he was very open to Wagner’s ideas. As it turned out, Stevenson had been stationed in Japan during World War II. He had learned Japanese and had always been intrigued by how a given culture may influence children’s learning. In future years, Stevenson shifted his own research focus toward culture and education as well, publishing some of the most influential cross-cultural studies comparing learning in Japan, Taiwan, China, and the United States.
Within months, Wagner left the Experimental Psychology program and was welcomed into the Developmental area (he and Stevenson co-taught Michigan’s first class on culture and child development). He spent his remaining years in the program zeroing in on the kinds of work that would define his career. That culminated in his dissertation research, which allowed him to return to Morocco—this time as a psychologist instead of an engineer—for a then-unprecedented two-year field study comparing children’s learning across rural and urban settings. His dissertation, “Memories of Morocco: A Cross-Cultural Study of the Influence of Age, Schooling, and Environment on Memory,” was published in Cognitive Psychology (as his master’s thesis had been) and became a highly cited source in the emerging field of cross-cultural empirical psychology.
After receiving his PhD, Wagner accepted a position in the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, where he has served as faculty ever since. He has written or edited over 30 books and is currently working on a second edition of his textbook Learning as Development: Rethinking International Education in a Changing World. Over the decades, he has taken on many novel leadership roles, including becoming the UNESCO Chair at UPenn, the Founding Director of the International Literacy Institute, the Founding Director of the National Center on Adult Literacy, and the Founding Director of UPenn’s International Educational Development Program.
Wagner believes the support of open-minded mentors like Stevenson was what allowed him to capitalize on his ideas and the many serendipitous opportunities he encountered throughout his career. He has therefore made mentoring others a major priority and has supported hundreds of graduate students, junior colleagues, and educators through UPenn, UNESCO, and other organizations. As a watchword phrase to his students traveling to do work overseas, Wagner often quotes anthropologist Margaret Mead, who wrote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”
