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Larry Nucci
is Director of the Office for Studies in Moral Development and Education
and Professor of Education and Psychology at the University of Illinois
at Chicago. He has also held visiting faculty appointments at the Federal
University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil, and the Institute
of Pedagogy, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland.
He has written extensively in the field of moral and social development and education. Nucci's books include Education in the Moral Domain (Cambridge University Press, 2001); Culture Thought and Development (with Geoffrey Saxe and Elliot Turiel) (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000); Moral Development and Character Education: A Dialogue (Mc Cutchan, 1989).
Nucci has been a pioneer in what is referred to as the domain theory of social cognitive development. His findings have demonstrated that children and adolescents across cultures maintain a set of common moral concerns for fairness and human welfare that are different from their concepts of the conventions and religious norms specific to their particular social and cultural setting. Much of his recent work has focused on the ways in which individuals across cultures differentiate between legitimate moral and normative regulation, and those aspects of personal behavior that individuals consider to be matters of personal discretion and privacy. This work on the personal domain has included a number of cross-cultural studies in Latin American and Asian settings. This work has determined that efforts to identify zones of privacy are endemic to children and adults across a wide range of cultures. Nucci has proposed that efforts to parse out a personal domain are central to the formation of personal identity and selfhood.
Nucci’s psychological research has formed the basis of programs in moral and character education, and is now being utilized in the construction of an alternative assessment of moral growth. His work is being employed as the basis for research on adolescent-parent conflicts, and has also been recently applied to the study of adolescent psychological disorders.
Nucci has received grants from the Council for Spiritual and Ethical Education, the Templeton Foundation, and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. He was a Fulbright Scholar to Brazil, Co-recipient, of the Special Merit Award for Action Research in Schools presented by the Institute for Educational Research, Illinois (1991), an American Association for Higher Education honoree as a pioneer in school-college collaboration (1990), and recently received the UIC Award for Excellence in Teaching (2001).