60readingassignment

Shelton, L. G. [2004] Develecology: An introduction to Bronfenbrenner. Sections 1 - 5.

Introduction

In my teaching, a major purpose is to help students develop an understanding of how people develop. Why does development occur, and how? What influences the course of development? If you want to facilitate development, how can you do that? Over the course of my career, I have studied the works of Freud, Erikson, Sullivan, Piaget, and many other researchers and theorists who consider the processes of development. Each is useful to some degree for understanding some aspects of development. Over the past decade, I have studied and taught the writings of Urie Bronfenbrenner. My students have come to understand the process of development in context, and increasingly I have appreciated the power of Bronfenbrenner’s framework for integrating the work of other theorists and for focusing us on the features of the environment that are most related to development and its variations.

Bronfenbrenner provides a general and generalizable framework that can guide both individual attempts to facilitate development and analysis of policy and proposed social interventions. Bronfenbrenner’s approach applies to all development, optimal and less than optimal. It applies equally to children developing competence and adolescents becoming delinquents or addicts. Increasingly, I have found Bronfenbrenner’s work consistent with the best features of the theories that have survived best.

As an undergraduate at Harvard, I majored in a field called “Social Relations.” The title referred not to college party life, but to understanding human development and relationships within their social contexts. Social Relations was an interdisciplinary department incorporating developmental, social, and clinical psychologists, sociologists, and cultural anthropologists. My subsequent career and teaching have evolved from the integrative, multidisciplinary, and applied foundation that was laid down during those undergraduate years.

Bronfenbrenner’s views have become a major organizing scheme in my understanding of development and relationships, as I have evolved into an applied develecologist. They have become essential in my teaching. So it may not be surprising that I have been puzzled by the lack of presence of Bronfenbrenner’s perspective in the texts available for use in courses in human development. As Bronfenbrenner himself points out, there is still little research in human development that attempts to address important aspects of the environment.

I think that one reason scant attention has been paid to Bronfenbrenner’s work is that his primary presentation of the view, in his 1979 book The Ecology of Human Development, appeared now a quarter of a century ago and was addressed to graduate students and researchers. The presentation of the perspective appearing there is tied to analyses of research studies that are now dated. As well, the terminology Bronfenbrenner uses is rich and precise, understandable only with considerable study. So, while his views are recognized as important and provocative, and are included in nearly every human development text, they are given cursory treatment, usually only in outline form. Typically, his views are presented as one of several viewpoints or approaches to understanding development, and then are never integrated with the material on development that follows. This treatment gives the impression that Bronfenbrenner is as important and irrelevant as Freud and other outdated theorists mentioned in the introductory chapters, and thus worthy of being forever after ignored.

There has been no introduction to his views, nothing published that makes his perspective accessible to students. This book is my attempt to fill that gap, to present the human developmental ecological approach of Bronfenbrenner in an accessible manner, to put this powerful tool in the hands of students and others who would understand development.

Develecology

Why “develecology”? Bronfenbrenner uses the phrase “the ecology of human development.”

The ecology of human development involves the scientific study of the progressive, mutual accommodation between an active, growing human being and the changing properties of the immediate settings in which the developing person lives, as this process is affected by relations between these settings, and by the larger contexts in which the settings are embedded. [DEFINITION 1]

[Throughout this work, the definitions, propositions, and hypotheses cited are from Bronfenbrenner’s Ecology of Human Development, 1979, unless otherwise indicated.]

This definition draws attention to critical aspects of Bronfenbrenner’s views and intentions. First he intends to forward a scientific, or research based, framework in which the assumptions about reality, the principles, and the definitions of concepts are as clear as possible. In a scientific framework, testable hypotheses can be derived, and appropriate research strategies described. Second, he views humans as active participants in the process of development, engaged in continuing adaptation to an environment [which includes relationships with other persons]. Third, the environment is assumed to be changing, rather than static, and to be adapting to the developing person, so the accommodations of the person and the environment are mutual. Fourth, he conceives the environment as consisting of different settings, some of which the person participates in. The process of mutual accommodation is affected by the relationships between settings, or parts of the environment. Finally, the process of mutual accommodation is influenced by the larger context—community, society, and culture.

Bronfenbrenner’s publications refer to ecological views of this and that aspect of development. In more recent publications, Bronfenbrenner uses “bioecological model of development”. This change recognizes the important roles of genetics and physiological change in development. But the term “bioecological” places biological aspects of development in a privileged position compared to psychological and interpersonal, and thus fails to express the encompassing nature of our developing understanding. The power of his framework is that it combines a developmental viewpoint with an ecological viewpoint, arguing for the necessity of applying both perspectives at once. But the developmental and ecological viewpoints are usable separately. Development can be and often is considered out of context, or in a very limited context. In fact that is precisely why Bronfenbrenner developed his conceptualization: to encourage us to think about development in a context that is an ecosystem. The concept of ecology incorporates notions of systemic relationships, in which the important elements are related to each other in ways that make changes in one element productive of and responsive to changes in other elements. Just as development can be considered out of context, however, ecosystems can be analyzed non-developmentally. Ecosystems can be described statically. How can we describe an approach that is both ecological and developmental, equally, at the same time?

Others use “biopsychosocial model”, which is not ecological. We could make it “biopsychosocialecological model”, but that makes an already unwieldy compound word still more unwieldy. I believe the term “developmental” subsumes the biological, psychological and social domains. The power of Bronfenbrenner’s framework lies in truly merging developmental and ecological views. The integration of the two perspectives results in a combined analytic power that far exceeds that of even the sum of the two. In my teaching I began to use the phrases “ecological developmental framework” and “developmental ecology.” Over time, the two sets of principles became so necessary to each other in my thinking that I coined the term develecology to refer to the integration of the two sets of principles.

“Develecology” refers to the study of the processes of development within an ecological framework, or the study of development in context. I believe it is a term usable in other fields as well. My focus, like Bronfenbrenner’s, is on human develecology, but I can easily imagine someone else focusing on canine develecology or the develecology of arctic mammals, for example. Because my interest is in how the study of develecology can be used to improve human conditions, I have come to call myself an “applied human develecologist”. This also is Bronfenbrenner’s interest, and that of many of his students, such as Garbarino.

So, to define the term more precisely:

Develecology is the study of the processes of development of organisms and their relations with their environments, employing a combination of systemic and longitudinal perspectives that include the mutual and reciprocal transactions of organism and context. The focus of develecological study is change in both the context and the organism.

The Framework:

Bronfenbrenner’s scheme is a system: the person exists in a system of relationships, roles, activities, and settings, all interconnected. Individual development takes place as the developing person constructs an understanding of his or her experience and learns to act effectively within the system in which she or he is participating. At the same time, the development of the person changes the system, because his or her actions are different, and other people in the system therefore respond differently to the developing person. At the same time, the settings the person participates in are interrelated with each other and with other settings and with the culture in which the whole system of settings and the roles, relationships and activities within them are embedded. We will examine the parts of the system, their interrelationships, and their impacts on development as we work to understand the processes of the whole.

The task we are undertaking is not a simple or easy one. It is a great challenge to understand the interrelatedness of a complex system such as the social system we live in. To conceptualize relationships that constantly shift, that act reciprocally on each other, requires prodigious expansion of our mental structures. The challenge is doubled because some aspects of relationships are part of the immediate experience and others are more abstract, removed from the direct experience of the person. To then place the developing person within that dynamic system further enlarges the challenge.

Bronfenbrenner attempts to help us conceptualize the human ecosystem with an analogy to a set of nested Russian dolls, with the person in the middle, encased in a series of dolls, each larger than the next. Another analogy sometimes offered is an onion, with a series of layers that can be peeled away. I find both analogies misleading.

In the set of dolls, each level is independent, though parallel—simply larger or smaller in scale. In develecology, the layers or levels are not simply bigger or smaller. Each is of a different kind. The microsystem is a level, but the next level, the mesosystem, is not merely a larger system; it is the relationship among the settings of the smaller “nearer” level, or microsystems. The two levels are not just different in size, but otherwise identical. They are in fact different, the larger consisting of the relationships among the smaller, and thus incorporating the smaller, not existing independently of it. We will continue to elaborate our understanding of this, but it will be necessary to overcome the implications of Bronfenbrenner’s own analogy.

Bronfenbrenner presents his framework in the terms of science, stating his definitions, explaining his assumptions or propositions, and constructing formal, testable hypotheses about the way things work or are related in development in the environment. I’m going to present many of Bronfenbrenner’s hypotheses as if they are true, but remind you here and elsewhere that Bronfenbrenner was trying to encourage research, and to create a scientific approach to the study of development in context. A challenge for you is to see what evidence you can find for the validity of his hypotheses. Are they supported by research? Are they evident in your own experience? Are they consistent with the conclusions of others who think about development?

The purpose of Bronfenbrenner’s scheme is to lead us to understand the development of the person in the ecosystem in which the person participates. We will turn now to look at the person.

The Person and Development

Bronfenbrenner views human beings as active participants in the world. In his view, people are always interacting with their environment, and this interaction is reciprocal: the world interacts with the person. Analysis of the nature of the interactions or transactions we have with the system in which we participate is key to explaining development. Understanding how a person develops within the ecosystem is the central issue in Bronfenbrenner’s work.

A person is always learning about the world through active experience in it. The human mind is designed to make sense of experience. Intelligence is a characteristic of humans that enables us to construct understanding of our world, our experience and ourselves. As we develop we gain understanding, which we apply to our ongoing experience, gradually building up an understanding and gradually refining our abilities to function effectively in our world.

Bronfenbrenner’s view is fundamentally a constructivist view, similar to the views of Piaget, Montessori, Vygotsky and other theorists of human development. In all these views, it is the person who is actively constructing an individual mind, based on the biological potentials humans have evolved over time. In these views, to understand a person’s development is to explore the gradual change in understanding constructed by the person through experience in a world.

For Bronfenbrenner, it is important to keep in mind that the individual is constructing a unique and personal view, a view which may be shared with many others, but which fundamentally is the individual’s own, based only on the specific and unique experience the person has had over time in a specific and unique environment. And that ecosystem must be examined from the person’s own viewpoint, or perspective. Bronfenbrenner regularly returns to the notion that there is not an external objectively true environment in which the person is participating: there is only the environment the person perceives and interprets. What is developmentally important is the ecosystem as the person perceives and experiences it. So, to understand development we must attempt to see the ecosystem from the perspective of the developing person in whom we are interested.

What we are trying to explain, in Bronfenbrenner’s view, is the essence of development, the understanding of the world the person is constructing, along with the skills the person is acquiring, skills that will enable the person to act effectively within the world.

Human development is the process through which the growing person acquires a more extended, differentiated, and valid conception of the ecological environment, and becomes motivated and able to engage in activities that reveal the properties of, sustain, or restructure that environment at levels of similar or greater complexity in form and content. [DEFINITION 7]

The developing person changes over time. Changes are inherent in human growth. The person changes biologically, and the biological changes themselves are in part shaped by the nature of the person’s participation in the ecosystem. For example, if the ecosystem does not afford food adequate for good nutrition, the person’s biological growth reflects the inadequate nutrition. If the ecosystem encourages practice of motor skills, the person will develop better motor skills than would be the case if the person participated in an environment without such opportunities.

Similarly, the biological changes that take place in the person change the nature of participation in the ecosystem. Puberty, for example, typically makes the person a potential sexual partner in the eyes of other members of the ecosystem. So the transactions the person has with those others will change because their understanding of the person changes, and they will behave differently. They will gradually assign a new role to the developing person, not necessarily on the basis of the developing person’s new behavior, but because of their perception of the person’s biological changes.

Biological changes also may underlie changes in participation in the ecosystem. Pregnancy changes one’s role in the ecosystem but also may change one’s ability to move quickly or to carry out tasks as one has previously. Slowing of reflexes or perceptual changes in the later years may alter how one can participate in the ecosystem. Thus, the biological characteristics of the person, characteristics that change regularly through the life span, help determine the person’s participation in the ecosystem, and in turn, those biological changes are influenced by the nature of the ecosystem and of a person’s participation in it.

Biological characteristics are significant in the experience of the person in the ecosystem in other ways as well. People differ biologically. That is one of the wonderful features of humanity. We differ by sex, race, skin color, facial characteristics, body type, distribution of hair and its characteristics, shape of our faces, feet, hands, and so on and so on. Our brains also differ. We have genetically-based differences in our propensity to develop a variety of skills. We have different temperaments, different physiological responses to a variety of stimuli, and different characteristic emotional tones and reactions to experience and events.

Each of us is a unique variation on the human paradigm. Our experience of the environment reflects the influence of many or these characteristics. One of us may be attracted to a setting that exposes us to music and provides opportunities for musical exploration, while another of us might find such a setting less interesting. At the same time, the subtle and not so subtle differences among us often have meaning to others in the ecosystem. Difference from others in the setting might have meaning in the setting, and thus shape the transactions we have in it and the nature of our participation and experience in the system.

For example, if a person’s sex is a basis for exclusion from some activities in a setting, then being male or female will determine one’s experience in the setting, as it does in all cultures. In a setting in which some skin colors are valued above others or where dark skin makes one subject to enslavement, then the biology of skin color will shape experience. Less dramatically, perhaps, in a family of quiet reflective people, a child with a high energy level and desire for physical activity may have different experience and develop a different view of self and of others than the same child would in a family of high energy active athletes. Thus, biologically based variations affect our participation in our ecosystems in several ways. In the longer view, development is shaped by the accumulated effects of those variations in experience and in the ecosystem itself, as some settings may be open or closed to our participation.

Psychological processes underlie participation in the world. People perceive, remember, process information, distort, think, practice skills, seek experience, etc. etc. Bronfenbrenner assumes all these psychological processes are ongoing, and that they are affected by experience in the ecosystem, by participation in the ecosystem. Describing or explaining developmental changes in essential psychological processes is not a focus in his framework, but understanding them is necessary for analyzing changes in participation in the world.

Activities:

People act. It is inherent in being alive, as a human being. Activities tend to become more complex as we develop. In a constructivist view, complex activities evolve or are constructed from the exercise of less complex ones. In Bronfenbrenner’s words “activity is at once the source, the process, and the outcome of development.” [1979, p. 289]

What activities should we look at to understand development? We might distinguish simple actions from activities. An action might be anything one does, such as breathe, twiddle one’s thumbs, cough, or throw a stone into a pond. An activity might be an action or a set of actions that one is learning to do, or that represents new skills or ways of transacting with the world, or that have the potential to change the person of the environment or both. From a developmental perspective, the activities of interest would be those that have the potential to become incorporated with other activities into more complex activities. From a person perspective, perhaps we should focus on the activities that are important to the person, the ones the individual attends to and doesn’t want interrupted, will return to if interrupted, frets about, or expends significant effort on. Bronfenbrenner proposes to distinguish between molecular or simple actions and molar, or larger meaningful activities.

A molar activity is an ongoing behavior possessing a momentum of its own and perceived as having meaning or intent by the participants in the setting. [DEFINITION 12]

Momentum is the tendency of something to continue. People tend to continue activities to their conclusion, especially if they are activities that have “intent—the desire to do what one is doing either for its own sake or as a means to an end” [1979, p. 46].

In Bronfenbrenner’s view, the complexity of the activities one engages in can be used as an index of the level of development, particularly the variety and complexity of the activities engaged in when one is acting on one’s own initiative.

The developmental status of the individual is reflected in the substantive variety and structural complexity of the molar activities which she initiates and maintains in the absence of instigation or direction by others. [PROPOSITION B]

How many different things can you do, and how complex are they? And what activities do you actually engage in when you get to do what you want to do, on your own?

The activities a person actually engages in are the stuff of development in Bronfenbrenner’s view. He has little interest in the artificial indices often used in research. For example, in discussing the research on the impact of early childhood education on development, he proposes:

The immediate and long-range effects of exposure to group settings in early childhood will be reflected not primarily in scores on intelligence, achievement tests, or interaction processes but in the nature and variety of the molar activities engaged in by the child and in the changed character of his behavior and relations toward adults and peers. [HYPOTHESIS 20]

Over time activities change, as they become coordinated and integrated into larger activities. For an infant, learning to stand without holding on might be the most complex activity in the repertoire, the one with most meaning and momentum. As the infant masters that activity, it may become less molar, as it is incorporated into the more complex activity of walking. As walking is mastered, and no longer requires concentration and effort, it in turn ceases to be molar. The developing person moves on to focus on incorporating walking into running, and running into soccer dribbling, and soccer dribbling into playing soccer, and playing soccer into winning a state championship and so on [and on], perhaps to becoming a revered soccer coach. As the person moves from lesser to greater complexity, the activities that were once molar become actions, no longer molar. The new more complex activity becomes the molar activity that has meaning and intent, and which the person is motivated to continue.

The process of constructing more and more complex and integrated activities is an important way to look at development. It is an example of what Piaget calls the progressive process of coordinating knowledge. Bronfenbrenner directs us to look at how the ecosystem we participate in encourages the development of specific molar activities and how those activities become more complex.

Let us examine a couple of examples of how differences in the complexity of activities might reflect different levels of development. Consider two twenty year olds in college, roommates. What do they do when they have free time? One surfs the channels on television, watching whatever comes up. When asked later what she did through the afternoon, she reports she watched TV. What? Shows, nothing important. The other, given free time, goes to the gym, writes e-mail home, organizes his closet, reads a book. If he watches TV, he seeks out programs from which he can learn about the news of the day, and incorporates that into his political science essay, interpreting the news, etc. In other words, for one, the couch potato, television fills the available time. For the other, the one Bronfenbrenner would describe as more highly developed, television is one of a number of important activities, but important for its connectibility to other activities and responsibilities.

As another example, consider the toddler learning to walk. Walking is a molar activity at that point, one to which the child devotes great energy, and the practice of which keeps the toddler awake in the middle of the night. Much later, having mastered walking, the person might learn about exercise, nutrition, and other good health practices. As an adult, the person may incorporate walking into the much larger and complex molar activity of maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Because activities are so important to us, and we are social animals, the activities that others engage in are of interest to us; because we are attracted to the activities of other people, their activities are important to our development. Bronfenbrenner proposes that the activities other people in our near environments engage in will be important in our own development. Thus he hypothesizes:

The development of the person is a function of the substantive variety and structural complexity of the molar activities engaged in by others who become part of the person's psychological field either by involving her in joint participation or by attracting her attention. [HYPOTHESIS 1]

The important activities as we develop are going to be the ones that we engage in with other people, in joint activity. And we are going to learn more, and practice those activities more, in relationships that we enjoy. As we engage in activities over time, in relationships we enjoy, the activities are likely to become more complex, and thus we become more developed. Bronfenbrenner and Morris apply these principles in the following way in describing the role of “proximal” or immediate experiences in development:

1. For development to occur, the person must engage in an activity.

2. To be effective, the activity must take place “on a fairly regular basis, over an extended period of time.” For example, this means that in the case of young children, a weekend of doing things with Mom or Dad does not do the job, nor do activities that are often interrupted.

3. Why not? One reason is that, to be developmentally effective, activities must continue long enough to become “increasingly more complex.” Mere repetition does not work.

4. Developmentally effective proximal processes are not unidirectional; there must be influence in both directions. In the case of interpersonal interaction, this means that initiatives do not come from one side only; there must be some degree of reciprocity in the exchange.

5. Proximal processes are not limited to interactions with people; they also can involve interaction with objects and symbols. In the latter circumstance, for reciprocal interaction to occur, the objects and symbols in the immediate environment must be of a kind that invites attention, exploration, manipulation, elaboration, and imagination.

Bronfenbrenner & Morris [2000]

Why focus on activities? Because activities are what we develop. It is our activities that are our successes and our accomplishments. And it is our activities that represent deficient development. Success in school is the result of appropriate molar activities. Failure in school is the result of activities that are not congruent with the expectations of the school setting. Parenting is a molar activity. How we parent is crucial for the development of the next generation. For most of us earning a living is a molar activity. Income may be proportional to the complexity of the activities we engage in, and perhaps to their scarcity in the ecosystem. Drug addiction is a complex molar activity. Leadership in one’s community is a molar activity. In other words, explaining how we develop complex activities that are important to us and to those around us is essential to understanding our development. Remember that Bronfenbrenner’s definition of development includes becoming “motivated and able to engage in activities that reveal the properties of, sustain, or restructure that environment at levels of similar or greater complexity in form and content.”