Ecological Systems Theory

• Contemporary theories of human development include ecological systems, social ontogenesis, and moral development.

Ecological Systems Theory - Urie Bronfenbrenner

• Born in Russia on April 29, 1917 and died September 25, 2005.
• Immigrated to the US at age 6
• Enlisted in the US army after completing his PhD
• Known as the co-founder of the Head Start program, designed for at-risk nursery students.
• Development is a result of relationships between people and systems in their environment, and the interrelationships among those systems.
• Child development cannot be evaluated in isolation from the immediate environment; interactions among larger environments in which a child develops must also be examined.
• The key question is how the world around the child either helps or hinders their development.
• Postulated that effects of 5 environmental systems include:
  • Microsystem
  • Mesosystem
  • Exosystem
  • Macrosystem
  • Chronosystem
• Later emphasized interaction of genetic make-up and environmental forces.
• Assumes natural environment is a major source of influence.
• Microsystem: Refers to relations between the child and the immediate environment.
• Mesosystem: Refers to connections among the child's immediate settings.
• Exosystem: Refers to social settings that affect the child but do not contain them.
• Macrosystem: Refers to the overarching ideology of the culture.
• Variables the child is directly exposed to include:
  • Relationships with family, school, religious institutions, and neighbors.
  • The most direct interaction is with parents, teachers, and peers.
  • Family is the most influential and durable influence.
  • Microsystems becomes more complex as a child is exposed to day care, preschool, youth groups, teachers and neighborhood playmates.
• Environment, including geographic and material structures.
• Child's body, consisting of general health, brain functioning, emotions, and cognitive systems.
• The child learns most of their behavior in the microsystem.
• The microsystem consists of bi-directional influences
  • Parents and children actively shape the child's development
  • Personal attributes influence responses from others.
  • Children actively select/avoid environments.
• Bi-directional relationships form the foundation for a child's cognitive and emotional growth.
• Mesosystem refers to interconnections among microsystems such as home, school, and peer groups.
  • Examples include the interactions between the family/teachers, and the relationship between a child's peers and family.
• Development is optimized by strong, supportive links between microsystems
• Non-supportive links between Microsystems can cause problems.
• Exosystem elements consist of structures/institutions in which the child does not have direct contact but still indirectly affect a child's development.
  • Examples include parent's work environment and funding for education.
• Exosystems impact child development by influencing structures in the microsystem.
• Macrosystem is a cultural, subcultural, or social class context in which other systems are embedded.
• Provides the values, beliefs, customs, and laws of the culture.
  • Influences how parents, teachers, and others raise a child, and may be either conscious or unconscious.
• Dictates how children should be treated/taught, and the goals they should strive for.
  • Influences societal values, legislation, and financial resources available to families.
• Values differ across cultures.
• Chronosystem refers to the pattern of environmental events and transitions over the life course with sociohistorical circumstances.
• Changes in the child or any ecological context can affect the direction of development.
  • Examples include cognitive and biological changes at puberty, contributing to parent-child conflict, or the birth of a sibling.
• The effects of environmental changes depend on the child's age.
• Families influence their children and vice-versa, recognizing that families are complex social systems.
• Families are dynamic and embedded within larger cultural and subcultural contexts
• The ecological niche occupied by a family can affect its interactions and the development of its children.
• Properties of the ecological systems include:
  • Each layer is complex.
  • Each layer affects development.
  • Conflict within layers ripples throughout other layers.
• As the child develops, environmental interactions become more complex, correlating with the maturation of a child's physical and cognitive structures.
• Five propositions that describe how home/school relationships work towards positive development:
  • A child must have an ongoing, long-term mutual interaction with an adult based on unconditional love.
  • The child-adult relationship provides the pattern of all the child's other relationships.
  • Confidence provided from these relationships allows a child to explore/grow.
  • Interactions with other adults enable the child to develop a more positive relationship in the primary adult-child relationship.
  • The primary adult-child relationship improves with repeated interchanges and support.
  • Relationships between children/adults require society to support the importance of the roles via policy/resources.
• Risk factors to optimal child development include:
  • Instability and unpredictability in modern family life.
  • The demands of the workplace reducing constant interactions with adults important for development.
  • Breakdown of relationships in the microsystem, resulting in children lacking the tools to explore other parts of the environment.
  • Children without strong primary relationships finding affirmation inappropriately, especially in adolescence.
  • Society not providing resources to protect children/adults from technology.
• Society should lobby for policies supporting the important role of parents in a child's development.
• The ecological systems theory can be criticized for having very little to say about specific biological contributors to development and not providing detailed mechanisms for development.
• This theory provides a rich description of environmental factors which integrates multiple influences on child development.
• Called for needing developed to be studies in natural settings.
• The primary caregiver relationship is integral to someone's entire life.
• Teachers need to support the primary child-adult relationship.
• Schools should create welcoming environments for families.
• Education should foster societal attitudes that value all work done on a child's behalf.

Social Ontogenesis - Bame Nsamenang (1992)

• Theory developed by an African for the African people, specifically in Nso, Cameroon.
• Bame Nsamenang was born on August 23, 1951 in Kitiwum, Kumbo in Cameroon; was a scholar in residence at the Center for Advanced Study.
• Studied Nursing for their bachelor's degree and Education for their Master's at the University of Ibadan; received a Ph. D. Psychology in 1984.
• Studied/lectured at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development for 3 years, 1987-1990 in Bethesda, Maryland, U.S.A.
• Developed to meet the inadequacy of existing theories, especially with the ethocentrism of Euro-American theories applicability to human diversity and experience.
• Western cultures emphasize academic, technological, or cognitive modes of social integration.
  • Many African cultures place primacy on socio-affective socialization.
• Posited a theory based on socialization and collectivistic frameworks rather than individualistic ones.
• Focuses on organized teaching of social competence and responsibility within the family system and the ethnic community, rather than academic pursuits for individual achievement.
• Calls for theories that give more attention surroundings in which a person develops.
• Set out to discover how Nso children acquired cultural competence, with supportive evidence in other parts of Africa.
  • Nso people come from the Bamenda Grassfields in the Northwest Region of Cameroon.
• Discovered three distinctive patterns:
  • observation/imitation, attention to themes of prototypic stories, and co-participation in major activities involving peer mentoring.
• Concluded active role of Nso children in their own socialization emphasizing on obedience and social responsibility rather than verbalizations/individuality.
• Envisions phases of human cyclical ontogenesis of systematic socialization, not discrete disciplines.
• Knowledge is interwoven into a common tapestry at different developmental stages as children participate in the cultural and economic life of the family and society.
• Differs from traditional African education, which does not divide domains of knowledge and instead integrates knowledge about all aspects of life into a single curriculum.
• Children are neither instructed nor prodded into what they learn, but discover it through participation,.
• Curriculums are arranged in sequence to fit into the different milestones of development recognized by the culture.
• Development is partly determined by social systems/ecology in which the child learns.
• Development represents transformation in the individual, brought about by participation in cultural activities
• Child development is the process of gradual and systematic social integration.
• As children are initiated/engage in cultural life they gradually individuate themselves into particular levels of personhood, identity and being.
• An African worldview states that humans need other humans/social responsibility to individuate themselves and attain personhood.
• Premised not on independent or autonomous frames but on interdependent or relational ones.
• Social ontogenetic does not exclude nature, assuming that biology supports social ontogenesis.
• Social ontogenesis addresses how children are co-participants in social/cultural life throughout development.
• Sociogenesis: Individual development that is perceived and explained as a function of social factors, not biological ones.
• Development: Acquisition of physical/cognitive/social/emotional competencies required to engage fully in family/society (Nsamenang, 2005).
• Individuation: The process by which a human being comes to a sense of self and personal identity.
• Envisions the human life cycle in three phases of selfhood (Nsamenang, 1992) each with a developmental agenda,
  • West African ontogeny recognizes the three basic dimensions of personhood:
  • Spiritual self-hood: Beginning at conception/an ancestral spirit and ending with naming ceremony
  • Social self-hood: The experiential phase from naming to death in seven stages - newborn, social priming, apprenticing, entree, social internment, adulthood, and old age/death.
  • Ancestral self-hood: That follows biological death.
• Stage 1: Period of the Newborn (Neonate)
  • Identified by happiness for safe arrival and projections for the future.
  • Developmental tasks include the naming ceremony; names are determined on the basis of historical/circumstantial factors
  • Expected outcomes project the kind of socialized being the neonate should become.
• Stage 2: Social priming (infancy)
  • Core features consist of infancy pre-social period.
  • Developmental tasks consist of social priming such as smiling, crying, teething and sitting up, and the baby being cuddled/teased to smile along with adults.
  • Caregivers offer infants food/playthings, luring them both verbally/nonverbally for the "gifts."
  • Preliminary step toward the "sharing and exchange norms" that bond siblings/the system together.
• Stage 3: Social apprenticing (childhood)
  • Core features include a social apprentice/novice.
  • Developmental tasks involve initiation into social roles, recognizing/rehearsing that pertain to the household, network, and public.
  • Outcome is delegation of responsibility for care/socialization of children to adolescents - priming the emergence of responsibility.
• Stage 4: Social entrée (puberty)
  • Core Features consist of social entrée
  • Developmental Task consist of the appearance of sex characteristics, attending initiation ceremonies.
• Stage 5: Social internment (Adolescence)
  • Core features are probation and socialization/internship
  • Social induction via preparation/training for adulthood

• Stage 6: Adulthood (Adulthood)
• Core features consist of adulthood
• Marriage with parental responsibility increases seniority upon birth of each child.
• Grand parenting in old age is and epitome of expertise, and offspring living with the blood in them.

• Cognitive development represents the unfolding of abilities to generate the knowledge/skills to engage with the world. -Markers of intelligence: the ability to capture shared routines and participatory learning rather than completing school-based instruments -Parents/caregivers allocate neighborhood chores to instil responsibility, (Ogunaike & Houser, 2002).
• Adults in Zambia keep a mental tally of errands performed adequately as an index of the child is.
• Attributes are used as an index of which child to choose to run on an errant.
• Episodes of accurate enactment feed into the child's responsible intelligence.
• Parents determine intelligent through indicators such as the ability to give/receive support for others, (Weisner, 1987).
• Social ontogenesis focuses on a collective approach to human development.
• Piaget's theory of knowledge is based on the role of learning through interaction, explaining how children develop as they generate/acquire knowledge that shapes thoughts in their interaction with the environment.
• Learner brings to the learning the culture that affect what they think about learning.
• The impact the instructor has comes from teaching about a student's culture to improve their impact.
• The universal needs of children are highlighted by the need to belong via development.
• So there is the need in African early childhood care to capitalize/practice on the benefits of social development by children being able to talk with other children and get to know each other more rather than staying by themselves.

Moral Development

• Concerns the rules and conventions about what people should do in their interactions with other people.
• Dimensions that examine ethical concerns are:
  • How a child reasons the rules of ethical conduct?
  • How a child behaves in moral circumstances?
  • How a child feels about moral matters
• Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-1987)
  • Born in New York in 1927, became a sailor helping smuggle Jews past the British blockade into Palestine.
  • Studied moral development at the University of Chicago.
  • Developed a theory of moral development based on the ideas of Jean Piaget, John Dewey, and James Mark Baldwin.
• Developed a theory of moral development that unfolds in distinct stages.
• Based on research using interviews in a 20 year study focused on children encountering a series of dilemmas.
  • A popular scenario considered involved a European woman near death from cancer.
  • Heinz, her husband, went to a druggist to buy a drug to save his's wife life, but the druggist demanded $2,000.
  • After Heinz could only raise $1,000, but druggist refused to sell or have any money taken off. Questions about how moral dilemmas affects life span are:
• Should Heinz have stolen the drug?
• Was stealing right or wrong?
• Was it the husband’s duty to steal the drug?
• Would a good husband steal? -Did the druggist have the right to charge that much?
• From 100 children sampled, identified 6 stages of moral development, replicated and finding them in diff cultures. Three level's of moral development exist and it's' levels are characterized by 2 stages

• Primitive development, exhibited by children and some adults.
• egocentric, lacking a sense of wrong from right.
• Stage I - Punishment
• Stage II - instrumental Purpose

• Main concern at this stage is to avoid punishment, not concerning how it would impact right from wrong .
• Children do anything that will bring what ever they want and it does NOT matter in what way they did ethical and illegal
• A child here may support for Heinz to steal for blame if he doesn't
• Children's works hard for the system they receive for there "rewards."
• kohlberg calls this the marketplace orientation for it is the golden rule as the the help. someone should help.

• CONVENTIONAL(level 2) the level of ethical conduct.
• At this stage, a child internalizes the norms and expectations of the parents and laws of the society.
• It is their belief that adhesion to make them ethical.
• 3 :Good stage boy, but is also good for girls.
• Children get adopt to the of social expectations of others who are the family and friends.
• Children wanting to be thought of by such in who they have.
• These kids and people are always so sensitive to of what there parents say.
• A child who follows this in stage is they man to steal because they do not wants his is wife to die and have the family member to blame him and get mad.
• Children tend to want more and of social approval who tend to get in other way and do what others thing will be alright.

Stages 4 - this in involves law and over the others The in-law is the guy who does not care about any sort of people and does not want to be cared about. The person of law is the person who is like and in with the rules. EX: person never lies and is always against them.

LEVEL THREE - CONVENTIONAL The few to who progress to this level do not on laws as final to of moral that may and it. People recognize moral courses and explore their decision on personal moral codes.

• People think law must always be in for society.
• They can change as always if the society needs them to or as values changes.
• They only care about those in laws or for society as whole.
• That person doesn't mind and be will to what law that be against it.
• Stage 6: selected the others what and one for the one .
• Person makes always a good choice. In the even in it's a law that they not be doing it but they feel is the that they go with it even in if it had risks.
• The person selects a set of ethical principles to usually get his or her self accepted for those principles .
• Conscience is when a person will go with his conscience and even through the the decision.
• They never personal personal or risk.