- Hello, and welcome to
the last class
in HDFS 60.
And I'd just like to introduce this last lecture
with a few comments before you watch it.
We've studied develecology
and we've talked about it in many different ways
and applied it to many different situations,
particularly to families and their development,
the transitions that families go through.
I would just like to remind you
that Bronfenbrenner's scheme, his framework,
is very useful for understanding
all kinds of human situations.
And you can use it to ask questions
of people that are interested in.
It makes a nice framework to,
you don't have to use the terms,
but asking people about their lives
in a way that gives you information about their ecosystem
and their development in that ecosystem
is always helpful, I think.
You can apply it to understanding your family
and many of you have done that through this semester.
Many of you will work with families in your professions.
You'll be in the helping professions.
You'll be working with families or members of families
and I think you'll find the framework useful
in whatever work you do.
And I would welcome you getting in touch with me later
and telling me uses that you have found
for develecology, how you found it to be useful.
It is also an interesting framework for using
to think about people that you're friends with,
people you're dating.
The kind of information you will get from people
if you ask the right questions will help you
understand how they view their ecosystems
and you'll be able to spot similarities
to your own views and differences.
Differences that might be important
in understanding the way you get along with people
or the difficulties that you have with people
when you don't get along.
It will be helpful for you to remember
that people are always developing and they're adapting
to the ecosystems they're in, as they do that adapting.
So the developmental viewpoint
that you carry with you will be important
in all of your work
because if you don't have that,
you may not realize that people will develop
and you can help them develop.
And often asking questions suggests
to people more about how they might develop
than telling them what you think they ought to do.
So people need to think about their situation
and you can help them do that
by the questions you ask.
The framework is also very useful
if you're working in a program with people,
if your program is supposed to be helping people.
The framework can help you analyze the features,
the activities, the roles that are available in the program,
the situation that you're working in,
and help you design ways to change it
so that it will help people more.
Often having a develecological perspective
which tells you what sorts of things,
what sorts of experiences help develop,
help people develop,
can help you think about the changes that you could make
in a program to make it help people more than it does.
I hope you find it useful.
I also hope you will find it useful
in thinking about your own development
and the ecosystems that you have been part of.
The video for today is one that I normally show
in the next course, the Social Context of Development,
but I wanted you to have a chance
to see how I use it autobiographically
to think about how I got to be who I am.
And, in this case, what it was like in my ecosystem,
what features of my ecosystem as I was growing up,
to be a white guy in a small white community
in the Midwest,
in a society
that has pervasive, systemic, and personal racism.
If we are going to tackle racism in our society,
we all will benefit by looking at our own backgrounds
and seeing what in our experience supported the development
of a racist view of other people
and what features in the ecosystem might have prevented that
or hindered that development for some of us.
In my case, in the lecture you're about to see,
I look at my childhood and adolescence
and at the experiences
that have helped me realize the racism that I grew up with,
which is part of the ecosystem that I grew up in.
The experiences that helped me develop, slowly,
a different view.
And now the experiences that have helped me commit
to being an anti-racist, not just a non-racist,
but to actually work to reduce racism in my own behavior,
in my own settings,
and in the way I help other people do that.
So I hope you find this interesting.
I will welcome your comments on it,
your questions about it, and stay safe.