Key Developmental Psychology schools of thought

• Ecological systems: micro, meso, macro environmental study of development

• Psychosexual: Freud; conflict between conscious and subconscious messages, one trying to suppress the other. Hence suppressed memories shaping the adult. (‘Women are crazy because of sexual repression!’)

• Moral; Kohlberg –pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional reasoning

• Psychosocial; Erikson – social belonging. Like Freud, but not sexual. Social crisis emphasis.

• Cognitive: Piaget – nature

• Zone of Proximal development: Vygotsky – we learn from hands on social experience. (Soviet context)

 

A website designed for Livo students by teacher Ms Laila Gorge - great overview of theories and some good links
http://personalandsocialidentity.wordpress.com/identity-and-socialisation/

 

Havighurst

Interested in making education for Native Americans more empowering.

Researched social inequality amongst high school students across ethnicity and class over time.

He saw each human as having three types of age-dependent developmental tasks.

Tasks that arise from:

• Physical maturation: Learning to walk, talk, control of bowel and urine, socially appropriate behaviour

• From personal values: job choice, hobbies, world view

• Pressures of society: Learning to read, learning to be responsible citizen.

 

Elkind – concerned that formal education at a young age could stunt the development of children who need to ‘play’. Built on Piaget.

Adolescents : concerned with an “imaginary audience.” This can make young people stressed and pressured. If young people could control their own projected image or “personal fable,” many adolescent stressed could be eased.

• How does social media allow adolescents to construct a “personal fable”. Do you agree identity and ‘personal fables’ are important for adolescents?

• How might school better cater to adolescents with a sense of ‘imagined audience’ and the need to construct a ‘personal fable’?

 

*I love this idea of identity being forged through personal narratives! Here's a quote from postmodernist feminist Tiqqun that argues women particularly utilise personal fables in their social interactionist construction of self - and that its not always for the best:

'Feminine friendships remain narrative friendships, where the other is necessary to see yourself again, to recompose yourself, to recognize yourself. But the need for anarrative of the self... to the madness ofnot seeing yourself in your own acts anymore, now fills the psychoanalysts' pockets. To where there's nothing left to say: experience and narrative having divorced one another, all we're left with is information, neutral, aseptic, appaling - and our passivity as recievers.'

(By 'lining the psychoanalysts' pockets) the author means helping those who make money from counselling and pathologising the 'problems' of women.)

Like Elkind's theory, this made me think of the 'narrative' I project on Instagram - as a mum, a person who loves culture, flowers, jokes... Oh dear - am I 'divorcing' myself from experience and becoming more passive...?!

 

 

 

Piaget: Important theory that modern schooling is based on – children develop in cognitive (physical brain) stages and “before these (stages) children are not capable (no matter how bright) of understanding things in certain ways”

Belongs to the school of thought called “cognitive constructivism” – which most teachers study at uni. Others in the school, like Vygotsky, think nurture plays more of a role –children are “social learners” and language aids development.

 

Table of stages:

http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/piaget.htm#ixzz3363QTs72