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Tuesday, September 23, 2014 at 12:00pm
Biotechnology Building, G10
Central Campus
"Making Human Beings Human:” Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Vision for Understanding and Enhancing Positive Human Development
Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological theory provides a model for linking theory and research in the service of enhancing human development and promoting social justice. The key feature of this theory involves the Process-Person-Context-Time (PPCT) model. The model is an instance of action theory, in that process pertains to actions involving developmental regulations marked by bidirectional, individual-context relations (represented as individual/context relations); as such, the model accounts for both individual and contextual outcomes across human ontogeny. In the model, individual ontogenetic characteristics and temporality represent person and time; and the complexity of engagement by the person with the multi-level and nested ecology of human development, which includes historical temporality, represents context and time. Bronfenbrenner’s theory is an exemplar of the relational developmental systems metamodel that is a focus of much of contemporary developmental science and, as such, his theory provides a key frame for conceptions of development that seek to describe, explain, and optimize humans’ lives. The Positive Youth Development (PYD) perspective is a sample case of this contribution of Bronfenbrenner’s theory. Accordingly, I describe the PYD perspective, and review data from the 4-H Study of PYD to illustrate how ideas associated with the PPCT model enhance understanding, and the promotion, of thriving among adolescents. Such use of Bronfenbrenner’s theory has important implications for future research and for policies and program seeking to optimize the quality of the lives of diverse individuals, that is, to make human beings human.
Richard M. Lerner is the Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science and the Director of the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development at Tufts University. He went from kindergarten through Ph.D within the New York City public schools, completing his doctorate at the City University of New York in 1971 in developmental psychology. Lerner has more than 500 scholarly publications, including 70 authored or edited books. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Research on Adolescence and of Applied Developmental Science, which he continues to edit. He was a 1980-81 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science.
Lunch will be served immediately following the lecture.
Cornell Human Ecology, Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research
Carrie Chalmers
607-254-4336
Richard M. Lerner
Tufts University
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