Reconstructing Agency in Developmental and Educational Psychology

Inclusive Systems as Concentric Space

Paul Downes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351588034
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book reconstructs the foundations of developmental and educational psychology and fills an important gap in the field by arguing for a specific spatial turn so that human growth, experience and development focus not only on time but space. This regards space not simply as place. Highlighting concrete cross-cultural relational spaces of concentric and diametric spatial systems, the book argues that transition between these systems offers a new paradigm for understanding agency and inclusion in developmental and educational psychology, and for relating experiential dimensions to causal explanations.

The chapters examine key themes for developing concentric spatial systemic responses in education, including school climate, bullying, violence, early school leaving prevention and students' voices. Moreover, the book proposes an innovative framework of agency as movement between concentric and diametric spatial relations for a reconstruction of resilience. This model addresses the vital neglected issue of resistance to sheer cultural conditioning and goes beyond the foundational ideas of Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory, as well as Vygotsky, Skinner, Freud, Massey, Bruner, Gestalt and postmodern psychology to reinterpret them in dynamic spatial systemic terms.

Written by an internationally renowned expert, this book is a valuable resource for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the areas of educational and developmental psychology, as well as related areas such as personality theory, health psychology, social work, teacher education and anthropology.

Part I
Setting the scene: key features of a concentric spatial turn for developmental and educational psychology

Agency and inclusive systems

1 Introduction

A specific spatial turn for developmental and educational psychology beyond diametric spatial opposition

The domination of time over space in developmental psychology has become a truism, built into the very nomenclature of development presupposing growth in time. Yet, a different conception of development, not reliant on organismic assumptions of growth, is possible. This is one that examines development in terms of spatial movements, whether at the level of the individual or wider systems.

Inscribing the centrality of space for developmental and educational psychology is not to pit space against time, within some kind of diametric opposition. It requires, firstly, uncovering how foundational concepts of developmental and educational psychology are thoroughly imbued with spatial assumptions. To reveal how specific spatial structural assumptions silently pervade psychology is a key task of this book. In doing so, the relevance of these spaces to agency and to inclusive systems needs to emerge.

The familiarity of space needs to be undone. To do so requires a specific spatial turn for developmental and educational psychology. Space is a concept that is far from being neglected in these disciplines, at least at the level of individual cognition. Naive notions of space, as fixed and noninteractive, have been questioned since Piaget; this highlights that the everyday, taken-for-granted Euclidean space is a construct, and not the only possible one.

There is evidently a strong concern with spatial issues at the level of the individual, especially in relation to cognition in psychology. This ranges across various domains of perception, memory, learning and attention. For example, it includes two-dimensional spatial skills in mathematics achievement (Carr et al., 2018), young children’s perceptual skills in inserting objects into an aperture (Shutts, Örnkloo, von Hofsten, Keen, & Spelke, 2009) and the role of spatial prototypes in memory retrieval, such as regarding bias towards region centres (Plumert & Hund, 2001). It extends to pre-schoolers’ spatial thinking during spatial play (Borriello & Liben, 2018) and understanding the relation between language and spatial cognition in young children (Miller, Patterson, & Simmering, 2016). Nevertheless, the power of space as a mode of relation, both as a medium of experience and to frame understanding, as well as to foster system change, has, at best, been only partially acknowledged in psychology. Spatial concepts at system levels require much further scrutiny, including interrogation of relational spaces, as spaces of mediation. There is a need to expand the terrain of relevance for space in developmental and educational psychology, in both its scope and its range of conceptualisations.

Science has long recognised that there is no such thing as naive direct observation, even in physics (Duhem, 1905), and that all scientific observation is theory-laden (Popper, 1959; Lakatos, 1970; Feyerabend, 1988) and steeped in paradigmatic assumptions (Kuhn, 1970). In psychology, Freud (1915) already acknowledged that observations are theory-laden and further interpreted theoretically (S.E. 14, 117), though Watson (1914) sought a purely objective, theory-less science for behaviourism. Selection of attention to observational regularities in psychology depends on what questions are being asked and the level of description of the factual observed regularities (Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988; von Eckardt, 1993; Teo, 2008). While recognising the need to distinguish different levels of a research programme, including theory, data, methodology and the phenomenon as object of study in developmental science (Winegar, 1997), this separation of levels risks overlooking the key point that theory-ladenness is built into the data of empirical observation, so such levels may not be so neatly distinguished, even for subsequent integration across levels. A further step being taken here is to examine how theory-ladenness in observations in psychology is not simply random or haphazard but is structurally arranged in spatial terms and imbued with hidden spatial assumptions. Moreover, these spatial assumptions are not necessarily fixed and immovable but may be malleable.

A neglected, yet recurring, theory-laden feature of space in developmental and educational psychology is that of diametric spatial opposition. Diametric spatial oppositions divide into mirror image inverted symmetries (Lévi-Strauss, 1963, 1973), such as above/below, us/them, good/bad. This pervasive structure of diametric space underpins key features in the psychological thought of, as illustrative examples, Erikson, Sullivan, Klein, Skinner, Freud and Maslow. Erikson’s life stage theory of development pits each stage as being a choice between diametrically opposed tasks, such as trust versus mistrust in early infancy, identity versus role confusion in adolescence, intimacy versus isolation in adulthood. Erikson (1972) extends this diametric oppositional spatial relation to that between generations as part of an intergenerational identity struggle:

much horrible hate and much resultant paralysis is … transferred to the inter-generational struggle where it appears to be hopelessly raw and untrained in comparison to the age-old stance and stamina of uniformed and disciplined military behavior. This probably is the cause of occasional enactments of totally ‘senseless’ cruelty … for the sake of a vindictive illusion of extinguishing the established.

(p. 700)

A similar predilection for diametric oppositional space is a hallmark of Sullivan’s (1953) conception of early development, where the “me” differentiates into a good-me, bad-me and not-me. The self develops here through diametric spatial oppositions of good/bad, me/not-me or other than me. Klein (1946) proposes a related view of diametric spatial opposition as a dividing process in the early years; occurring as early as in the first three or four months, ‘the mechanism of splitting … [is] one of the earliest ego-mechanisms and defences against anxiety’ (Klein, 1946/1997, p. 6). Though located in a different tradition of psychology from Erikson, Sullivan and Klein, radical behaviourism is similarly bound by a diametric spatial intuition through its guiding framework of positive and negative reinforcements (Skinner, 1974). Even the polar opposite to the organismic growth metaphor relied upon in many developmental theories, namely, behaviourist environmental conditioning through reinforcement of Skinner (1974), is tethered to the same basic underlying spatial assumption of diametric oppositional space.

Freud’s (1912–13) discussion of obsessional neurosis is similarly framed through a diametric spatial mirror image inverted symmetry opposition of love versus hate, as a feature of ambivalence, where he observes a denial of ‘hostile feelings against the dead loved one’ and a ‘contrast between conscious pain and unconscious satisfaction over the death that has occurred’ (p. 61). A mirror image is not identical but rather a left–right inversion. Such a mirror image reversal as diametric spatial opposition is central to Freud’s accounts of obsessional neurosis. In Wolf Man, Freud (1926) strongly emphasises the interplay of two diametrically opposing states:

In following up a single instinctual repression we have thus had to recognize a convergence of two such processes. The two instinctual impulses have been overtaken by repression – sadistic aggressiveness towards the father and a tender passive attitude to him – form a pair of opposites.

(p. 106)

The passive orientation is a mirror image of the active one involved in aggression, while the tender attitude towards the father is a mirror image of the sadistic attitude. He extends this diametric spatial structure, in effect, making it a general feature of obsessional neurosis:

The symptoms belonging to this [obsessional] neurosis fall, in general, into two groups, each having an opposite trend. They are either prohibitions, precautions and expiations – that is, negative in character – or they are, on the contrary, substitutive satisfactions which often appear in symbolic disguise.

(Freud, 1926, p. 112)

Diametric space is arguably a hallmark of much of Freud’s thought (Downes, 2003a, 2012, 2013). Moreover, in a US sample of ninth and twelfth grade and undergraduate students, Sincoff (1992) has observed that subjects who score highest on repression scales are statistically more likely to adopt judgements dividing reality into diametric oppositions between good and bad across all these age levels. In effect, they project a diametric spatial structure onto the world, constructing mirror image inversions. This diametric spatial understanding needs to be understood as not simply mere metaphor or analogy but as a prior spatial system.

In humanistic psychology, often setting itself up as an antidote to psychoanalysis and behaviourism, Maslow’s well-known hierarchy of needs is again locked into a diametric spatial split between mind and body, in Cartesian fashion, between basic bodily needs and psychological growth needs. This dominion of diametric space in developmental and educational psychology requires much more interrogation. What is the epistemological status of this diametric space? Is this diametric oppositional space fixed or can it be made malleable? Is it part of a wider spatial system and, if so, at what system levels does it operate? This diametric spatial structure as a theory-laden feature of psychological phenomena is not simply mere error or a random feature, but is rather an organising structure as the gateway to a more fundamental questioning in psychology.

Diametric spatial opposition and mirror image inverted symmetry additionally underpin the us/them structure that frames understanding of the supposed norm versus the other in developmental and educational psychology and far beyond. The ‘other’ becomes a reification, a static category rendered passive and inert in this role as mere object of the gaze from the vantage point of the supposed norm. An intersubjective process of othering is prominently challenged by de Beauvoir (1949/1989) in The Second Sex to critique a construct of ‘woman’ in terms of a male reference point as the norm. Similarly, Said’s (1978) Orientalism offers an excoriating assault on Western projections onto Eastern cultures which construct the East as the other; the other is dehumanised of lived experience, as a static, lifeless exhibit in ‘an imaginary museum without walls’ (p. 166). Like the construct of ‘woman’ as the second sex, Eastern cultures become defined abstractly in unitary terms of contrasts with a Western culture as norm.

De Beauvoir and Said’s critiques of ‘othering’ invite challenge to this diametric oppositional space of exclusion as a framing condition for construction of ‘the other’. This exclusion renders concrete groups and individuals inert and lifeless, as an epistemological violence leading also to ethnocentrism, as abstract categories of the other (Teo, 2008). There is a need to challenge the hard borders between ingroups and outgroups constituted by diametric spatial oppositions for ‘the possibility of a space which does not replicate the exclusions of the Same and the Other’ (Rose, 1993, p. 137). For an inclusion of the ‘other’ that dismantles its status of otherness, as distinct from exclusion of the other through the diametric space of us/them, a different space is needed. How can the claims of diametric space, often universal and sweeping, as a glue holding central theories of developmental and educational psychology together, become reconstructed from being a taken-for-granted spatial intuition?

Invoking a systems questioning for diametric space as part of a wider dynamic system requires recognition of a further neglected spatial feature of ecological approaches in psychology. In comparisons between Gibson’s (1979) ecological model of direct perception and Bronfenbrenner’s (1979, 1995) wider ecological systems models, there is far from agreement as to whether these two ecological approaches are compatible with each other (Branco, 1997). Nevertheless, both proponents of the basic commonality of these ecological models (Tudge, Gray, & Hogan, 1997) and opponents (Branco, 1997) agree on one central feature of both as ecological models. This central feature is that of the assumption ‘that development occurs within the individual who is not separable from his or her environment’ (Tudge et al., 1997, p. 87); ‘the fundamental similarity, as well as the main shared contribution, of Gibson and Bronfenbrenner lies in the emphasis on the role of environmental structures associated with a holistic approach, linking together the individual and the environment’ (Branco, 1997, p. 314; my italics). In other words, ecological approaches pivotally rely upon assumptions of connection and separation, assumptions that are ineluctably spatial preconditions.

Diametric spatial opposition presupposes division and separation between the individual and environment or system; ecological systems approaches represent a direct challenge to such a diametric spatial framing precondition. The zoologist and evolutionist Ernst Haekel is usually credited with initiating the term ecology, proposing in 1873 a new science of ecology (oekologie) from the Greek word oik, for living place or home, to study organisms in their environment, which he treated as inseparable parts of a whole (Bubolz & Sontag, 1993). Moving beyond diametric spatial oppositions is key in a quest for a spatial ecological systems approach for developmental and educational psychology.

A specific concentric spatial turn: beyond empty space and chronocentrism to an acceleration of focus on concentric space developing early Bronfenbrenner’s systems theory

Developmental and educational psychology are remarkably insulated from currents of understanding in other related disciplines, such as geography, anthropology, sociology of education and law, specifically regarding space. Geographical concerns with a spatial turn involve relational space (Jones, 2009) to ‘liberate’ space from traditional Western associations of stasis and closure (Massey, 2005, p. 19). Longstanding concerns in structural anthropology observe cross-cultural examples of concentric and diametric spatial structures (Lévi-Strauss, 1962, 1963, 1973). Space is a broader concept than simply place, as a holistic background relation that is more than the sum of its physical and symbolic place elements. Educational concerns examine spatial processes of exclusion (Ferrare & Apple, 2010) and legal frameworks have interrogated space as an interactive medium building on post-Newtonian physics (Tribe, 1990). All of these concerns have been left largely hors de vue in developmental and educational psychology; interdisciplinary spatial understandings have been largely excised from the domain of relevance of psychology. This is a concern even if one does not subscribe to a fully-fledged unity of science framework.¹ This largescale lack of an interdisciplinary spatial questioning has occurred despite the widespread reception of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems framework, which relies on a further feature of a spatial systemic model.

Bronfenbrenner...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Setting the scene: key features of a concentric spatial turn for developmental and educational psychology: agency and inclusive systems
• Part II Spatial transitions for inclusive systems: reconstructing resilience, early school leaving and bullying
• Part III Concentric and diametric spaces as deep structures of experience