Issue 1.2. Psychological Development: Conceptual and methodological framework.

In this lesson we find, first of all, the controversy about the endogenous and the exogenous perspectives in the explanation of human development. The endogenous perspective is the one that says that the elements that promote the development comes from inside the human body, this perspective is used in the Psychodynamic approach and the Cognitivist approach, as the first one believes that the development comes from inside the human body and the second one says that the development has some innate stages, no matter the relation with the environment. On the other hand, the exogenous perspective is the one that believe that the development comes from outside factors, such as the behavior in the Behaviorist approach and from the interaction with others and the education in the Contextual approach.

So by that we can conclude that the development occurs through changes during the participation in socio-cultural interactivity systems of their communities, which at the same time change by the action of the individuals. Which basically means that the development is affected by some contextual factors, such as the society in which we live during this process, but that at the same time, is the development that the people had experimented, the one that makes that one community acts the way it do. In other words, the context affect the life-style of the people that lives in there, but they also affect the way the context is. Consequently, the development is a process of appropriation, done by the individual, of the instruments of symbolic mediation of their culture in contexts of interactivity, and by that we mean that the children will get the language, symbols and cultural tools from the place he or she develop by interaction with others and in order to take place on the community. The child will learn from what adults do or say, so their development will be similar to the one from their ancestors.

And by that we can enumerate a certain numbers of ideas that we will develop now:

- The first idea is the one that says that in the development of the child, all function appears first at the social level and then at the individual level. By that we mean that first of all the child is an unconscious being, and at a certain moment he or she founds somebody that is using some tool or knowledge that they don’t have yet. In that moment the change from the unconscious to the conscious and they start learning and developing knowledge from that tool and how to use it. A good example is the language, kids learn to speak by interaction with people that already know how to speak, they get aware of that tool and they want to know how to use it. Once the motivation appears and the tool is part of the child, he or she can start regulating and using it.

- The second idea is about the transposition of the inter-psychological plane to the intra-psychological, one occurs in the educative interactions, participating in culturally organized activities. This means that every child goes through an educative process that allows him or her to become more autonomous, there is not maturation process but the educative one.

- The third idea is the one that says that when another participant in the activity provide instructions that are appropriately supplied, attracts the attention of series of functions that are in a State of maturation in the zone of immediate development. This last ideas mean that exists a process in which a child, who don’t know how to do something but biologically is ready to learn it (all the functions he or she need to develop that knowledge are already developed), may need an adult’s help (parents or teacher) in order to achieve that function successfully the first time, but once that experience has passed, the child will be able to do it by his o her own.

This last concept is what we call the Proximal Development Zone, and is the concept that says that what today is done with help in a future will be done autonomously. Moreover, learning is a universal and necessary aspect of development and the help should follow some characteristics. This means that, as we said before, if we don’t know how to do something, but an adult with the certain tools and the correct knowledge help us, we may learn it and after a while we will be able to do it alone.

The scaffolding structure of this kind of help means that there are some requisites that are needed to follow, such as make the help we give adjustable, temporal and audible and visible. Those characteristics can be understood on the way that we may need to adjust our help in order to cover all the needs of our student, temporal as soon as we cannot spend all the time with the same characteristics if we see they don’t work, and we don’t have to put pressure into a concrete child if we see they don’t develop that knowledge in the moment that we want, finally our help might be audible and visible as soon as we cannot make a child learn from theoretical discussion or memorizing processes, but by experiences, which is the only way in which we can achieve a correct knowledge.

Therefore development is a socio-genetic mediation which depends on the learning processes that happen in the double and complementary levels of educative interaction and the participation in situations culturally and socially organized, meaning by that that not all the knowledge comes from the school or the context, but needs to be a union of this both medias in order to achieve the goal of a great education. So we need the student to get connected with the environment in which he or she lives, to accomplish development by interactivity systems, by that we want to evolve him or her with activities that connects individuals to the world, to other people and to themselves.

So the systems of interactivity are socially and culturally organized activities that consist on carrying on actions, which are systems of coordination to service purposes, and at the same time, represent intermediate steps to meet the motive. So the main steps of those systems are: Activity – Motive; Action – Objective and Operation – Conditions. In the activity we did in class we were told to invent an activity that accomplish those actions, we took an activity based n Saint George Day, in that the kids spent some hours in the week creating paper roses and book markers based on their compulsory readings done in class, all the money saved was destined to an NGO that the students had previously chosen. The motive in this activity could be to do plastic activities to sell them, the objective to raise money for the NGO and the condition to motivate the children in reading their compulsory class reading by giving them an special use.