Valores intrínsecos que aportan las artes a la educación

The term ecology, first defined by German biologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866 (Freese, 2001, p. 2), involves the study of the interrelationships between living organisms and their environment. Since that time, these biological concepts have been applied to many different disciplines outside the natural history domain where they originated. Human ecology generally addresses “relationships of humans to their environments” (ibid., p. 1). It assumes that human behaviour can be understood only in situ and that individuals and their environmental context are “inextricably linked” (Steinberg, 2001, p. 2). Freese explained that “the overriding theme construes human ecology as knowledge of the complex interactive connections that integrate human activities with environmental contexts” (2001, p. 5). The ecological perspective

provides a conceptual framework within which to investigate complex interactions between people and their environments:

Proximal settings are seen as connected to each other, contained within broader institutional and community contexts that shape their structure and influence what takes place within them. In addition, proximal settings and the broader environments that contain them are seen as located within particular historical, social, economic, political, geographical, and cultural contexts that influence the nature, structure, function, organization, and influence of all levels of the environment. (Steinberg, 2001, p. 1)

The ecological perspective can be seen as not one idea but an eclectic assortment of ideas which “unite an array of otherwise unconnected scholarly traditions” (Freese, 2001, p. 1).

Steinberg explained that the term “context” is used loosely. It can refer to anything from “an interpersonal relationship” (for example a student’s emotional expression in the context of the student-teacher relationship), “a social group” (interpersonal conflict within the context of a peer group); “a physical setting (e.g., sex role behaviour in the context of the classroom), a locale (e.g., crime in the context of neighbourhood poverty); or a broad expression of time or culture” (e.g., the role of education in the context of twenty-first century New Zealand) (2001, p. 1, emphasis in original). Support for the adoption of this approach to education problems is provided by the work of Barker and Gump (1964, cited in Steinberg, 2001, p. 2) who found that students' behaviour in small schools was markedly different from students’ behaviour in large schools.

In the late 1970s psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner drew widespread attention to the role of context in human development and behaviour. This work led to the development of the ecological perspective on human development which is a “theory of environmental interconnections and their impact on the forces directly affecting psychological growth” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 8). Researchers had previously tended to study their subjects in laboratory environments, to the extent that Bronfenbrenner claimed developmental psychology had become “the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time” (emphasis in original, Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 19). Advocating for the study of children in their natural environments, “in their homes, schools, and playgrounds,”

Lerner (2005, p. x) explained, that the

experimental research tradition …places considerable theoretical and practical limitations on what can be learned about the forces that affect human development. Laboratory settings do not reflect the actual situations in which children develop, so knowledge of how to design programs that can improve outcomes for children and families is constrained. (ibid., p. xxi)

Introducing Bronfenbrenner’s seminal work on the ecology of human development Cole also emphasized the “crucial importance of studying the environments within which we behave if we are ever to break away from particularistic descriptions and contentless processes” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. ix).

Here the emphasis is not on the traditional psychological processes of perception, motivation, thinking and learning but on their content—what is perceived, desired, feared, thought about, or acquired as knowledge, and how the nature of this psychological material changes as a function of a person’s exposure to and interaction with the environment. Development is defined as the person’s evolving conception of the ecological environment, and his [or her] relation to it, as well as the person’s growing capacity to discover, sustain, or alter its properties. (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 9)

Magnusson (1995) took this concept further in advancing a holistic, integrated approach to individual development based on the proposition that the individual functions and develops in an ongoing process of interaction with his or her environment.

At each specific moment, individual functioning is determined in a process of continuous, reciprocal interaction between mental factors, biological factors, and behaviour—on the individual side—and situational factors. (ibid., p. 27)

In the many previous dropout studies referred to in the last chapter, a myriad of contextual and individual characteristics had been identified but researchers failed to link these into a coherent framework to bring an understanding of the process of early school leaving and the meaning of dropping out to the individuals themselves. With its central focus on the individual within a dynamic and reciprocally influential setting, it appeared that, with the recent enhancements suggested, Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems model might indeed provide a satisfactory basis from which a greater understanding of dropout behaviour could be gained. This ecological conceptualisation forms the

framework for the present study on student drop out and retention. In this framework “the explanations for what we do…are to be found in interactions between characteristics of people and their environments, past and present” (Cole, in the Foreword to Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. x).

Dropping out of school involves leaving the school setting and changing roles from that of high school pupil to parent, worker, unemployed benefit recipient or tertiary student. In this framework, dropping out is conceived of as a type of “ecological transition.” Transitions are movements “through ecological space” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 26) and, as such, dropping out can be seen as “both a consequence and instigator of developmental processes” (ibid., p. 27). This raises the question of the definition of development.

Texts on human development commonly assume an understanding of their title topic, a concept which is often equated with growth and maturation. In the bioecological model–a more recent reformulation of his original ecological model–Bronfenbrenner has recognised the necessity of including more explicitly the levels of individual structure and function, both biological (which includes physical changes), psychological and behavioural, “fused dynamically with the ecological systems” (Lerner, 2005, p. xiv) to depict the “dynamic developmental relations between an active individual and his or her complex, integrated, and changing ecology” (ibid., xviii). In this theory, human

development is defined as the “phenomenon of continuity and change in the

biopsychological characteristics of human beings, both as individuals and as groups”

extending over the life course, across successive generations, and through history (emphasis in original, Bronfenbrenner, 2005e, p. xxviii). Magnusson explained that “individual development is concerned with individual functioning in terms of thoughts, feelings, actions, and reactions studied across the lifetime of the individual” (1995, p. 20). He clarified that “if a person’s distinctive pattern of characteristics remains unchanged across time, no development has occurred….Processes that go on in an unchanged manner, within existing structures, do not constitute development” (ibid.). The following section describes in detail Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, providing examples of its application to dropout behaviour.