Lifespan development and lifelong learning. ‘Development’ is one of those familiar concepts that seeps almost unnoticed into the conversations of educators. They are self-evidently concerned with the development of people. But what is development? Are there particular stages that we pass through in our life course?
Contents · introduction · development · stages · gender, culture and political convenience · life events · conclusion · further reading and references
For adult educators, youth workers and those concerned with lifelong learning one of the great attractions of the literature examining life course development is that it may identify qualities or problems that are the distinctive property of young people and adults. If this can be done then the grounds exist for the establishment of specialisms such as youth work and adult education or learning. In the case of the latter, for example, we might look to possibilities around:
process – do adults think differently? (This is what came to the centre of Knowles’ theory of andragogy)
situations – do they find themselves in different circumstances to other age groups?
experiences – does the accumulation of experience change things. What difference does having been through a greater range of things make?
A further interest is that if there are some qualities that are uniquely youthful or adult, there may be implications for the sort of learning environments that could, and should, be fostered – and what subject matter should be attended to.
Development
How are we to define development? The first and obvious element is change – that development involves movement from one state to another. As a result an interest in development leads one to a concern for transitions. How is it that a person moves from this state to that? A second aspect is that this change is understood to have a permanent or lasting impact, or at least having some degree of ‘carry-forward‘. However, development is not change of any kind.
The feeling of satiety after a good meal clearly involves change, but no one would see that as developmental… Reference to lasting change does not provide a satisfactory solution, because some alterations that are obviously developmental may have no long term consequences; they serve their purposes at the time but they leave no lasting imprint… On the other hand some degree of carry-forward would seem to be necessary for most aspects of development. (Rutter and Rutter 1992: 63)
Third, in common usage developmental often refers to growth, to a progression through certain stages. More than that it is frequently linked to an unfolding, a movement toward a certain fixed point. In terms of human development the notion commonly used here is ‘maturity’. Here we move into contested territory. While it may be possible to get some agreement about where physical growth stops, how are we to approach personality development? What may be maturity to one person or culture, may be nothing of the sort to another. Furthermore, ‘maturity’ is something that is presumably demonstrated in action – and what may be appropriate behaviour in one setting or situation is not in another. Some writers have tried to find a way around this by turning to endpoints like adulthood, individuality, inner unity, self-actualization and so on. However, each of these notions is still borne of a particular historical moment and culture – and there are distinct problems in thinking of them as universals.
Building on these elements Rutter and Rutter (1992: 64) use the following as a working definition of development in relation to humans:
systematic, organized, intra-individual change that is clearly associated with generally expectable age-related progressions and which is carried forward in some way that has implications for a person’s pattern or level of functioning at some later time
The concern here with intra-individual change does highlight a problem in some of the literature. There has been a tendency to focus on what is going on inside the individual with a corresponding lack of appreciation of inter-personal or social forces and dynamics (see selfhood). This ties in to all those rather fruitless nature-nurture debates that were especially prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s. Arguably, today, with the development of genetic research, and more sophisticated appreciations of the self, the focus is rather more on gene-environment interaction. This involves looking for the various ways in which genetic influences may orient and open up people in different ways to environmental influences; and how environmental elements may become part of a genetic inheritance. However, looking at a definition like this we can get stuck on the notion of ‘progressions’ – there may be changes or transitions – but are they all forward movements? What are these changes?
Stages
One attractive way of handling the idea of development has been through the idea that people pass through various stages. People are seen as making systematic progression in a certain order through a series of phases. Step by step they move closer to some form of adult status. This movement can be seen as involving changes in intellectual and physical powers (for example around changes in intelligence, expertise and ability to reason); and the impact of life events and experiences. Aristotle proposed a three-stage model, Solon divided life into nine seven year stages, Confucius identified six stages, The Sayings of the Fathers (from the Talmud) contain fourteen stages, and Shakespeare proposed seven stages (Tennant and Pogson 1995: 69).
One, quite popular way of expressing this is from Levinson (see below and taken from Tennant and Pogson 1995). In this model ‘each era has its distinctive and unifying character of learning’ (op. cit.: 72). Each transition between eras requires a change in the character of one’s life (and this can take between three and six years to complete). At the same time there is a process of individuation occurring.