Where the Work Began
Our work is grounded in a broad body of developmental science concerned with how people grow, change, participate, and make meaning across time and experience.
Rather than relying on a single theory of development, we explored scholarship across ecological and developmental systems, identity development, autonomy and self-determination, agency and intentional action, positive youth development, purpose and contribution, sociocultural development, experiential learning, reflection, and meaning-making.
These traditions ask different questions and use different theoretical lenses. Together, they deepen our understanding of development as a dynamic process involving the person, their experiences, their relationships, and the environments in which they participate.
Development in Context
Development does not occur in isolation.
Ecological and developmental systems scholarship has demonstrated the importance of understanding development through the ongoing relationship between individuals and their environments.
Young people develop within families, schools, communities, cultures, institutions, and broader social conditions. These environments are not simply backgrounds to development. They shape the experiences, relationships, expectations, resources, and opportunities young people encounter.
At the same time, young people actively participate in those environments.
Development is therefore shaped through an ongoing relationship between the person and the contexts in which they live and participate.
The Developing Person
Development also involves an evolving relationship with oneself.
Scholarship on identity, autonomy, self-determination, agency, and intentional action has examined how young people develop understandings of who they are, build capacities, make choices, pursue goals, and increasingly participate in shaping their own lives.
This scholarship complicates any view of young people as passive recipients of experience.
They encounter experiences with existing understandings, histories, capacities, interests, and perspectives. They interpret what occurs, respond to it, make choices within it, and influence what happens next.
Young people are participants in their own development.
Development in Relationship With Others
Human development is also fundamentally relational.
Relationships with adults, peers, families, communities, and institutions create important conditions for development. Through participation with others, young people encounter different perspectives, expectations, responsibilities, forms of support, and opportunities to belong and contribute.
Scholarship across positive youth development, sociocultural development, purpose, and contribution has helped expand developmental attention beyond individual achievement toward young people's relationships with other people and the larger social world.
Development therefore involves not only what a young person comes to know or becomes capable of doing, but also how those developing capacities are expressed through participation and relationship with others.
Experience and Meaning
Experiences matter developmentally, but experience alone does not determine development.
Young people interpret what happens to them and around them. They connect new experiences with what they already know, reconsider prior understandings, construct meaning, and carry those interpretations into subsequent experiences.
Scholarship concerned with experience, reflection, and meaning-making draws attention to this interpretive dimension of development.
The same experience can therefore hold different meanings for different people.
What occurs matters. So does what a person makes of what occurs.
A Developmental View
Across these bodies of scholarship, development emerges as more than the acquisition of knowledge, skills, or predetermined outcomes.
It is dynamic, contextual, relational, participatory, and interpretive.
People develop through ongoing relationships with themselves, with others, and with the environments and experiences through which their lives unfold.
No single experience determines that development.
No single context explains it.
And no single theory captures its full complexity.
Developmental science gives us a way to understand young people not simply in terms of what they know or can demonstrate, but as developing persons continually interacting with and making meaning from the world around them.
Selected Developmental Foundations
Our work draws from scholarship across several developmental traditions, including:
Ecological and Bioecological Development
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Development within interconnected systems of relationships, environments, processes, and time.
Developmental Systems and Relational Developmental Systems
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Development as a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between individuals and their changing contexts.
Identity Development
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The exploration and development of understandings of self in relation to experience and social context.
Self-Determination and Autonomy
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Autonomy, competence, relatedness, and the conditions associated with self-directed action.
Agency and Intentional Action
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The developing capacity to make choices, act intentionally, pursue goals, and participate in shaping experience.
Positive Youth Development
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Young people's strengths, capacities, relationships, participation, and development within supportive contexts.
Purpose and Contribution
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The development of purpose and engagement with goals and activities that extend beyond the self.
Sociocultural Development
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Development and learning through social interaction, cultural participation, and shared activity.
Experience, Reflection, and Meaning-Making
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The role of experience, interpretation, reflection, and meaning-making in learning and development.