According to developmental theory, learning occurs when individuals interact with their environments (which include people and how they behave, objects and phenomena encountered in the world) and then reflect on that interaction. The learner actively constructs understanding from processing her/his experience, making meaning of every new opportunity or bit of information.
Context is often understood to mean setting, a relatively stable feature within which behavior occurs. But contexts do change, and the meaning of change for behavior and development is, in itself, an important area for theory and research. In this chapter, I focus on changes in the family context, considering how transitional periods have been conceptualized and studied and how they might be explored further.
There is the premise that if you are interested in development and context -- or development in context you must deal with the family as an organized system, keeping track of its natural membership, its structure, its subdivisions and the complexity of its patterns. Families evolve and develop over time, and they reflect the things that happen to their members. In that sense, they are subject and object, core and context. It is more difficult to study families than individuals, but when the context changes, the implications are not contained solely within a given person. Inevitably, then, there must be an expansion of theory, concepts, and research paraphernalia in order to deal with the system, its subdivisions, and its several members.
A change in context is always a crisis. It creates a challenge to the family's customary patterns, and generates thereby a state of disequilibrium and a transitional period. The third premise is that we must necessarily use a developmental framework for considering what happens when the context changes and the family is in transition. Unless we know where a family is in.......
