Routledge Reconstructing Agency in Developmental and Educational Psychology: Inclusive Systems as Concentric Space (Routledge Research in Educational Psychology)

This book reconstructs the foundations of developmental and educational psychology and fills an important gap in the field by arguing for a specific spatial turn so that human growth, experience and development focus not only on time but space. This regards space not simply as place. Highlighting concrete cross-cultural relational spaces of concentric and diametric spatial systems, the book argues that transition between these systems offers a new paradigm for understanding agency and inclusion in developmental and educational psychology, and for relating experiential dimensions to causal explanations. The chapters examine key themes for developing concentric spatial systemic responses in education, including school climate, bullying, violence, early school leaving prevention and students’ voices. Moreover, the book proposes an innovative framework of agency as movement between concentric and diametric spatial relations for a reconstruction of resilience. This model addresses the vital neglected issue of resistance to sheer cultural conditioning and goes beyond the foundational ideas of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, as well as Vygotsky, Skinner, Freud, Massey, Bruner, Gestalt and postmodern psychology to reinterpret them in dynamic spatial systemic terms. Written by an internationally renowned expert, this book is a valuable resource for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the areas of educational and developmental psychology, as well as related areas such as personality theory, health psychology, social work, teacher education and anthropology. Review "...Downes successfully brings together a remarkably broad range of perspectives relevant to human agency as it is encountered in an array of sub-disciplines in psychology and education. This work makes contact with a truly impressive range of perspectives from cognitive and structural approaches of various sorts to contemporary phenomenological schools of thought. Few texts manage such a range of insights.. Throughout the volume the author weaves the key aspects of agency in and out of the narrative in insightful ways and offers new analytical insights, makes innovative connections to related bodies of scholarly work, and develops new intellectual models, successfully offering, in the end, a sort of "protolanguage," to use the author’s own term for dealing with human agency across a broad intellectual landscape ... The signal contribution of the work is the introduction, into the scholarly conversation on agency and its related topics, of the dimension of spatiality in a sophisticated form. This aspect of the book, I predict, will be taken up again and again for quite some time, and be recognized as a substantial lasting contribution." Nominated for the American Psychological Association (APA) William James Book Award 2021 by Professor Richard Williams, Brigham Young University, USA "On the background of the decline of theory in psychology, Paul Downes provides a highly original and philosophically informed interpretation of developmental and educational thought that opens new possibilities for research and practice. The book is a unique piece of empirically and experientially grounded theorizing that does justice to the complexity of what it means to become human. His call for a spatial turn and his focus on agency identify lacunae in the dominant developmental and educational frameworks, while opening new horizons on significant topics such as resilience, bullying, or early school leaving. Downes provides an intellectual tour de force through the most important theories in developmental psychology, making the case for spatial systems being central to human experience." Thomas Teo, Professor of Psychology, York University, Canada "This is an erudite work of reconstructing and reconceptualizing foundational assumptions, standing on the shoulders of tradition and referring to many years of empirical research but, at the