Psychosocial Perspectives on Individual Development
Module Leader: Dr Heather Price
Main aims:
This course encourages students to begin to describe how to take a psychosocial studies approach to development throughout the life course.
- It moves across the lifespan, ‘from the cradle to the grave’, considering birth, infancy, childhood, adolescence and youth, young and middle adulthood, different phases of old age, and death and dying.
- As we look at different points in the life course, we will be considering the different ways that personal growth over the lifespan has been pictured, theorised and researched (in developmental psychology, attachment theory, psychoanalysis, critical psychology and sociology).
- The module encourages students to take a critical approach to human development as a simple or linear progression, or a rise to maturity and then decline.
- Emphasis is placed upon the psychosocial nature and context of development, and the importance of human beings’ ongoing dependence upon one another and upon their wider culture and society.
- Where appropriate we touch upon relevant issues in current social policy and in contemporary political debates.
- Students will be encouraged to review their own personal development self-reflexively
