Human Development - Power and Politics

In this course students are introduced to the life-course approach to human development. Although the common sense view of the human life-cycle is widely accepted in society and strongly suggests that there exists a universal and uniform set of stages through which all people pass, historically and sociologically, it has been acknowledged that these apparently natural biological stages are part of the human life-course which is social as well as biological. Stages of the life-course are influenced by cultural differences and also by the material circumstances of people's lives in given types of society. Other social factors, such as social class, gender and ethnicity also influence the way the life-course is experienced. For example, some people due to their positioning in the class/race/ethnicity The life-course approach allows us to see how advantage and disadvantage has a cumulative effect over time. In this course we will analyze educational experiences in order to see how inequalities are socially constructed over the life-course. In doing so, we will see how disadvantage and inequality accumulate as a child transitions between the various stages of education beginning in pre-school through to further, adult and continuing education. Moreover, while both children and adults experience inequality differently, and some more than others, we will see that they, as active agents in their own lives, have the capacity to construct and reproduce inequalities. They are also presented with opportunities to challenge and transform them.