The Study of Behavior in its Context: a Mesogenetic Approach

This essay traces the history of an activity designed to promote the intellectual and social development of elementary-age school children during the after-school hours. Following in the footsteps of Urie Bronfenbrenner, it highlights the insight that just as all human development occurs in contexts of varying levels of inclusiveness and mutual interchange, human development occurs at intersecting scales of time that themselves vary in character and duration. In tracing one line of this activity in its institutional contexts over an 18 year period, it makes clear that scholars interested in person-context co-constitutive processes are confronted with a difficult methodological requirement; to study simultaneously the history of the person (at the microgenetic and ontogenetic time scales) as well the history of “the contexts of development” in which the persons participate.

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