Understanding the Identities of Mixed-Race College Students Through a Developmental Ecology Lens

Journal of College Student Development, May/Jun 2003 by Renn, Kristen A

Urie Bronfenbrenner's (1979, 1993) ecology model of human development meets the need for flexibility without sacrificing its powerful heuristic properties for examining identity development. Furthermore, although the identity development models focus more on the outcomes of development (racial identities) than on the processes that lead to those outcomes, the ecology model incorporates both processes and outcomes. This combination of outcomes and processes is useful in translating developmental theory to educational practice. To create environments most conducive to development and learning, it is not enough to know what outcomes are possible; educators must also know what processes lead to them.

Bronfenbrenner's Ecology Model as a Conceptual Framework for Racial Identity Development

In response to his concerns that developmental psychologists paid inadequate attention to environmental influences on human development, Urie Bronfenbrenner wrote:

The understanding of human development demands more than the direct observation of behavior on the part of one or two persons in the same place; it requires examination of multiperson systems of interaction not limited to a single setting and must take into account aspects of the environment beyond the immediate situation containing the subject. (1979, p. 21, italics in original)

Although this emphasis on developmental environment is familiar to educators working in student affairs, Bronfenbrenner's call for examination of "multiperson systems of interaction not limited to a single setting" and "aspects of the environment beyond the immediate situation containing the subject" challenges college student development theorists to look beyond false dichotomies of curricular versus extracurricular settings, precollege versus college influences, and peer culture versus faculty and administrative goals. Conceptualizing the development of individual students within a complex, dynamic, interactive web of environments, some of which do not even contain them, provides a rich contextual field for the study of cognitive, moral, and identity development. Although crafted from Bronfenbrenner's work with early childhood development, the model transfers easily across the lifespan and can be applied to college student development (Renn & Arnold, in press).

Bronfenbrenner (1979, 1993) attempted in his model to account for the influences of individuals (person), their interactions with the environment and the responses they provoke from the environment (process), their interactions within immediate settings (context), and changing sociocultural influences on development (time). The elements of person, process, context, and time (PPCT) create a developmental environment unique to an individual, though organizations such as college and universities provide shared settings where the unique developmental environments of hundreds or thousands of students overlap significantly and are influenced by institutional policy and programs.

Person and process. The Person component of Bronfenbrenner's (1979, 1993) ecology model can be considered to be the personal experiences and characteristics that students bring with them to higher education, including socially constructed identities (race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, abilities and disabilities, etc.), prior academic performance and academic self-concept, political and social ideologies, and family background (Renn & Arnold, in press). Bronfenbrenner (1993) posited that "the attributes of the person most likely to shape the course of development, for better or for worse, are those that induce or inhibit dynamic dispositions toward the immediate environment," and he called these key attributes "developmentally instigative characteristics" (p. 11). These characteristics include students' propensity to explore surroundings, engage or persist in increasingly complex activities, invite or inhibit particular responses from others, and view their agency in relation to their environments (Renn & Arnold).