I suppose it's inevitable as we come to the end of year that we look back on it. This year has been particularly eventful with my daughter's wedding, serious illness in the family, visits to family in Australia and visits from family in Iran and many other smaller events and achievements that connect us as a family in interesting and unpredictable ways.

This reflective mood encouraged me to think of the idea of development in the context of being part of a family. It seems to me that development is an important process for keeping the family together and for continually engaging members of the family in the process of nurturing or enabling the development of its members sometimes by design but often as a consequence of the way life unfolds.

Development as a family comes from sharing experiences good or bad and participating in and talking about small and significant events and people so that members of the family develop a shared sense of history and belonging. This was brought home to me recently as I interviewed my mother and father who are in their late 80's in order to record the story of their early life growing up in Manchester in the 1920's and 30's. One reason for doing this was to provide our family with a clearer sense of our history the detail of which will be forgotten when they are no longer with us. In fact the stories that parents tell about us and our childhood are one way in which we can appreciate our own development.

Development as a family manifests itself in what we do to, with and for each other, the sacrifices that are made and the willingness to take on rather than avoid family commitments regardless of cost. In a well functioning and caring family everyone is involved in developing themselves - to be better parents/grandparents, spouses, workers, students etc.. and often for others - children, grandchildren, siblings or the children of siblings.

A year in the life of a large family inevitably contains many events some of which cannot be predicted in advance. This year the serious illness of one family member completely disrupted our plans yet brought us together to support each other. We are all different and more empathic having had this challenging experience but we would have never wished for such an experience.

Development is easiest to see in the youngest members of the family for example my youngest grandson was born exactly a year ago and in the space of a year he has grown from a tiny helpless baby into a little boy able to walk and let you know what he wants and doesn't want to do. But another grandson shows me that not all babies are able to develop at such a pace if they are born with conditions that affect their physical and cognitive development.  Their measures of progress are smaller and much harder to see and harder for them to accomplish. Nevertheless when witnessed they bring much joy and hope for a better future.

Formal learning has an important role to play in the development of a child. A year ago my six year old grandson was a hesitant and reluctant reader. Thanks to the efforts of his mum and school he is now a fluent reader willing to search for and read the books that interest and inspire him opening up a world that is not accessible to those who cannot read. While they are at school or university our children's developmental processes are mostly hidden from us - we gain insights when we see them doing their homework or more intensely when they revise. My youngest daughter is revising intensively for her mock GCSE's at the moment - it's a serious arduous task and she is far more engaged than I ever was at  her age.

As parents we encourage our children to develop their interests beyond the classroom - we want them to have friends and be confident socially, to enjoy and engage in sport, to join clubs and societies, have hobbies and be aware of the world around them. We are happy when they want to get involved but are disappointed when they do not use the opportunities they have and sometimes we pressurise them into doing things that we believe are for their own good. We push and pull, reason and cajole, and sometimes just insist in what we believe is for the greater good of encouraging development that will help and enable our children to be happy, fulfilled and successful in the future. Sometimes these actions result in tensions as our children let us know that this is not what they want to do.

Perhaps our creative involvement as parents in these forms of development is in the success we have in enabling our children to discover things that interest them that they value rather than imposing on them what interests us and what we value. I learnt this the hard way: the fact that I was a geologist seemed to be a burden when I tried to interest my three children in the geology at our feet when we were on holiday. I carried on behaving like this with my three step children. I failed to interest any of them in something I was passionate about but when one of them became fascinated in archaeology he reluctantly admitted that he could see the parallels and could see why I was interested in it!

So our involvement in our own children's development must balance the aspirations we have for them and the need for our children to discover for themselves their own purposes and ambitions and create their own intrinsic motivations for pursuing what they value. There comes a point in this familial developmental process where we start thinking that our children must do things for themselves. For several years we tried to encourage our son to learn to drive. Thanks to friends who were willing to give him lifts and the absence of a need while at university to drive he put it off until he suddenly realised he needed it in order to get a particular job. So he paid for his own lessons and after three goes he passed his driving test. We all rejoiced at the new freedom's this act of development afforded but it only came about when his need created the desire for him to persist until he had achieved this goal.

Most personal development goes on unseen, unrecorded and unrecognised. It just goes on and on as our children grow into the people we hope and they want to become. As parents we rejoice when we think our children are moving in a direction that we think holds promise but despair when they make decisions that we don't think will lead to anything of value.

All too often we forget that much of our own learning was through the experience of trying - regardless of whether something worked out or not. Perhaps this is the hardest lesson in the family development process letting our children make their own mistakes - and being ready to help them when they do. And it can be painful process. There are times when our children develop us in directions that we do not want to go. At times we may have to compromise our beliefs in order to maintain the relationships that make up a family. Above all we have to trust that they will find their own way and make the decisions that are right for them in their circumstances.

So the continuous process of creating and recreating family is a never ending developmental process in which all members are involved for themselves and for others.

The marks on this garage door record the growth of a family- more specifically the changes in height over time of grandchildren and some great grandchildren recorded over the 27 years that my parents have lived in this house after they retired to Narrawallee in New South Wales. My own children's heights were recorded on that door when we visited in 1993, 2003 and 2005. My parents are quite old now, approaching 90, and they are preparing to move to somewhere more manageable - so the door will eventually be painted over and this unique record of family history will be lost. There are of course other ways to record our histories like the photographs on the walls and in the albums or our computers, and in the stories that our parents tell about us. But when they are gone and the family photo albums are dispersed there is no repository for family history and knowledge about the members of the family gets dispersed to the branches of the family and much of it will be lost.

The loss of key family members diminishes the knowledge we have about ourselves, or our children. I have become more and more aware of this as I have got older. In 1999 when my wife Jill died of cancer one of the things I grieved for was the loss of our family history. All the little events in the lives of our children that were memorable to her that she had stored away and was able to tell in the way that only she could do because it had been her experience and her memory that had captured those moments.

I read somewhere that as parents we are not only the archive of memory of our children's passage through early life, and of our own childhood that provides them with a deeper sense of who they are, the digital age has made us custodians of our children's digital record until such time that they need to take it over. To this end I have begun to set up a family website and to digitise our hard copy photographs. It's going to be a big job but it's one I feel is my duty to undertake.

But I have also come to realise, for example through Jill's passing, that histories are not just snapshots of life they are stories containing the meanings we construct around them. Meaningful stories are as important as our genes in transmitting who we are and how we have become who we are. So now that I have more time, I have taken it upon myself to record my mother and father's stories about their lives as audio files and as a transcribed text so that more of our history is preserved. I have made a good start and I think that they are pleased to have their stories written down.

On my visit in 2013 I have found this place holds so many memories - the house and garden, the beach and the journey here - some are happy and some are sad. But listening to my parents talk again about their lives I have been inspired to spend some time researching my father's family going back in time as far as I can. It looks as if our roots lie in Scotland and Ireland on both sides of the family. The second is to set down my own story, at least that part I am willing to tell, and I have made a good start while I am here.

As I write this another idea is emerging from my thoughts that there must be lots of people who are reaching my age who would perhaps like to record their parent's histories or tell their own life stories. Helping people create such personal records would be a worthwhile thing to do so perhaps there is a role for me to play and a business to create?

I introduced my talk with a slide that portrayed my own ecological process for making my contribution to the event. I had concluded that my learning process had been purposeful and directional - towards creating the resources and personal knowledge to be able to contribute to the seminar and workshop and that it had also involved lots of other people - the people who had codified their understandings in the articles I had read and whose ideas I had assimilated and reused, the people I had talked to especially members of my family, the people who had written blogs which I had drawn on, accounts of learning written by past students at Surrey and my daughter's evolving account of learning as she helps us pilot the lifewide development award. My learning had been both a  constructive process and an organic social process. 

The workshop involved inviting participants to think of a learning project they had been involved in and to try in about fifteen minutes to record the key elements of their learning process. Each then told their story of learning and as a group we tried to think about the ecological aspects of the story. The process was quite revealing and on the train journey home (in true ecological spirit) I decided to email the people who had participated to invite them to continue working on the ideas that had emerged and to write them up as a co-authored paper to illustrate how such a workshop methodology can work in revealing the ecological process involved in lifewide learning. So far only two people have responded so I'm uncertain as to what will emerge from the process. But I feel sure that something useful will come from it. 

On Thursday I was thinking ahead to the next issue of Lifewide Magazine and thinking of potential contributors when I googled Jay Lemke - who has written extensively on ecosocial theory and  who I had really enjoyed reading. I came across a beautifully written and inspiring chapter he wrote in 2002.. on becoming a village.. I cite a passage below to illustrate..

An old saying has it that it takes a village to raise a child. As children, we know how much we need to learn about everything and everyone in our communities to live there successfully. As we learn, we gradually become our villages: we internalize the diversity of viewpoints that collectively make sense of all that goes on in the community. At the same time, we develop values and identities: in small tasks and large projects, we discover the ways we like to work, the people we want to be, the accomplishments that make us proud. In all these activities we constantly need to make sense of the ideas and values of others, to integrate differing viewpoints and desires, different ways of talking and doing. As we participate in community life, we inevitably become in part the people that others need us to be, and many of us also find at least some of our efforts unsupported or even strenuously opposed by others... The challenges of living in a village define fundamental issues for both education and development.1

His website had a contact email address and in the spirit of nothing ventured nothing gained  I decided to invite him to write a feature article for the next issue of the Magazine.. Within a few hours I had a very encouraging response which indicated that although in the midst of travelling from Europe to San Diego he had taken the trouble to follow the link I had given him to my website and had made a relational connection.. What a wonderful illustration of our ecologies in action.

Fortified by insights gained at the CRA workshop, the other important decision I made this week was to reframe the conference we are planning for next year to focus attention on the way that universities are supporting lifewidelearning ie I turned it from a criticism of inaction to the opportunity to celebrate achievement and progress. In spite of uncertainties I went ahead and booked the venue thus committing Lifewide Education to the conference in March next year. Making these decisions brought a sense of relief, as so often decision making does, and I was much happier at the end of the week than I had been at the start.

1 Lemke J L (2002) Becoming the Village: Education across lives, in G. Wells and G. Claxton (eds) Learning for Life in the 21st Century: Sociocultural Perspectives on the Future of Education Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, UK available on-line at http://www.jaylemke.com/storage/becoming-the-village.pdf

I am writing an essay on the ecology of learning for a seminar next week so the idea of ecologies has been very much in my mind.  The basic ideas underlying the ecology of family(1)  is that a family is a distinct closely related social group that interacts with their environment to form an ecosystem. Families carry out the following for the good of itself as well as the good of society: biological sustenance (have children and look after each other), economic maintenance (share resources), psychosocial nurturing (provide empathy and emotional support). Families and the environment are interdependent and they interact with multiple environments - typically each adult member inhabits a different physical/social environment. Adaptation is a continuing process in families.  They can “respond, change, develop, and act on and modify their environment.” Interactions between families and environments are guided by two sets of rules: Physical and biological laws of nature and human-derived rules (e.g., social /cultural norms). Our physical environments do not determine our behavior but pose limitations and constraints as well as possibilities and opportunities. Decision making is the central control process that directs our actions for attaining individual and family goals. Families are underlain and held together through shared values including its survival: maintenance and sustainability are important features of life and the “four great virtues that contribute to the ‘ultimate good’”: economic adequacy, justice, freedom and peacefulness. Other virtues that contribute to the quality of family life include: health, education and learning, loving and nurturing relationships, productive work and work environments, experiences and symbolic systems that sustain meaning and a sense of community, beauty and trustworthiness.

From an ecological perspective we might reflect on how our family functions and adapts to assure survival, how we collectively try to improve the quality of our lives, and how we contribute to sustaining natural resources. We might also consider how we allocate and manage resources over time to meet the changing needs of individuals and the family as a group. And how the environment (the meso-, exo-, and macrosystems of which we are apart impact on us.

Scanning  my blog I can see many references to our family and the ecology that sustains it and how the members of my immediate and the greater family impact on my life. For example, in my last blog I talked about my step nephew's search amongst family members for resources to enable him to finance some training to help him become a missionary both my wife and I have responded to him with financial and emotional help and he in return is coming to visit us in a couple of weeks.

This week has also been half term so I had the pleasure of looking after my six year old grandson for 24 hours. I have been very conscious since the twins have been born that I have spent less time with him and this sleepover, and the things we did together, were an important way in which we renewed our bonds. As we parted he said (as he so often does) 'I love you ganddad', which gets right to the point of good family relationships. 

Last Tuesday I, and my wife helped my daughter with childcare looking after all three of her children so that she could go to work. I suppose this is an example of family ecology in action to help sustain the family and enable resources to be brought into the family.

During the week my wife and I chatted at length to our two children at university listening to their problems (prep for exams and an important piece of coursework). They discussed their ideas for their future and we provided encouragement and practical suggestions where we could. Thanks to technology and mobile phones even when we are not physically together as a family we can remain in touch and have valuable conversations that sustain our family ecology.

Making full use of our physical environment, yesterday my wife took me and our daughter out for a light and chilly (we sat outside) lunch and after cleaning the house and working in the garden (maintaining our physical environment) we had some fun and went to the cinema to see The Great Gatsby. This morning I was made to jump on the scales to see how much I weighed fortunately I hadn't had any breakfast. I then proceeded to set the scales to give me my BMI. She had been reading a book about fasting and she passed on the science she had learnt on to me. The experience of public weighing and telling me that I was nearly obese was also intended to convince me that I needed to do something about it - the family ecology of nurturing our health and educating me was clearly in evidence.

On Sunday we celebrated the twins first birthday with a small family gathering for two of my children and their families including all four of my grandchildren. I guess that birthdays are symbolic in families when we pay attention to the particular member of the family whose birthday it is and the celebrations and gifts are tokens of valuing them as members of our family.

And as I complete this piece my daughter who is over from Dubai for a few days is staying with us. Last night we spent  time catching up and talking a lot about a particular matter involving another member of the family. I was struck by her deep concern and her willingness to provide both practical help and emotional support.

These simple stories of family life in the past week reflect the everyday functionings of our family. A family I am very proud of.  Each example illustrates the ecology that binds us together and gives us an important part of our identity and our sense of individual and social wellbeing. But these sorts of ecologies are learned. The values, attitudes and behaviours that underpin such ecologies are passed on from generation to generation propagated by parents who teach their children the importance of these things. I know that I and both of my wives learnt the meanings of family from growing up in our respective families and we have simply tried to practice the values and practices that were passed on to us through these lived experiences. I can no see the same patterns emerging as my children and step children find their own independent way in the world.

1) I found this powerpoint presentation which provided the core ideas for the ecology of family  www.public.iastate.edu/~hd_fs.511/lecture/Sourcebook17.ppt‎
Bubolz, M. M., & Sontag, M. S. (1993).  Human ecology theory.  In P. G. Boss, W. J. Doherty, R. LaRossa, W. R. Schumm, & S. K. Steinmetz (Eds.), Sourcebook of family theories and methods: A contextual approach (pp. 419-448).  New York: Plenum Press.