MSWK503

Human Behavior and the Social Environment I (HBSE I) is the first of three courses in the Human Behavior sequence. HBSE I and HBSE II examine human development, and HBSE III covers psychosocial-pathology. This course introduces students to the salient aspects of the human condition. Learning emphasizes the reciprocal and transactional influences between persons and their environment and examining bio-psycho-social factors influencing human development throughout the life cycle. Known as person-in-environment, this interaction forms the basis of an ecological approach to human development, brining into focus current knowledge and theories regarding human behavior and the social environment as they influence each other. The course examines human development beginning with conception through middle childhood.
The course focuses on issues that deal with the self in an ecological context, with specific attention to the study of individual, physical, intellectual, and temperamental endowment in transaction with sociocultural norms and family patterns. The crises, struggles, conflicts, risks and opportunities associated with these conditions and transactions are explored. The emphasis is placed on differences and similarities in the life experience and lifestyles of men and women and minority groups. The relationship between individual experience and wider system forces is examined. Emphasis is placed on the capacity of the individual, groups and organizations, to improve their own life and their community’s in response to macro-system forces.