Soaring above the clouds, delving the ocean’s depths: Understanding the ecologies of human learning and the challenge for education science

Lee, Carol D. (2010). Soaring above the clouds, delving the ocean’s depths: Understanding the ecologies of human learning and the challenge for education science. Educational Researcher, 39(9), 643-655.


In her presidential address at the American Educational Research Association’s 2010 annual meeting, Carol Lee presents an “ecological” theory of human development and learning. Although the theory itself is abstract, as theories tend to be, Lee anchors it within a striking real-world example, a young Black man she calls Yetu. Lee encountered Yetu as part of a project through which she and others provided an intervention in an urban high school. Yetu struck Lee as having high ability, but that potential was far from realized as Yetu became caught in the many challenges facing young men of color in urban, high-poverty environments. Yetu’s story is vivid and painful, but Yetu is the anchor for Lee’s theoretical exposition, and provides the grounding for it.

Lee proposes a theory in which complex influences on human development and learning are interwoven, or “braided” together. Simplistic approaches probably are not sufficient to help us understand learning and learner’s in today’s complicated world. In fact, approaches that fail to account for the complexity of learners’ lives run the risk of promulgating deficit thinking rather than recognizing learners’ strengths and using those strengths to help learners face challenges that put them at risk. Lee brings up the danger of deficit thinking repeatedly in her address, and I found her concerns resonating with concerns I share, particularly since No Child Left Behind. I also share Lee’s concerns about recent research on the brain that is being used to “reify” notions that urban children of color who live in poverty are somehow biologically deficient, and is being presented simplistically to teachers.

Lee’s theory presents four intertwined elements: Physiological systems, Environmental stimuli, Cultural Practices, and Human Dispositions. She proposes that humans continually adapt to the environment in the quest to survive, and that this process of adaptation occurs in multiple ways and across multiple contexts. It is only by understanding these intertwined elements and processes that we can truly understand and assist learners, particularly those in “at-risk” (a deficit term) categories. In short, we have to look at each person as a whole person, one who functions within and across real, complex environments. Lee offers few answers, but she does point to some interesting future research agendas, including an interdisciplinary approach, which makes sense to me. When we face difficult challenges, why shouldn’t we seek out every line of theory and research that we can possibly apply to those challenges? Isn’t that our job as educators? As Lee says near the end of her address: “In sum, to study how people learn and develop over time as learning unfolds in of the ecologies of their lives is the quintessential purpose of a science of learning” (p. 653).