1.2: What is the purpose of the textbook and the course?

This text is designed to act as a guidebook for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in awakening them to the dominance of conventional assumptions in shaping our approaches and solutions to applied developmental problems, and in enabling and encouraging them to try out the lens of developmental systems with its power to transform their approaches to research and practice. This book contains multiple versions of the course we have created and taught jointly with our colleagues and students over the last 20 years, a course that is a requirement in our doctoral program on Applied Psychology and serves students specializing in social, community, and industrial-organizational psychology, as well as in developmental science and education. These students go on to be academics and researchers, but they also join public and private organizations, like businesses, school districts, hospitals, and non-profits, where their perspectives on the people they are trying to serve and the problems they are trying to solve, change lives.public and private organizations, like businesses, school districts, hospitals, and non-profits, where their perspectives on the people they are trying to serve and the problems they are trying to solve, change lives.

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