The purpose of this assignment is to facilitate your deeper understanding of what theory is and how it can be used to enhance social work practice. This assignment also provides an opportunity for students to demonstrate their mastery of key ideas from the person-environment perspective and systems theory.

This is not the type of assignment that students can complete the night before it is due. The questions in the prompt are designed to be challenging and to push students to understand the course material more deeply. They are as much an assessment of where students are at with the course material as they are part of the learning process in this course.

For the purposes of this assignment, students should view material from the presentation on maltreatment, trauma, and child development listed below. (Note: These links will direct you to websites outside of the Rutgers domain.)

How Childhood Trauma Affects Health across a Lifetime by Nadine Burke Harris. Watch in full (approximately 20 minutes).

https://www.ted.com/talks/nadine_burke_harris_how_childhood_trauma_affects_health_across_a_lifetime#t-39458 (Links to an external site.)

Using this video, students are to answer the questions below. Students should complete this assignment by developing well-formulated sections with respect to the following questions. No additional introductory or concluding sections are needed, nor are transition sentences between sections. The assignment should reflect students own thoughts and analysisnot that of classmates, work colleagues, or anybody else.

Section #1

View the full lecture by Nadine Burke Harris. Summarize the main point of the presentations as a whole. What is the main argument? Within this discussion, make sure to demonstrate your understanding of each domain of persons as biopsychosocial beings, integrating this understanding within key points from the presentation, and citing course materials with in-text citations as part of your discussion.

Section #2

To what extent did the lecture by Nadine Burke Harris address each of the following levels of social environments in terms of their implications for development among children facing maltreatment: micro-social, meso-social, and macro-social? Using your own ideas, give an example of how the presentation could have addressed one of the levels even more forcefully. Within this discussion, make sure to demonstrate your clear understanding of each level of the social environment, citing core course materials (with in-text citations) as part of your demonstration of understanding.

Section #3

Explain in your own words the concept of person-environment transactions, making at least one link to the core course material when describing this concept. Now, discuss two examples of how Burke Harris’ argument demonstrates the transactional relationship between each level of the social environment as you discussed in Section 2  above (micro, meso, macro).

Section #4

Based on your viewing of the lecture by Nadine Burke Harris in full how did the presentation incorporate insights from a complex systems perspective? Describe at least one clear and compelling exampledemonstrating your understanding of at least one specific and central concept from complex systems theory through in-text citations (e.g., probabilism, non-reductionism, non-linear causality, heterogeneity). Conclude with a discussion on how this insight from complex systems theory enhances your sensitivity to diversity among children facing maltreatment and overall implications for practice.