Becoming a Learning Ecologist
In the months since I began this series with A Note of Dedication, I have been mapping my own terrain: my professional journey, my relationships, and the systems I have moved through. More than any particular discovery, I want to account for the practice of looking.
Mapping begins with observation. In Life Mapping My Faculty Experience, I drew my time on the tenure track as a jail, a visual that surprised me even as I drew it because my conscious mind had been telling a different story. In Before I Can Study Contemplation Through Data Science, I named something I had been working around for years: building the embodied infrastructure to sustain this work is a precondition for everything else. In Mapping the Terrain, I began examining the ruptures that, over time, revealed something useful through the difficulty itself. Drawing, naming, and stepping back constitute the methodology, and I am beginning to understand them as a way of being in the field.
Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model (1977) gives us a language for the layers of the systems we inhabit: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem. Vélez-Agosto and colleagues (2017) sharpened that framework by placing culture within the everyday activities, routines, and relationships of the microsystem itself, rather than as a distant force operating from outside. That reorientation matters for what I am building here. The points of light I look for across a professional journey are relational events embedded in cultural practice. They become visible through three forms of mapping: self mapping, which reveals how who we are shapes what we see (Gupta, 2021; Gupta & Zhu, 2026a); situational mapping, which makes visible the forces and conditions shaping collaborative work (Gupta & Zhu, 2026b); and practice mapping, which traces how embodied routines sustain the capacity to engage over time (Practice Mapping: A Return to Running; Gupta, 2019b). Together, these maps create a picture of where and with whom something generative was possible. Those are the connection points - our points of light.
That ecological question is one I have been working toward for years: asking why the field was not talking about teacher well-being alongside inclusion (Gupta, 2019a), examining how leaders build conditions for practitioners to change and stay changed (Gupta, 2020), and studying my own teaching through mapping to understand what I could and could not yet see (Gupta, 2021). In Finding Ground, I wrote about moving from reactive accommodation to conscious positioning. Ecological inquiry asks the same: to position oneself deliberately to observe what the system makes invisible.
Across every institutional context I have moved through (doctoral training at UMD, postdoctoral work, four faculty appointments, the research partnership with New York City’s Division of Early Childhood Education documented in Building Relational Infrastructure, What Makes Policy Sustainable, and AI and Contemplative Practice, and my current work as a student), specific people sustained the relational work that formal structures left unaddressed. Looking across those people and moments over twenty years, a pattern emerges: they were the places where conditions allowed individuals to connect to themselves, to each other, and to something larger than any single role or institution. When Xiaohan Zhu and I introduced life mapping with teachers in New York City (Gupta & Zhu, 2026a), teachers described a shift in how they saw themselves, their students, and the families they served—moving from assumption to genuine curiosity. That movement from assumption to observation appears across every map I have made.
In When Life Becomes the Practice and Practice Mapping: A Return to Running, I wrote about the embodied practices (running, yoga, pranayama) that sustained my capacity to observe when institutional ground was shifting. In the Yoga Samachar, I wrote about rebuilding a practice from the inside rather than reaching for a former state (Gupta, 2019b). In Lion’s Roar, I wrote about learning to hear and say my own name as a form of reclaiming presence in spaces that routinely erased it (Gupta, 2025). These practices and the professional inquiry are inseparable; the practices are the infrastructure the inquiry rests on.
Early childhood and early intervention systems are built on relational work: between researchers and practitioners, between agencies and families, between teachers and the structures meant to sustain them. That relational foundation is what makes the work possible, and it is what erodes when systems focus on competencies without attending to conditions. I raised this concern in On Containment and Embodied Inquiry, writing about what teacher preparation assumes but rarely provides. The mapping methodologies I am developing through Ecological Learning Partners are tools for that kind of seeing, at the level of the individual practitioner and the level of the collaborative team (Gupta & Zhu, 2026a; Gupta & Zhu, 2026b). The goal is connection: to self, to each other, and to what we can do, individually and collectively, to lift the systems we are part of.
The maps I have made across these posts organized what I could see clearly enough to work from. They showed me where my points of light were: the places where conditions allowed something important to happen between people, and where those connections carried our work forward.
That is what I mean when I call myself a learning ecologist: positioning oneself in relation to complex systems as an investigator and a partner, making visible what systems render invisible, so that the people within those systems can connect to themselves, to each other, and to what they can do together.
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References
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1977). Toward an experimental ecology of human development. American Psychologist, 32, 513–531.
Gupta, S. S. (2019a). Voices from the field: Why aren’t we talking about teacher well-being with inclusion? Young Exceptional Children, 23(2), 59–62. https://doi.org/10.1177/1096250619846581
Gupta, S. S. (2019b). Seeking truth through resistance. Yoga Samachar.https://www.iynaus.org/yoga-samachar/
Gupta, S. S. (2020). Building practitioner resilience for change in EI/ECSE. Young Exceptional Children, 24(1), 3–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/1096250620913258
Gupta, S. S. (2021). Mapping self to others: A self-study on critical reflection in early childhood special education teacher preparation. The New Educator, 17(3). https://doi.org/10.1080/1547688X.2021.1913849
Gupta, S. S. (2025, November 6). The myna bird knows her name. Lion’s Roar.https://www.lionsroar.com/the-myna-bird-knows-her-name/
Gupta, S. S., & Zhu, X. (2026a). Life mapping: Helping teachers examine how the past shapes the present. Educational Leadership.https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/redefining-bias-training
Gupta, S. S., & Zhu, X. (2026b). How might situational mapping be used in RPPs? NNERPP Extra.https://nnerpp.rice.edu/
Vélez-Agosto, N. M., Soto-Crespo, J. G., Vizcarrondo-Oppenheimer, M., Vega-Molina, S., & García Coll, C. (2017). Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory revision: Moving culture from the macro into the micro. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12(5), 900–910. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617704397
Previous posts in this series
Gupta, S. S. (2025, October 14). A note of dedication. Ecological Learning Partners.
Gupta, S. S. (2025, October 17). Building relational infrastructure: Questions for a moment of transition. Ecological Learning Partners.
Gupta, S. S. (2025, November 5). Life mapping my faculty experience. Ecological Learning Partners.
Gupta, S. S. (2025, November 11). Before I can study contemplation through data science: Rebuilding embodied infrastructure. Ecological Learning Partners.
Gupta, S. S. (2025, November 24). When life becomes the practice: A reflection on continuation. Ecological Learning Partners.
Gupta, S. S. (2025, December 5). Practice mapping: A return to running. Ecological Learning Partners.
Gupta, S. S. (2026, January 1). What makes policy sustainable: Practice architectures for NYC’s early childhood expansion. Ecological Learning Partners.
Gupta, S. S. (2026, January 9). Finding ground: From reactive accommodation to conscious positioning. Ecological Learning Partners.
Gupta, S. S. (2026, March 17). Mapping the terrain: Ruptures that have revealed spaciousness and light. Ecological Learning Partners.
Gupta, S. S. (2026, April 1). AI and contemplative practice: An inquiry into professional learning infrastructure. Ecological Learning Partners.
Gupta, S. S. (2026, May 20). On containment and embodied inquiry: The practice we assume in teacher preparation. Ecological Learning Partners.
Sarika S. Gupta, Ph.D., is the founder of Ecological Learning Partners LLC. She develops ecological mapping methodologies to study complex educational systems, with a focus on early childhood education and teacher preparation.
