"The only way to be totally free is through education" - Jose Marti
Topic 8: Identity
Adolescence is a time of change and development, both physically and mentally, it is when teenagers are granted or start to demand independence from their parents and start to create their own identity. A teenager's identity is largely influenced by their self esteem. Unfortunately, self-esteem tends to drop off dramatically with the onset of puberty, especially for girls. Everyone has a general self-esteem level, referred to as their baseline self-esteem, and infrequent, short-lived traumatic or encouraging events can cause a change in barometric self-esteem. The reasoning behind the decrease in self-esteem for girls in relation to boys is that the principal determinant of self esteem is physical appearance, and we saw in earlier topics that as girls go through puberty they develop away from the popularized ideal for the female body.
Adolescence is a time to start to decide who you are wha what you want to do with your life. Some people are driven by the suggestions of others and do not put very much exploration in to defining their future. These individuals are considered to have identity foreclosure. Others spend all of their time exploring possible futures but do not commit to any one path in life, they are in identity moratorium. Still others neither commit nor explore, and have identity diffusion (this is common not only in adolescence, but in emerging adulthood as well, especially after graduation from post-secondary studies). Finally there are those who reach identity achievement by both adequately exploring their options and committing to a life path.
Some adolescents of minority ethnic cultures face another quartet of identity development. if they both identify with their culture and the majority culture then they have reached integration. Those who reject their culture and accept the majority culture undergo assimilation, and those who reject the majority culture in favour of their own culture experience separation. Finally, some are not able to identify with either their own culture or that of the majority and experience marginalization. Marginaization is of particular concern in reference to Aboriginal youth who may not have access to cultural experiences from their own tribe or band and at the same time feel outcast from mainstream society.
Morality also plays a role in identity cretion with the development of reasoning and a moral identity. One famous test related to the achievement of a moral identity is that of Kohlberg who determined preconventional, conventional, and post-converntional morality from a story of a man who steals medicine to help his sick wife from a chemist who jacks up the price for pure profit.
In this week's flex reflection we were asked: How can you help adolescents go beyond a Like or brand and focus on developing their identity in a meaningful way?
In relation to this question we watched Generation Like, a video investigation of the motives behind teenage online media identities and how they were being transformed by marketing companies. I feel that this flex-reflection activity is increadibly challenging as it's difficult to ask students to step away from their online profile and question who the person sitting in front of the computer really is. One way for students to identify the differences between their online personality and their real-life personality is to do a social media audit which lists your top used words, general positivity, and propernsity for online bullying. In this way I woudl hope that my students would see that thier online presence is usually more negative than their in-person personality as an artifact of the lack of face-to-face reaction to their comments.
Additional Resources:
ASCD - Moral teachers, Moral students
A guide to developing ethics in the classroom and supporting moral development.
Who am I?: The ethnic identity development of adolescents
http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED412432.pdf
An explanation of identity development and supporting diversity in schools
What every middle school tacher should know: Understanding the young adolescent
https://www.heinemann.com/shared/onlineresources/e00266/chapter2.pdf
An excerpt explaining adolescent physical, social, and emotional development including identity development.