Literature Circles: Utilizing Chris Cutcher to Empower Youth (original) (raw)
Acting Adolescent: Critical Examinations of the Youth-Adult Binary in Feed and Looking for Alaska
The ALAN Review, 2016
ts. In this article, we provide analyses of two popular young adult novels, Feed by M. T. Anderson (2002) and Looking for Alaska by John Green (2005), to demonstrate how young adult literature interplays with dominant ideas of adolescence/ts. Specifically, we explore how these texts both critique and re-inscribe normative distinctions between adolescents and adults and examine how such distinctions affect the subsequent relations between youth and adults. Given their status within biological and psychological discourses as "incomplete" and "emerging toward adulthood," youth are often positioned as inferior to and dependent upon adults. In this way, adults not only embody the destination and goal of adolescence, but also are called upon to guide youth in their proper development toward adulthood. The responsibility of youth, in this model, centers on accepting and abiding by adult-set rules and guidelines and improving the mind and body in the movement toward adulthood. Through this framing, youth may rebel against such standards as part of their overall "normal" development (e.g., Trites, 2000). In many respects, the image of the rebellious teenager constitutes one of the hallmarks of commonsensical ideas of adolescence. Perhaps the quintessential embodiment of the idea can be found in the iconic figures of Holden Caulfield from J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Jim Stark, James Dean's character in the film Rebel without a Cause (Weisbart & Ray, 1955). As in these depictions, youth are often understood to be in opposition to adults and adult authority, preferring to find ac-I n mainstream and educational discourses, adolescence is typically understood through biological and psychological perspectives that view it as an inevitable stage of life with natural expectations. For example, thinking of adolescence as a time of "storm and stress" and rife with difficulties-particularly due to biological shifts such as "raging hormones"-is fairly commonplace. Similarly, it is typical to think of adolescents as incomplete people who are "coming of age" along a more or less standardized developmental trajectory. However, many of these dominant ways of knowing young people have been critiqued by recent scholarship that reconceptualizes adolescence as a construct (e.g.,
Adolescent Psychology , 2022
In times past, the main focus of the study of psychology has been seen to be on the unacceptable and negative behavioral characteristics of humans and for that matter, adolescents. However the increase in knowledge about psychological issues in young people and especially the quest to understand their behavior, cognition and learning abilities etc., have birthed an aspect of psychology called Adolescent psychology. This aspect of psychology is aimed at understanding teenagers, helping them to understand themselves and guiding them in their milestone transition from childhood to adulthood. Hence with the study of Adolescent psychology, adolescents can be understood better and helped to navigate through their new world of growth, development and learning.
Ideas of "Adolescence" in English Education
This article explores how secondary English preservice teachers reason about their future students and the consequences these systems of reasoning have for their thinking about pedagogy and their roles as teachers. By examining these systems of reasoning, this article helps to denaturalize normalized discourses about adolescence-discourses that oftentimes help to name and position young people in powerful, predictable, and problematic ways. Finally, this article suggests ways English teacher educators might create spaces for preservice literacy teachers to rethink how their experiences with adolescents are always mediated and produced by discourses that authorize how young people are known and acted upon.
Marked Lives, Dreamed lives 21 century Adolescents back to Dialogue 31 01 2019 en-2.pdf
What makes the co--construction of a new alliance between school--adolescents--family and territory topical, necessary, vital and imperative? The 21 st century started with one of the most significant and profound educational emergencies of all times. The following elements characterize this crisis: --the progressive loss of trust in the institutions and in the adult world; --the disruption of communities and the solitude of families; --the absence of new paradigms able to interpret and face changes under way, with the subsequent poor awareness of the impact on young generations and on the planet of the two revolutions under way: digital and biotechnological. The fourth revolution, as Luciano Floridi defines it (2018), which is transforming the world, does not find any critical space yet in educational curricula. A sort of "anthropological mutation" of digital adolescents is taking place which may appear as a surprise to the world of adults and in particular to all those who are in charge of education. A dialogue--based approach can represent an effective "counter--device" capable of fighting dementia and digital solitude , and of contributing to co--construct a new educational alliance based on responsibility, commitment and understanding. Dialogue is an inclusive practice where the entire educational community is involved, which is generously, carefully and profoundly listening to adolescents. Dialogue, as a bridge with and between generations, develops higher awareness and critical skills with respect to the continuous and sudden changes under way and provides the ability to imagine the future. In this article, the possibility to co--construct a new educational alliance between schoolstudents - families - territory is analysed. School managers and teachers, "coach facilitators" of this process, are in charge of generating dialogue, facilitating it and keeping it open. change that has occurred in Italy as the transition from the regulatory to the affective family. 4 The first was characterized by formal and distant relations, by precise role definitions and by a robust paternal authority aimed at passing on values, rules and principles, that required obedience, submission and conformism. This meant that children felt a strong desire for freedom, also characterized by a high level of conflict. All this has disappeared. The affective family, the modern one, is characterized by the central role of children and by an over-investment in them. Relations are characterized by a symmetry of roles and by complicity with a major reduction in intergenerational conflicts. The parent's objective is to supply love, support, safety, meeting all needs. Children, in this family, are hyper--protected, barely exposed to frustrations, and this makes them particularly fragile and vulnerable. It is absolutely necessary to avoid that children suffer damage, that they feel offended, that the image that has been patiently built of them is questioned. They are fragile children because they are exposed to the disappointment resulting from the gap between expectations of acknowledgement and the real treatment by teachers, peers, and parents. Fragile because they are pained by humiliation and by the risk of being too often ashamed of their body and of their, sometimes unsolvable, social invisibility. The world of school is stiff, rigid and this has caused a sharp divide between the school and adolescents. With its current model, the school is not able to "engage" adolescents. Why do adolescents not see the school as an opportunity for self--fulfilment rather than, often, as a boring obstacle in their life? They certainly no longer assign a historical or symbolic meaning to the school, nor an institutional meaning. Without these meanings, a teacher entering class no longer represents anything but himself in the eyes of the child, and everyday he must laboriously regain his authority. Also having an effect is the fact that parents, in the first place, when exercising their parental function, have emptied their role of symbolic meanings. If the family has left children to define the rules of the family, they will try to dictate the rules also at school. Without this symbolic meaning assigned to the school, an adolescent does not feel any guilt and is not afraid of any punishment by the school. Ethics has been superseded by appearance. During classes, an adolescent ignores what is happening, because he is working on the creation and maintenance of his image, adapting his body to it, with the only purpose of becoming popular at school, in his community; it is not the most skilled who will be rewarded, but the "coolest" who will pass all competitions. An adolescent lives in a state of lack of confidence in himself and in the future. School is increasingly perceived as a sort of hypermarket that must satisfy "customers", who will be ready to state their case because, after all, customers are always right. A teacher can regenerate the relationship, can still attract and affect adolescents with passion more than with severity, with the richness and beauty of knowledge, through the emotions and the erotic in the learning-teaching process, already mentioned by Plato. 5 Not falling in love as an experience that emulates the symbiosis between mother and child, that feeds on filling an absence, but love which is an active, creative and generative movement. 6 The methods used matter and make the difference, it is necessary to establish a learning environment that connects with adolescents. School must respect what the student already is, without any will to change him, to destroy the project that he has about himself. True school reform should be made around relationships. Adolescents seek and need adults at home and at school. Also systematic bullying finds nourishment in loneliness, in the lack of authoritative adults of reference, in the inability to set up relationships outside the virtual world. Cyber-bullying is violent because it is very fast and extensive. School, in terms of educational alliance, is a location which is always there and active, that can have the bully perceive himself as a resource for his schoolmates, that can dismantle fears and set up significant networks 4 Charmet, P. (2010) Fragile e Spavaldo. Ritratto dell'adolescente di oggi, Roma-Bari, Laterza 5 Platone, (1995) Simposio, intr. di U. Galimberti, trad. e cura di F. Zanatta, Milano, Feltrinelli 6 Recalcati, M. (2014) L'ora di lezione. Per un'erotica dell'insegnamento, Torino, Einaudi