Nakkula Chapters 2 and 3

So far in graduate school, as far as educational gurus go, I've connected most with Diane Ravitch.  She was profiled in The New Yorker last year and she has a new book out, which was reviewed by Jonathan Kozol in this past week's Sunday New York Times Book Review.  Ravitch used to be all for standardized testing, and now she's against it.  I like her most because she was able to admit she was wrong.  This is such a rare thing in education!  It seems like people's egos are extremely fragile, and she doesn't care about hers.  Hooray!  Her blog rules, and I'm sure I'll use it to help me write my graphic novel on learning.  I'm ordering this book to the library after I finish this sentence.  Here's my post on Nakkula for the week!

At the beginning of Chapter 2, Nakkula wrote about how adolescents and adults in education are both learning.  This idea is counter-intuitive to the common adage that we as teachers need to be experts in our subject areas.  Perhaps we know much about the material.  However, we need to know much more about the world of adolescents and how to present that material.  That is an on-going learning process and Nakkula describes this as more of an interactive approach, as a growing opportunity, as opposed to the normative idea of a ‘quiet student sitting in a chair listening to an expert teacher talk’.

                I thought that this was a smart way for Nakkula to frame these chapters.  Interacting with students isn’t a simple under-taking and there aren’t any simple answers.  There are many complex behaviors occurring at this point in a person’s life.  Nakkula discusses the idea that a person starts with an individual idea of oneself, and attempts to understand his or herself, while at the same time fitting themselves into society.  The idea of a ‘misfit’ is the space between the individual development and social psychology.  What kinds of experimentation does a person have to make in order to reach equilibrium between these two posts?

                This developmental stage also branches out into how adolescents struggle with anxiety from another equilibrium that’s out of wack: how to “balance the need to be distinct from family/friends/society with the simultaneous need to establish and maintain meaningful relationships with significant others. (21)” There are so many students with anxiety problems that I find it hard to believe this theory is the only reason that they are faced with this mental obstacle.  But it does make me re-think what constitutes anxiety.  Perhaps it manifests itself in other ways that I hadn’t previously considered.  I understand a little more now why students try to be cool or try to stand out.  They’re trying to both be distinctive and belong, all at the same time.

                Nakkula mentions one way that adolescents attempt to find orientation in this disequilibrium is to find something authentic, a true way to live.  This renders them susceptible to fads or charismatic leaders.  This was an interesting way to look at adolescent culture and reminds me of the students who took a photo on their phone of The Walking Dead pin while I was at the mall.  Is The Walking Dead a fad?  Is there a deeper reason why adolescents are drawn to this show?  I wonder if marketing researchers know this about adolescents and the ways they behave. 

                This all has to do with how an adolescent sees himself or herself.  Nakkula describes this idea of identity as four different types of statuses that people encounter in their lifetime.  Someone with a foreclosed identity status is comfortable with their place in society and has trouble exploring.  I thought it was important to note that someone with a foreclosed identity status is resistant to challenging their status, and needs to be helped without judgment.  Diffuse identity status is the opposite – someone who doesn’t identify with anything specifically, is a chameleon, and does little reflecting.  I thought it was an interesting idea that Nakkula says we shouldn’t tell students what to do in situations.  Rather, we should hear what they have to say, and “it would be more effective to ask them about their experiences in these various settings, listen to their struggles and thrills, then help them to hear the moments about which they speak with the most passion” (33).  We have discussed how important passion is to the learning process in class, and now I can see a little more clearly where that connection comes from.

                An interesting thought that I took away from the moratorium identity phase was that adolescents try to emulate role models during this crisis, yet the emulation is a fleeting solution.  They end up finding themselves in their achieved identity when “the identity crisis is resolved and the commitment to the selected identity is high” (38).  I also thought it was worth noting that these ideas on identity are in a constant, dynamic cycle, and they aren’t just exclusive to adolescents.  This is something we do as adults, too.  It isn’t a simple linear phase.  There’s constant change going on.

                Nakkula continues writing about behavior and identity in chapter 3.  He writes about the various forms of experimenting and risk-taking involved with teenagers.  Again, he mentions a difficulty in equilibrium, this time between the dependency of teens on their parents’ world and the impulse to create their own world.  They start focusing on risk-taking to help define their own world.  This certainly can be positive and negative, depending on who is guiding these students through their risk-taking.

                Students learn through modeling their behavior after others.  Much like learning school material, this learning occurs through scaffolding.  They also learn about risks through scaffolding.  Nakkula writes about positive scaffolding only occuring through consistent and challenging activities that help build skills and personal development.  These achievements are missed when there is an excess of psychological entropy, or the blocking of energy to do complex thinking.  Flow experiences occur when these energies are unblocked.  This started sounding a heck of a lot like Scientology, and my dubious alert system started going off.

                This is where I started to lose Nakkula a little bit.  He argues that students get involved in bad behavior because their flow states are only opened up when involved in reckless behavior.  It’s the responsibility of the teachers to build scaffolds to lead to positive risk taking, and positive flow states, or we run the risk of students only connecting to bad behavior.  This is an incredible leap of faith here.  If there is anything I’ve learned in these chapters, it’s that students have complex, complicated lives that we have to do our best to understand.  It seems unrealistic to expect teachers to be the only people in their lives to prevent them from engaging in bad behavior.  Their families don’t have anything to do with this?  I think that is one of my major beefs with Nakkula: doesn’t a student’s family background count for something?  I think teachers can help, but we can only do so much.  I agree we need to be cognizant of positive risk-taking.  That I can get behind.  But we need to be met half-way.  Maybe I’m misreading something here, but Nakkula seems to be saying that poor teaching leads to reckless behavior in adolescents, and that makes zero sense to me, from my experiences.  Hopefully this slight irritation will become more understandable in the up-coming chapters.