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Learning from Adolescence

(No name for Peer Assessment)

Department of Education, University of the People

EDUC 5420: Adolescent Development

Professor Sushma Murthy

June 17, 2023

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Learning from Adolescence

Part 1: My Experience During Adolescence

My relationship with my parents and siblings was on the whole positive. My extended

family was always welcoming and interested in what and how I was doing. However, I consider

my relationship with my peers and friends to have been unstable throughout my adolescent

years. This began as I entered Middle School. As we ventured into our teenage years, I noticed

the friends I had managed to gain in Primary School to become more rebellious and rejective of

personalities like mine, which remained more similar to how they were in childhood. I was not

the easiest to get along with either, as I was pretty sensitive to mockery and nicknames, and I

was still resistant to experiment sexuality (with women, in our heteronormative context).

My relationships with teachers, on the contrary, were widely positive. In them, I

continued to significantly find the understanding and security I would otherwise find with my

family. During this time, I remained a good student, conducting my learning processes following

the outlines proposed by my instructors and delivering consistently solid results. In terms of my

identity, there was not much that surfaced for me other than being a mestizo (mixed-race, the

‘white’ race of our country) and a heterosexual, gender-conforming man.

My goals at the time, in the short term, were to achieve consistently very good to

excellent grades across all subjects (attaining a score worthy of a distinction diploma at the end

of each academic term in a year), and to maintain and demonstrate a good performance in

physical education. In the medium, indefinite term, it was a goal of mine to have a romantic

partner and fit in. In the long term, my goal was to go to a university to study filmmaking and

become a director. The concerns and challenges I experienced at the time were losing my friends

and being noticed in doing so, as well as left out and rejected from social circles.
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Part 2: Connection of My Personal Experiences to Theory

The ideas discussed by Erik H. Erikson about identity crisis during adolescence as

psychosocial are representative of my adolescent years. Erikson (1970), for instance, identifies in

it “a sense of personal continuity and sameness, but it is also a quality of unselfconscious living,

as can be so gloriously obvious in a young person who has found himself as he has found his

communality” (p. 732). It is only until recent years that I began to recognize a struggle in my

identity during those years. On the one hand, I was looking to follow the model of my older

brothers (from a first marriage of my dad) and their sons, in terms of an abrasive masculinity,

vitality and youth. On the other, I was navigating my soft self from my childhood. In this case, I

had an awareness of myself not changing from my childhood years, while I also did not have an

awareness of living as part of my community, precisely because of feeling at odds with models.

This challenge that will keep surfacing as long as a hegemonical discourse on masculinity exists.

The theories of Jean Piaget on cognitive development in adolescence also surface in my

experience. For him, according to Deanna Kuhn (2008), “by adolescence, individual aptitudes

and interests become more important, (…) by the later part of the second decade, adolescents are

likely to have reached their full intellectual potential in only some – perhaps only one or two – of

the potential areas” (p. 49). Over the course of my teenage years in middle school, my

performance in and affinity for literary and cinematic study and practice, for instance, began

distinguishing itself from that of the mathematical and scientific, where this was more

homogeneous during my childhood and primary school. By the time I was in high school, my

profiling as belonging more in the former disciplines than in the latter was pronounced, even if I

strived to deliver on both. This is a discovery I believe new generations continue to encounter,

and one that will be found at an earlier or later time but within these developmental years.
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Part 3: Discussion of Educational Implications

Linking my experiences to theory increases my knowledge of the adolescent experience

by highlighting that what I went through is not as singular as I believed, in the sense that it fits

within tendencies identified by researchers on the topic. The notion of sameness and continuity,

which I long perceived about myself in contrast to my friends, is put into perspective as a change

in the be-coming adolescent as they develop positions of affinity or opposition to their

surroundings. Similarly, I can now comprehend my approach to specific fields of expertise and

not others as something that is not as consciously experienced in childhood but rising to

awareness as a tendency more frequent than not – and not necessarily imposed by curricular

decisions at a learning institution. These two notions I had upon going through these experiences

I can now corroborate with formal studies on the matter, helping me better relate to the concepts.

The way I will utilize this information in my work with adolescents in an educational

setting is in creating constant spaces within my courses that aid their navigation of such a

discovery and challenge (the learning environment acting, thus, against the repression of those).

For instance, in a course of cinema, theory of knowledge, or language and literature, we can do a

close reading on a movie or media text dealing with toxic gender models, and use it to catalyze

discussion with pupils, where they can reflect on, articulate and verbalize their thoughts and

feelings on experiences with the subject matter beyond the classroom. This self-cognizance

would extend to creative practice, with pupils being made aware of this as a narrative to explore

and which allows them to express their points of view. Similarly, in terms of the development of

aptitudes and interests, the courses can offer a variety of paths of topics to explore as related to

the main discipline. The study and practice of movies, for example, can be approached by pupils

from a linguistic-literary perspective and aim, or from a mathematical or scientific one.

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References

Erikson, E. H. (1970). Autobiographic notes on the identity crisis. Daedalus, 99(4), 730-759.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20023973

Kuhn, D. (2008). Formal operations from a twenty-first century perspective. Human

Development, 51(1), 48-55. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26763967