Interview with a Teacher
For this interview, I talked with a teacher I know about the topic of identity formation in the adolescent stage of development. This was an interesting talk, as the teachers students are all adolescents, but she also teaches at a community college at nights and gets to meet some older students and even sometimes catches up with former high school students. She has personally seen how people change as they grow, and in her opinion the most successful people she meets are the ones who figure out themselves and their identity before they move into adulthood. Others who are less successful stay stuck in a kind of delayed adolescence that goes on into adulthood as they try to figure out their role in the world. I was put in mind of Erik Eriksons psychosocial stages of development in which the main conflict of adolescence is identity vs. role confusion. Her statements clearly supported Eriksons view of what goes on in adolescence and why it is so important for adolescents to resolve this conflict so that they can proceed to the next stage of development.
The teacher and I were pretty much aligned in terms of how we viewed this topic: she saw identity formation as very important at this period, and I agreed with that assessment. I, however, thought that identity has to be authenticit cannot be some unreal or superficial, because this does not really work to resolve the identity vs. role confusion conflict. A person really needs to have a sense of who he or she is in order to grow into adulthood. I myself see too many instances of young people getting older and thinking they know what they are about but it all being supported by artificial concepts, often derived from media stereotypes and constructs that are not rooted in reality. I think that part of the problem many adolescents face is that they do not receive much character education. I asked the teacher if she thought character education was important and she said very: kids are not being taught what it means to be virtuous, to have character, to have grit, to have the ability to bounce...
…he found his gift, his calling, his joy, his reason for growing up and getting serious about life. She said that too many adolescents never find this because they are mired in media and silly cultural expectations and
norms about who they think they should be based on this
music or that
movie. Tatum's point about the complexity of identity formation, where multiple factors such as
race, gender, and socioeconomic status interplay?? with one another is helpfulbut I think the teachers ideas about medias influence are also insightful.
When reflecting on their adolescence, the teacher mentioned that many adults that she has met still retain vivid memories from their adolescence, which as noted by Senior can be called the "reminiscence bump." That is to say that experiences during adolescence occupy a privileged place in our memories because they are meaningful to us at a point when we are determining who we are. They are formative for us because they hit us at a formative age. The teacher noted that many of her older students often revisit their adolescent experiences when dealing with identity issues…
