PaulStevens5Sep13

TeachingforLearningAssignment2Essay

Demonstrate your understanding of the learning needs of the adolescent.

Discuss how the ideas of four influential thinkers in education have contributed to your
understanding of how to create a positive learning environment for the adolescent learner.

How would you include these perspectives in your own teaching?
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Then, the whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.
- William Shakespeare, The Seven Ages of Man

The process of becoming a teacher involves a re-evaluation in how to approach even
basic interactions with people we deal with everyday. This is the student-teacher
relationship. An inherently strange one; a push and pull, giving and receiving; an
often reluctant exchange of knowledge, a power struggle. This enforced and often
uncomfortable alliance is complicated further, in the secondary school context, by one
of the players (or rather 25-35 of them in any given classroom) being adolescent (a
word which brings fear to the minds of many, even well-adjusted, adults). They are
struggling through that transitory time in all of our lives which no sane person over
20 would ever want to re-endure.
Coming to terms with this realignment had me thinking during my first practicum:
The simple, go-to, conversational topics of adults - the safe, small-talk questions we
ask on first meeting acquaintances: What do you do for a living?, Are you
married?, How many children do you have?; the pigeonholing queries to help us
suss out new people - seem inappropriate in getting to know adolescents in a
teaching environment.
The nature of adolescence is that it manifests itself not just in the gradual and drastic
physical changes of puberty - that take us unawares between ages 12 and 18, as we
watch our body change from one we have just barely become accustomed to into a
new and unusual hormonal frame which starts doing things parents or health class
hardly begin to prepare us for: pimples and growing pains, hair in strange places and

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flowings of blood, sexual urges and nightly self-abuse.
No, on top of this the adolescent must become. Become what? Well, that is perhaps the
ultimate question. One even many in their twenties struggle to answer (some never)
and a process that could be a full-time job, education aside, for those in their teens. To
put it obviously: Adolescence is a child becoming an adult. Sounds simple enough, but
this is no small feat and it rarely happens without pain, and the part that education
can play in this process is, quite literally, life-changing.
Lets paint a picture. For the purposes of this essay generalisation will be required.
There are as many adolescence (the period of life, plural) as there are people over a
certain age, but still a few broad statements can be made for the conveniences of
discussion.
If we put aside the physical transitions already hinted at, as complicating as they can
be for any young person, a few necessary points should be made specifically in regard
to internal changes, both psychological and emotional, to help us come to terms with
the unique requirements of the adolescent learner.
The adolescent is a creature of doubt. It is said that the main thing any young person
needs is to fit in. They desperately want to be liked by their peers and more often
than not they want anything but to stand out and will go to extraordinary lengths not
to look stupid. We cant take the impact of this self-consciousness for granted.
Their self-concept is still forming and their identity is in sometimes constant flux
(Fenstermacher & Soltis, 2004). The reason it can be so hard to get to know a teenager
is that very often they dont yet know themselves. As stated, it is normal to ask an
adult, if not in so many words, Who are you?. They will usually respond confidently
and enthusiastically (often even long-windedly, as all humans, as a generalisation, love
to talk about themselves). But ask the same question to the average young person and
at best they will reply with a convoluted non-answer. More commonly their answer
will consist of confused looks and grunts or single syllables. At worst their answer
will include cursing and open aggression at the insolence of such a stupid question.
Paradoxically, as well as wanting to fit in, the adolescent wants independence (Coleman,

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1996). They value making their own choices, even as they dont often know what they
should be, and a key part of the adolescent process is the forming of a functional
decision-making capacity. They want to be able to make mistakes, but they want to do
so (whether they realise it or not) in a safe environment. Added to this is the
contradictory attitude that many adults have in relation to the teenagers in their lives
(teachers and parents particularly) in that they want teenagers to have some degree
of independence, but also want to stop them making the same mistakes they did
(Coleman, 1996). We are happy with young people making their own choices as long
as they make the choice we want them to (perhaps the maxim that some things need
to be learnt the hard way would be a more appropriate approach).
This dichotomy is what makes secondary teaching so challenging and sometimes seem
close to impossible.
School for many adolescents is nothing but obligation. They do it because they
apparently must, with no other perceivable option available to them. It is too often
akin to the daily grind adults in jobs they hate suffer through: Looking busy avoiding
work, avoiding the boss, waiting impatiently for lunch, biding time until the weekend
and the next break from work and so on. The conveyer-belt, production-line mentality
of many education systems and schools could easily be mistaken for facilitating little
more than factories of compliant cookie-cutter workers to fuel a consumerist society,
which looks with suspicion on real creativity or anyone poking their head outside of
the box (Freire, 1970).
Schools: Too often institutions defined by boredom and obligation. Why would anyone
choose to be there? (And why the hell would anyone go back there to become a
teacher?! That least enviable of positions in too bureaucratic a framework.)
Educational researcher Sam Intrator (2003) describes a typical student he
encounters:
Like most of the students whom I came to know[at the school], Jeff was a young
man of deep passion and diverse interests. He was energetic, thoughtful and
playful. When I heard him talk about his dreams, fears, and hopes, he reminded
me of how complex the journey of adolescence is in todays world. He was hard
at work figuring himself out and learning to understand his place in his peer
group, his family, and the world. In his writing, thinking and conversations, he

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was trying on ideas and actively constructing a sense of self; yet his openness in
school to big ideas seemed to get shucked off like a backpack outside the
classroom. (pg. 21)
But it needn't be like this. Schools dont have to be the most regimented institutions
in our society, after prisons (Robinson, 2009). Education doesnt have to equal
conformity. Or kill creativity, as the educationalist Ken Robinson puts it.
Picking up from Howard Gardners foundational theory of multiple intelligences,
expounded in his seminal work Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences
(1983), where Garner explains the numerous fruitful ways in which we can
understand intelligence outside of a solely mathematical-logical/linguistic
understanding as promoted in standardised IQ tests, Ken Robinson has spent much of
his career rallying against what he sees as the destructive environment in many of
our schools, where, instead of promoting creativity and creative thinking, they too
often penalise it (Robinson, 2009).
The question arises: Should adolescents be forced to fit the current framework of
education, or should secondary education instead be created to fit the needs of the
adolescent learner? Unfortunately this is rarely the same thing.
Paulo Freire, progressive educationalist and the key proponent of a liberationist
approach to education, describes this system as a banking approach to education
(Freire, 1970). He recognises that teaching is a narrative discipline and that the
profession is suffering from, as he puts it, narration sickness (pg. 52).
The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalised,
and predictable. Freire explains, Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to
the existential experience of the students. His task is to fill the students with the
contents of his narration - contents which are detached from reality, disconnected
from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. He
continues: Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated,
and alienating verbosity (pg. 52). Freire sees this kind of teaching as playing a part
in oppression when instead education should be in the practice of liberation. He goes
so far as to see this banking approach as having a dehumanising function in which the
more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they

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are (pg. 53). He goes on to explain that, under this system, the scope of action
allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing deposits,
and that ultimately, through this process, it is the people themselves who are filed
away through the lack of creativity, transformation, and knowledge in this (at best)
misguided system (pg. 53). Freire sees the traditional institutions of education as
complicit in removing agency from people, just as young people particularly are in
search of agency, and when it should be doing the exact opposite. His concept of
knowledge, vastly different from what he sees propagated under the banking
approach, is ideally one of invention and reinvention, emerging through the
restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world,
with the world, and with each other (pg. 53). His theory is that teaching and learning
should be an exciting journey of discovery for both the teacher and the learner, the
result of a deeply human engagement, and that ultimately the process should bring
learners to realise their own oppression and look to free themselves through
education itself. In this sense Paulo Freire advances a concept of education which is
inherently political, and inherently socialist.
Picking up from where Freire leaves off, the contemporary academic bell hooks (her
name is intentionally decapitalised) extends his thinking in her book Teaching to
Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994) to reflect on postcolonial
issues and the way that a liberationist approach can be used by feminist teachers to
undermine patriarchy. She proposes that for liberation to take place in the classroom
teachers need to be prepared to take the same risks they ask of their students. In my
classrooms, I do not expect students to take any risks that I would not take, to share in
any way that I would not share (pg. 21). She spells out her understanding of the role
that narrative, in a personal sense, can play in the teaching and learning experience:
When professors bring narratives of their experiences into classroom discussions it
eliminates the possibility that we [the teacher] can function as all-knowing, silent
interrogators. It is often productive if professors take the risk first, linking
confessional narratives to academic discussions so as to show how experience can
illuminate and enhance our understanding of academic material. But most professors
must practice being vulnerable in the classroom, being wholly present in mind, body,

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and spirit (pg. 21) (italics mine). I think this is key. To make the content of a
curriculum relevant the teacher must recognise the importance, not just of what the
students already knows, but the impact of their personal experience to enhance their
learning.
This idea comes straight from the pages of art theorist and educator John Dewey
(1938); perhaps the quintessential progressive educationalist, who detailed a
teaching philosophy based primarily on the concept of experience. He begins, much as
Freire does, by explaining two opposing educational theories: one the idea that
education is development from within, and the other that it is formation from
without (pg. 17). This is effectively traditional versus progressive educationalist
models. The traditional approach (similar to what Freire terms the banking concept)
being an understanding that it is the teachers role to impart knowledge to the
student who is basically an passive, empty vessel in need of tutelage. While the
progressive model, which Dewey proposes, is one where who the student is, what
they know, and, particularly, what they have experienced, is inherently relevant to
the teaching and learning process. He promotes a system where instead of
imposition from above there is instead the expression and cultivation of
individuality; to external discipline in opposed free activity; to learning from texts
and teachers [only], learning from experience (pg. 19). He explains how vital this
change in approach is in light of our changing world. As Ken Robinson explains, we no
longer know the jobs we are educating young people to be equipped for in the future
(Robinson, 2009). For this preparation to take place Dewey recognises that students
must be taught to make the most of the opportunities of present life, putting aside
static aims and materials (pg. 20). Experience, Dewey proposes, is key to preparing
young people. Each new experience has the ability to affect how future experiences
will affect an individual and so on. It is the teachers responsibility then to select the
kind of present experiences that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent
experiences.
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This is then, if I may paint another picture, based on my understanding of these

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theorists, what I propose would be the ideal learning environment for the adolescent:
A classroom with a teacher who goes by their first name. Who opens up about who
they are, and expects their students to do the same. Who is honest when they have
made a mistake, and when a student impresses them with their insight. Who
regularly uses life experience to inform what goes on in the classroom. Who doesnt
shy away from asking big questions and letting their students do the same. A teacher
who expects much from their students and lets students expect much of them. Who
gets to know their students and sees them first as people. Who celebrates creativity
in all of its forms and knows that since much of the best art and literature come from
personal experience, so too should the way that it is taught, for content to be truly
understood. This is a classroom where assessment is not the reason to be there, but
instead a love of lifelong learning is promoted. Where assessment is instead more of
an afterthought, a requirement but not the primary guiding force behind the
enterprise. An environment where students opinions count for something and are
encouraged. A place where humour is welcome, where human connection takes place.
Where students can feel ok to fail, because that is often how we learn, but where they
get up again and are encouraged to always strive for more. A place where being
sidetracked can be ok, as long as its relevant to the liberation of students. A place
where passion for a subject and for learning itself is instilled. Where the struggles
and doubts of adolescence are not painted over or ignored, but instead incorporated in
the development of students learning. This is a place of structure with the aim of
being a place of freedom. A place where a process of doing and experiencing is seen as
relevant to the process of becoming.
In the first class I ever taught, a group of 11 girls learning Year 12 Art History, I
aimed to create an environment like this. The class had just begun looking at Modern
Art and I aimed to explain the project of Modernism as relevant to them in that it
formed the world we live in now, incorporating many of the ideas that we take for
granted. Being a girls school I saw it as necessary to include in my teaching an
understanding of the rights of women during the 19th-century to give context to the
world we live in now. Using artworks as the instigator for discussion I wanted them to
ask the big questions themselves that were motivated by the images. I encouraged

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them when this happened. I explained that art is more about asking questions than
demanding answers and that our experiences and opinions are relevant to how an
image is read. In one of my last classes we were looking at the women Impressionists,
Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot. I began the lesson with a contemporary artwork
from a feminist art collective which highlights the revealing disjuncture between
how prevalent representations of women are (in the nude particularly) compared
with how few women artists are represented in major collections of Modern Art. This
began a discussion about misogyny in art practice and in the art world and the way in
which art is a reflection, and sometimes an amplification, of the society in which it is
made. Many of the girls were not aware of the context of 19th-century sexism and
how quickly things have changed in society in regard to the rights and views of
women. I could tell the students were interested and that the art began to speak to
them in a relevant way they had not seen before. This was my aim. It was not just
about teaching the content but rather about enhancing their self-concept through
relevant material. Building new experiences for them through the curriculum.
Adolescence is hard enough. Why do we add to this struggle so often by making
young people learn things which are not relevant, or at least made relevant, to their
present lives? The features of adolescence include, as well as a sense of doubt and
self-consciousness, a curiosity about the world and a growing sense of their place in
it, and a new understanding of the nature of relationships. A great teacher should be
able to make use of these emerging aspects of self to educate young people and help
grow who they are. But for this to happen the secondary school teacher must show
authenticity. For teaching, and therefore learning, to be real, the teacher first has to
be real themself.
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References
Berger, J. (1973). Ways of Seeing. London, UK: Penguin Books.
Coleman, J. C. Adolescence in Moon B., & Mages A. S. (ed). (1996). Teaching and
Learning in the Secondary School. London, UK.
Dewey, J. (1938). Experience & Education. New York, USA: Touchstone.
Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. New York, USA: Berkley Publishing Group.
Fenstermacher, G. D., & Solis, J. F. (2004). Approaches to Teaching (Fourth Edition). New
York, USA: Teachers College Press.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London, UK: Penguin Books.
Gardner, H. (1985). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York, USA:
Basic Books.
Intrator, S. M. (2003). Tuned in and Fired Up: How Teaching Can Inspire Real Learning in
the Classroom. USA: Yale University Press.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New
York, USA: Routledge.
Richardson, E. S. (1964). In the Early World: Discovering Art Through Crafts. New York,
USA: Pantheon Books.
Robinson, K. (2009). The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. New
York, USA: Penguin Books.

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