Erikson/Marcia

Erik Erikson believed that everyone goes through a psychosoical crises, and that we go through several several times over again throughout our life.  Below is a picture of those different levels and the approximate age for each of those.  These ages do not define and solely claim that level, but that is typically the age we first experience it and when it is the strongest seen.

According to the chart, in high school, students would be facing the Identity v Role Confusion.  I would agree with this, but I think there is more to that.  Students when they first are in your class will deal with the trust v mistrust level.  Can they come to you and trust that you will help them?  That you know what you are teaching?  They deal with intimacy v isolation.  While it may not be on a marriage level, it can easily correlate with group work v individual assignment.  Are we as educators giving students the chance to work through group assignments, helping them develop that skill or are we keeping them to work by themselves and learning not to be open to others ideas?

I know that the teacher I am observing this semester is constantly putting students in groups to work together.  And not all of it is necessarily group work, but she is allowing the students to learn to work with different type of people and allowing them to communicate their thoughts so that they are more proficient in communicating.  I definitely want to be able to do that in my classroom and allow students to learn to express themselves in a group setting and how to appropriately do that.

I honestly think that you could eliminate the "approximate age" on the picture above and change it to "time in the classroom".  The beginning, first day, of class and different levels throughout until the last day of class.  Students will most likely experience some of all of these crisis'.

Now if we look at James Marcia's work, we can see a type of "commitment level" that students can experience in finding themselves.  Students will fluctuate through all of these, diffusion, foreclosure, moratorium, and achievement.  I think that more or less students will be somewhere between foreclosure and moratorium, or in other words, they are committed to an idea of themselves but haven't tried to explore it to they are actively exploring different options of themselves and what they like.

The following link will take you to an online book title Drama and Theatre with Children: International Perspectives.  This book is really cool because it talks about how children find themselves and what they perceive in this world and there is even a section about Erikson's theory and how we as theatre educators should not try and force a student to have an identity crisis to achieve a level of understanding, but that students should find a sense of themselves in order to portray any type of role.  It's a great read if you have the time!

Physical Development/Bronfenbrenner

High school is a challenging time for any student.  They have expectations to meet, friends to impress, their bodies are still changing from puberty.  It's a lot to take it!  Take into account that we as teachers are trying to add to their development and make them smarter and more educated students and you have a lot to think about for a student.  But I want to address in this post how their physical development affects their learning in the classroom.

Now, obviously, students in high school are still going through a stage of puberty.  Boys voices are still changing, body hair growing, big appetites, sexual urges.  Girls are dealing with periods, appetites, sexual urges, leveling off on their height.  That is a lot of change happening to them on a daily basis.  They are confused and very self-cautious.  Now we as educators can help students feel safe about their bodies in our classroom by helping provide physical activities throughout the lesson to help them be comfortable with their body and using it in multiple ways.

Educators need to be aware of the different influences affecting a student as well.  Their family, their religious beliefs, friends, ect.  Lets look at religious first.  If you look at Utah, the predominant religion is Mormonism, but not everyone follows that religion.  So we need to make sure our lessons are not geared toward everyone understanding a reference to a particular religion because not everyone will understand it, even if they grew up around that religion!  Parents will have expectations of their kids as well that we need to be cautious of.  If parents are expecting their kid to get an "A" in a class, helping provide the material and resources for the student to be successful to get that "A" is something that we can do.  Here is link that you can read that helps give some important information that teachers and parents can do to help work together to benefit the students learning.

Vygotsky

The cool thing about theatre is that we kind of always are incorporating Vygotsky and his theory.  In the sense that in order for one to become a better performer, they need to practice of course, but they need to push themselves just outside their comfort zone, or in this case, the Zone of Proximal Development.  The zone of proximal development, AKA the ZPD, is a range of tasks or objectives that one is ready to accomplish with help to get them to the next level of understanding.  Actors work with each other and with a director to get to that next level, as do teachers.

Fellow actors, students, directors, teachers.  All of these things could be known as people who are More Knowledgeable Others, or someone who has experience in a certain area of learning.  They can help guide one to becoming a better performer.  In high school, that typically will fall to the teacher, AKA me.  We help students to get to that next level of understanding in performance.

In theatre, one subject is easily connected to another part of theatre.  So internalization of material and knowledge is easily transferable between all of the theatre world.   No matter where you go, you can understand theatre, even if you don't know the language.  You can understand what they are wanting or what an actors objective is by understanding how facial expressions and body gestures work.  How the tone in one's voice portrays emotions.  We teach all of that in the classroom!

In this link, you will find a PDF that talks about the framework of theatre in school.  On page 9, you can find on the side that theatre's work from one class to the next is scaffolded, giving the students the education they need succeed as they progress in theatre and learn more in depth techniques, continuing outside of high school and to the college level and beyond.  We have scaffolding techniques for a specific unit but that unit in and of itself is its own scaffolding to understand the next unit.  That's what I love about theatre, and why I can't wait to teach it in the classroom!

Teachers behavior in the classroom should be driven to help students understand that what they bring to the classroom (their background, their experiences, their life) can help them understand the relevance of the topic for the day.  We as teachers need to be aware of our students backgrounds to an extent so that we can relate the material to them.  Helping them to internalize that something that they learned at home can apply to the work at hand in class.