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!