Educating Adolescents Around the Globe: Becoming Who You Are in a World Full of Expectations

331 Pages·2020·6.692 MB·English

by  Meike Watzlawik, Alina Burkholder

Cultural Psychology of Education 11
Meike Watzlawik
Alina Burkholder   Editors
Educating
Adolescents
Around
the Globe
Becoming Who You are in a World Full
of Expectations
Cultural Psychology of Education
Volume 11
Series Editor
Giuseppina Marsico, DISUFF, University of Salerno, Salerno, Italy
Editorial Board
Jaan Valsiner, Department of Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg,
Denmark
Nandita Chaudhary, Lady Irwin College, University of Delhi, New Delhi, India
Maria Virginia Dazzani, Instituto de Psicologia, Universidade Federal da Bahia,
Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
Xiao-Wen Li, School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal
University, Shanghai Shi, China
Harry Daniels, Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Nicolay Veresov, Monash University, Australia
Wolff-Michael Roth, Faculty of Education, University of Victoria, Victoria,
BC, Canada
Yasuhiro Omi, Hachioji, Tokyo, Japan
This bookseriesfocuses onthe development ofnew qualitative methodologies for
educational psychology and interdisciplinary enrichment in ideas and practices. It
publishes key ideas of methodology, different approaches to schooling, family,
relationships and social negotiations of issues of educational processes. It presents
new perspectives, such as dynamic systems theory, dialogical perspectives on the
development of the self within educational contexts, and the role of various
symbolicresourcesineducationalprocesses.Theseriespublishesresearchrootedin
the cultural psychology framework, thus combining the fields of psychology,
anthropology,sociology,educationandhistory.Culturalpsychologyexamineshow
human experience is organized culturally, through semiotic mediation, symbolic
action, accumulation and exchange of inter-subjectively shared representations
of the life-space. By taking this approach, the series breaks through the
“ontological” conceptualization of education in which processes of education are
localized in liminality. In this series, education is understood as goal-oriented
personalmovementthatisatthecoreofsocietalchangeinallitsdifferentforms—
from kindergarten to vocational school and lifelong learning. It restructures
personal lives both inside school and outside the school. The cultural psychology
approach to education fits the global processes of most countries becoming
multi-cultural in their social orders, reflects the interdisciplinary nature of
educational psychology, and informs the applications of educational psychology
ina vast variety ofcultural contexts.
This book series:
(cid:129) Is the first to approach education from a cultural psychology perspective.
(cid:129) Offers an up-to-date exploration of recent work in cultural psychology of
education.
(cid:129) Brings together new, novel, and innovative ideas.
(cid:129) Broadens the practical usability of different trends of cultural psychology of
education.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13768
Meike Watzlawik Alina Burkholder
(cid:129)
Editors
Educating Adolescents
Around the Globe
Becoming Who You Are in a World Full
of Expectations
123
Editors
Meike Watzlawik AlinaBurkholder
SigmundFreudUniversity SigmundFreudUniversity
Berlin, Germany Berlin, Germany
ISSN 2364-6780 ISSN 2364-6799 (electronic)
Cultural Psychologyof Education
ISBN978-3-030-37899-8 ISBN978-3-030-37900-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37900-1
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Preface of the Series Editor
Adolescence as a Cultural Stage of Human Life
Twostrangecoincidences—ormaybe Ishould call them convergences—happened
to me while reading the manuscript Educating Adolescents Around the Globe:
Becoming Who You Are in a World Full of Expectations, edited by Meike
Watzlawik and Alina Burkholder. The first is that I was teaching Developmental
andEducationalPsychologytoaquitelargegroupofmiddleandhighschoolItalian
teachers who will deal with preadolescents and adolescents in an increasingly
globalized world and with highly differentiated educational needs. The second is
thatIwasbusywiththesupervisionofoneofmybrilliantBrazilianPh.D.students
who is working on the “plan for the future” of vulnerable adolescents in Salvador
da Bahia, one of the poorest parts of Brazil. Why are these two things connected
with the Watzlawik and Burkholder volume? Because I painfully realized how
unpreparedwearetodealwiththealwayschangingpsychologicalconfigurationof
contemporaryadolescenceindifferentpartsoftheworld.TheItalianteacherswere
somehowdisquietedbythebasicassumptionthat,firstandforemost,theywillface
human beings occupied and preoccupied with their rapid biological development
and itscultural framing. Adolescentsenter schoolswiththeir bodies intheprocess
ofsexualmaturation.Thiscreatestheneedforgrantingculturallyacceptableforms
ofconduct.Byignoringtherelevanceoftheembodiedaspectandthepsychological
implications of school life at this age (as schools seem to do), we run the risk of
disregarding the very core of adolescent identity construction and how school
contributes to it (Marsico & Tateo, 2018). The second of the above-mentioned
coincidencesconcernedmyownsurpriseinanalyzingtheresearchdataofmyPh.D.
studentwhoaskedagroupoftheyoungestadolescentslivinginaperipheralareaof
onethelargestBraziliancitiestotakepicturesofwhatmakessensetothemintheir
living context.1 Technologies and social media were highlighted as meaningful
1The name of the Ph.D. student is Ayla Arapiraca Galvão, and she applied the photovoice
technique(Carpiano,2009).Thedataisstillunderanalysis.
v
vi PrefaceoftheSeriesEditor
partsoftheirdailylife.Whatsurprisedmeaboutthis?Thefactthatthoseboysand
girls are living in-between reality and virtuality and consider both real, fluctuating
between the two. I suffered the same naiveté of the Italian teachers: neglecting the
evidenceoftheadolescents’ordinarylife.Thisledmetorealizethatwe—associal
scientists, psychologists, and educators—are failing to understand the growing
needs of the youngest because our epistemic categories are out of fashion, extre-
mely normative, and incapable of grasping the ever-changing psychological con-
figuration called adolescence.
Evenworse,wearetoo“clinical”aswetendtoseethe“pathology”ineachand
every little divergent conduct of the youngest. We are also too “cynical” because
we do not recognize the subversive and innovative power of the adolescent.
We overlook the pathos of life that manifests itself in different ways during
adolescence. The book Educating Adolescents Around the Globe: Becoming Who
You Are in a World Full of Expectations is, then, needed to contrast these mis-
leading tendencies.
Since the first proposal, I found this book an arena to debate the role of social
expectation and cultural guidance in the process of “becoming.” Adolescents have
the developmental task to become who they want to be but under specific condi-
tions (Tateo, 2015). The developmental trajectory is not totally free as it unfolds
within a culturally settled window of possibilities (Tateo, 2019). Schooling is the
main tool to frame this developmental path (Marsico, 2018a).
This volume is, also, truly international since it discusses the educational prob-
lemsofadolescentsfromdifferentpartoftheworldandovercomes,inthisway,the
predominance of North Americanand Anglo-Saxon perspectiveson the topic.
Aseditor-in-chiefofthebookseriesthathoststhisbook,Iamgladtoseetheextent
towhichthetopicsdiscussedhererefertowhathasbeenalreadypublishedinother
volumesofthesameseries.Forexample,Omi(2015)discussedtheglobalizationof
education in Japan as well as the always complex relationship between alterity,
values, and socialization processes that has been explored in all its multifaceted
components in the volume edited by Branco and Oliviera (2018). In addition, the
tensioned dialogue between educationand culture, whichisoneoftheaxes ofthis
volume,representsthecoreoftherecentbookeditedbyHviidandMärtsin(2019).
This makes evident the increasing preoccupation of a group of international
scholars who are questioning the rampant neoliberal discourse circulating in edu-
cationalsettingsworldwide (Szulevicz, MayEckerdal,Marsico &Valsiner,2016).
According to Burkholder (this volume, page 325):
Systems that attempt to deliver the same education in the same manner to all students—
regardless of their circumstances and needs—are bound to fail to achieve the goal of
servingallchildrenwellandprovidingaspaceforalltogrowandsucceed.Thisprinciple
appliestoallaspectsofeducation,fromschoolstructurestoteachingmethodstocurricula.
It should be at the front of policy-makers’ minds when designing and implementing
reforms,anditshouldbeinthebackofteachers’andothereducators’mindsduringdaily
educationalactivitiesandstudentinteractions.
PrefaceoftheSeriesEditor vii
As I have claimed (Marsico, 2018b), one of the most pressing challenges of
schoolingworldwide isthat the education of the future must be regarded as global
in its vision yet local in its solutions. The volume Educating Adolescents Around
the Globe: Becoming Who You Are in a World Full of Expectations provides the
reader with the conceptual tools to imagine future interventions in this direction.
Salerno, Italy Giuseppina Marsico
January 2020
References
Branco,A.,&Oliveira,M.C.(Eds.)(2018).Alterity,valuesandsocialization:Humandevelopment
within educational contexts. Cultural Psychology of Education (Vol. 6).Cham, Switzerland:
Springer.
Carpiano,R.M,(2009).Cometakeawalkwithme:The“go-along”interviewasanovelmethod
for studying the implications of place for health and well-beingin. Health & Place, 15(1),
263–272.
Hviid,P.,&Märtsin,M.(Eds.)(2019).Cultureineducationandeducationinculture.Tensioned
dialogues and creative constructions. Cultural Psychology of Education (Vol. 10). Cham,
Switzerland:Springer.
Marsico, G. (2018a). Development and education as crossing socio-cultural boundaries.
In A. Rosa, & J. Valsiner (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of sociocultural psychology
(2nded.,pp.302–316).Cambridge,UK:CambridgeUniversityPress.
Marsico, G. (2018b). The challenges of the schooling from cultural psychology of education.
IntegrativePsychologicalandBehaviouralSciences,52(3),474–489.
Marsico,G.,&Tateo.,L.(Eds.)(2018).Theemergenceofselfintheeducationalcontexts.Cultural
PsychologyofEducation(Vol.8).Cham,Switzerland:Springer.
Omi.,Y.(2015).ThepotentialoftheglobalizationofeducationinJapan:TheJapanesestyleof
schoolsportsactivities(Bukatsu).InG.Marsico,M.V.Dazzani,M.Ristum,&A.C.Bastos
(Eds.), Educational contexts and borders through a cultural lens: Looking inside. Viewing
outside(pp.255–266).NewYork:Springer.
Szulevicz,T.,MayEckerdal,R.,Marsico,G.,&Valsiner,J.(2016).Whendisruptivebehaviour
meetsoutcome-basededucation.Psihologija,49(4),447–468.
Tateo, L. (2015). Continuity and discontinuity of the educational context. In G. Marsico,
M.V.Dazzani,M.Ristum,&A.C.Bastos(Eds.),Educationalcontextsandbordersthrougha
culturallens:Lookinginside.Viewingoutside(pp.29–54).NewYork:Springer.
Tateo,L.(2019).Introduction:Theinherentambivalenceofeducationaltrajectoriesandthezone
of proximal development with reduced potential. In L. Tateo (Ed.), Educational Dilemmas:
ACulturalPsychologicalPerspective(pp.1–21).London:Routledge.
Introduction
Dear reader,
This volume will take you on an exciting tour of the current state of adolescent
educationaroundtheworld.YouwilltravelfromIndiatoDenmark—withstopsin
Kenya,Germany,Brazil,andJapan—tolearnaboutvariouseducationsystemsand
their challenges as they relate to adolescents.
Our 26 authors hail from around the globe and are scientists, researchers,
practitioners,andeducators.Theywillfirstprovideyouawindowintotheworldof
adolescents more generally, overviewing what it means to be an adolescent from
differentperspectives.Then,theywillshowjusthowdeeplyculturalinfluencesand
context penetrate our respective education systems. Not only will you learn about
how education is structured differently internationally, you will also be given a
glimpseintothechallengesadolescentsarefacedwithindifferentcountriesandget
toknowspecificgroupswhoalltoooftenfallthroughthecracksofthesystemand
fail to receive the support they need. Sometimes, reforms are put in place to
mitigate particular issues, but the injustices certain groups experience repeat time
and again.
Amongthemanygroupshighlightedinthisvolume,youwillencounterrefugees
in Germany and an education system struggling with their successful integration;
youwilllearnaboutthemanytrialsenduredbystreet-connectedyouthinKenya,a
group that is largely overlooked; you will familiarize yourself with a program
whichseekstoeducateimprisonedadolescentsinBrazil;youwillbeintroducedto
delinquent teenagers from Japan and teachers who are going above and beyond to
help them create a better future; you will read about the consequences of rising
stress levels among adolescent students in Denmark; and you will meet people
fighting for the rights of girls in India, where dropping out of school due to early
marriage remains much too common. The volume concludes with an ambitious
final chapter which synthesizes the different findings, building a general model of
intervention with the aim of leaving no one behind.
Educationaffordstheskillsandtoolsnecessarytofunctioninanygivensociety,
and schooling plays an important role. However, as you will learn in this volume,
ix
x Introduction
formaleducationisorganizedquitedifferentlyacrosscountries—fromthesystems’
general structures to the curricula, learning beliefs, and teaching styles—and rea-
sons for why many are not able to receive or complete their education are myriad.
Anddespitethevariouschallengesanddiversityofeducationsystem,oneapproach
seems to be needed for all: to recognize each adolescent as an individual with
specific needs, experiences, and desires that must be deliberately addressed by
policies, educators, and other stakeholders.
Now, as we send this title to press, we hope that it will yield an interesting and
educationalexperienceforyou.Whilewecannotguideyouthrougheachandevery
continentandintroduceyoutoeverymarginalizedgroupofadolescents,wehopeto
send you on a journey that covers a wide and broadly representative swathe of
adolescent education and is thought-provoking. It certainly was for us!
Alina Burkholder
Meike Watzlawik