We Reap What We Sow: Modeling Positive Adulthood for Adolescents

By Anne W. Nordholm PhD

As anyone who lives, works, or spends any time with teenagers knows, adolescence can be both the best of times and the worst of times. Teenagers are undergoing miraculous, world-altering shifts. In light of these changes, how can society help adolescents move safely from teen to adult? How can adults and adolescents engage with each other in ways that are positive and mutually beneficial to one anothers journeys?

In We Reap What We Sow, author Dr. Anne W. Nordholm blends philosophical and educational approaches to demonstrate how you can cocreate an abundant future and help you guide a young person toward an engaging and meaningful adult life. She first describes what it means to know ourselves and the difference that knowledge can make. She then offers strategies that, when modeled by adults, adolescents absorb not from what we say but how we behave.

Every person must figure out a life that is individual, is connected to a community, and has a particular historical context. This guide explores how we know and connect to our communities and how historical consciousness assists us in finding and creating meaningful work. It also considers how we can be better guides to the next generation via skilled and disciplined communication and reconsiders the institutions weve established for adolescent learning to better reflect what we understand as effective adult maturation.

Through the strategies presented in We Reap What We Sow, adults can help youth navigate adolescence to become healthy, thriving human beings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475989571

Anne W. Nordholm PhD

Dr. Anne W. Nordholm earned a PhD from Marquette University. She is a constructivist learning coach and has served as a university faculty member, project coordinator, district learning coordinator, and school development coach. She has also taught at all grade levels. Nordholm lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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Copyright © 2013 Anne W. Nordholm, PhD.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-8956-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8958-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8957-1 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 7/1/2013

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: Know Yourself

Chapter 2: Understand The Necessity Of Community

Chapter 3: Adapt To The Changing Dynamics Of History, Vitality, And Work

Chapter 4: Communicate Across Boundaries

Chapter 5: Redesign Learning Environments To Inspire Adolescents

Epilogue: Now What?

Bibliography

To my family of origin and my family of choice for the love and learning they have shared with me on this journey.

Introduction

If you spend any time with teenagers, you know that adolescence can be the best of times and the worst of times. Biological changes in adolescents are nothing less than miraculous, world-altering shifts. The adults caught in or near these developmental cyclones are frustrated, entertained, confused, and inspired by the lives of adolescents. Most compassionate adults recognize these behaviors, struggles, fears, and dreams as parts of the ongoing theater of life. We wonder how we could have ever been so clear and so confused at the same time, and on some days, even in our advanced years, we still wonder about our clarity and confusion. Staying connected to adolescents provides adults with reminders of the extreme contrasts and dualities that challenge adults daily. Perhaps the extreme contrasts of behavior and attitudes that can irritate us and make us grateful that we are no longer teenagers are actually useful reminders of how we continue to grow and expand as adults. Adolescent dramas are also opportunities for the ongoing development of compassion and the sharing of wisdom from adults who have been aware of their own discord and able to make good choices to regain equilibrium.

When our son, Greg, was fourteen, he and my husband took a father-son bonding trip to Utah. They were part of a small group of cyclists who would be riding one hundred miles in total from point to point over a period of five days. A guide and bicycle technician ensured that the group’s basic needs would be met and that everyone would have a good time. For my husband, this trip promised to be heaven. For Greg, the emotions of the trip matched the ups and downs of the mountainous terrain—heaven and hell manifested on two wheels. For the most part, Greg kept his grumbling to a minimum. On the final leg of the trip, riding from Navajo Lake to Zion Canyon, Greg was in an adolescent grip. Grumpy, achy, defiant, and generally miserable, Greg decided he had used up his willing-participant account and would not be riding that day. After much coaxing and cajoling to no avail, the trip guide advised my husband to leave Greg to his misery and ride on without him, leaving Greg to ride in the sag wagon. At the end of the ride, Jeff looked back up the mountain and, to his delight, witnessed Greg on the final descent—alone but intact and, as Greg was to admit later (I’m sure in some adolescent code), elated with his tenacity and accomplishment. He made it!

Perhaps adolescent contrasts seem more dramatic than what adults experience or allow in the day-to-day, but we can all relate to the miserable and our ability to push on (or not). It is in these moments of clear contrast when all human beings straddle the conditions of resilience and resistance.

The phase of adolescence, the time between puberty and full development of the prefrontal cortex (somewhere between ages eleven and twenty-five), is the time when human beings become painfully aware of the gulf between resistance and adaptation. Adolescent development—physically, neurologically, emotionally, and spiritually—perfectly reflects and accentuates this phase of the human journey. Adolescents intensely attend to traversing the worlds between resistance and resilience/adaptation, neglecting other, adult-preferred attentions. Risk taking, individuation, idealism, and passion are all checkpoints on the path to authentic adulthood. As Barbara Strauch (2003) reports in her book The Primal Teen,

The teenage brain may, in fact, be briefly insane. But, scientists say, it is crazy by design. The teenage brain is in flux, maddening and muddled. And that’s how it is supposed to be.

And the teenage brain is also wondrous. It’s the brains of teenagers, after all, that begin to grapple with our knottiest, most abstract concepts, with honesty and justice. In the neuronal nooks and crannies of their evolving brains, teenagers, for the first time, develop true empathy. They may find themselves, often to their own surprise, happy to stay up until three A.M. to listen to a friend in trouble, worrying about the children in war-torn Afghanistan, or passionately falling in love with the nuances of a poem. (8)

Adult observers marvel and gasp at the awkward brilliance of the adolescent hero’s or heroine’s journey. The adolescent’s quest creates a vivid contrast to the armor against vulnerability that adults take up in response to the world’s demands on us. Out of our own painful recollections and our need to spare loved ones unnecessary struggle, some adults attempt to step in as an adolescent’s surrogate prefrontal cortex, the domain of decision-making. Protecting teens from adversity is not always possible or desirable. So that leaves most adults wondering, How can adults and adolescents engage with one another in ways that are positive and mutually beneficial to one another’s journeys?

The challenge of cross-pollinating these weirdly distant yet potentially symbiotic worlds of adults and adolescents is worth the trouble. In short, we need each other. Adults need adolescents to remind us of the contrast of unreconciled dualities (resistance/resilience, fear/faith, hope/cynicism, etc.), while adolescents need to learn the ways that adults have figured out how to stand, fully vulnerable, in the circumstances that life presents and, then, make meaningful choices for this life or that. What adolescents learn from adults directly and indirectly during the passage to maturity sets in motion the ease and proficiency with which they, as adults themselves, engage the paradoxes and ambiguities that are part of being human.

This book is for any person interested in the lives and healthy development of adolescents. Why? Because we reap what we sow, and I think we all want to cocreate an abundant future. I believe that we would all like to be able to show adolescents a world that is engaging and organized to call forth from us our purpose and the courage to serve that purpose. I want to encourage intergenerational discourse as something with which we are all proficient because we know that each life and each generation holds wisdom and the potential to guide individuals to pursue dreams with tenacity and courage. Having a vision for one’s future and the skill set to wisely navigate a complex world facilitates the essence of human activity: learning, creating, and adapting. We need the natural, playful state of learning to be something everybody knows how to design and pursue because we understand that a gamesome attention to life is a real platform for change and accomplishment. We need individuals and groups, including families, schools, companies, industries, cities, and nations, to truly demonstrate an understanding of what it means to be an effective adult and of how to share that knowledge with subsequent generations.

If we would all learn or remember to view human experience and community life through a lens of abundance and challenge, more adults and, then, more young people would be more excited to engage with the world and one another. I believe that challenging our assumptions about meaningful work and career satisfaction can open up new possibilities for all sorts of folks. I long for a time of minimizing the sense of hopelessness that keeps so many adults and adolescents trapped in vicious cycles of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse. I hope for a reimagining of age boundaries that currently limit access to the wisdom of other generations.

I imagine a future in which more and more people are able to bring their voices to the table of democratic decision-making with an increased tolerance for ambiguity and paradox. I envision that, from expanded participation, there will emerge a rejuvenated capacity to tackle systemic and endemic problems like environmental toxicity and poverty. I imagine that we can learn to speak differently with one another—across generations, economies, interests, cultures, and aisles. I believe that living the reality that we are truly connected will revitalize our most essential human capabilities—to learn, to create, to adapt—and allow us to be more responsive in an ever-changing and compelling world.

The future I imagine here is possible. However, if we are to create this future, several things need to happen. We will have to wake up to the cultural assumptions we have about reality, learning, creating, and adapting. We need to understand the vital dynamic of self-determination and collective journeys. We need to rethink the institutions that are disenfranchising some of us and preventing us from taking an active role in changing our lives and cocreating futures. We need to communicate across all boundaries and perspectives about the patterns and trends in the historical context that we share.

The ideas in this book wax a bit philosophical. The intention is not to lose you to abstraction but to engage you in an exploration of what has shaped our (yours and mine) journeys thus far. Sadly, philosophy has gotten a bad reputation over the years as it tends (at least in the West) to overemphasize the linear, hierarchical aspects of logic and progress. The linearity, the rules, the jargon, and the abstractions tend to get lost on mainstream people in the United States, who mostly just want to Get ’er done! However, if we choose to live our lives as whole people, working from a more unified, systemic approach, there is nothing more practical than engaging the tools of philosophy—unpacking and scrutinizing the collection and ordering of ideas and beliefs that consciously and unconsciously influence our values, thoughts, and actions, both individually and collectively.

The thinking of José Ortega y Gasset is a recurring influence in this book and offers a mental model for consideration that includes constructivism, perspectivism, and historical and vital reason. In our world today, there is so much tension and fragmented action in and around our institutions that it suggests to me that certain aspects of our policies are presumed to be permanent and unchangeable fixtures of our reality. Ortega’s philosophy during the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century dealt with this phenomenon. He thought and wrote about a Spain that had gotten complacent in its national identity formation, its exceptionalism, because, as he would suggest, it assumed that its golden age of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries provided a lasting and immutable identity.

As Ortega suggested to his Spanish audience in the 1900s, and I am suggesting now, we are in a historical crisis. A historical crisis is a natural human event that occurs when the system of convictions belonging to a previous generation no longer seems to work or regularly creates unintended consequences that compound the original issues. During a historical crisis, we get disoriented because the system of convictions that acted as the map that allowed us to move within the environment with a certain level of security seems suddenly unreliable. In Man and Crisis (1958), Ortega suggests that we (and our ideas) begin to move from here to there without order or arrangement; [we] try this side and the other, but without complete convictions. We convince ourselves and each other that all is well and that the world is just making a bit of an adjustment—nothing to worry about (86).

Complacency is one of the patterns of life that contributes to the development of a historical crisis. Complacency is living life from the belief that one is a finished project. We can be complacent about our individual development as well as collectively complacent about our local or national development. Once we are complacent with ourselves, we seek external expertise or targets to blame since some mess or brokenness must be someone else’s job to fix. The opposite of complacency is to be authentic in one’s own life, to stay conscious of one’s own learning, creating, and adapting that exists in community within a particular historical context. If I am unconscious about any one of those design elements of human life, my vitality, creativity, and personal mastery are at risk. The dis-ease that eventually emerges from complacency is the awareness that we are out of alignment with ourselves. Authenticity, or self-alignment, refers to the experience of being fully in sync with one’s most essential beliefs and purposes and then acting in accordance with those beliefs and purposes. Our emotions offer valuable feedback regarding our state of alignment. Generally, a sense of calm and wholeness suggests that we are in alignment, while anxiety and anger suggest that something is out of alignment. Alignment implies that one is engaged with one’s circumstances in a state of learning, creating, and adapting rather than complying, escaping, or dismissing. When a culture or society is out of alignment—in other words, when actions and attitudes are running far afield from essential beliefs and values—a historical crisis ensues.

Throughout his writing, Ortega advocated ways to look at reality to determine whether we are in sync with our authenticity. We can test our environments for one of the following three indicators to determine whether we are, in fact, in a historical crisis.

•  There is an increased tendency to abdicate the most vital of conversations to experts, to people with power who are external to us—for example, they, as in, "If only they would …"

•  A current begins to run through daily life, suggesting individual and collective isolationism.

•  There is very little discussion, personally or collectively, about reconsidering the appropriateness of solutions and public policies crafted in previous generations.

Ortega is as applicable to twenty-first-century United States as he was to twentieth-century Spain. His compelling mandate was to awaken the citizens to regenerate the power and glory that once were Spain’s because it had been deliberate and bold in its engagement on the world’s stage. An example of a current historical crisis in our times is the polarized Congress that has its lowest confidence rating in all of American history. Clearly, we are out of alignment when we, good people, cannot find a way to align our actions and attitudes (policies and laws) with our essential beliefs and values. Could it be that we are presumptuous in believing that we all have a shared understanding of this nation’s essential beliefs and values? Could it be that what we have collectively learned and created over the last several decades has evoked a need for adaptation? Adaptation recalls all prior shared understandings for reconsideration given our evolving national consciousness.

Using the criteria from above, we note that there is an increased tendency to avoid the treacherous waters of partisanship and allow the experts to handle this issue. And just who are the experts? The members of Congress? The newly empowered PACs and lobbyists?

Ortega and the other thought leaders discussed in this book offer an interruption to the vicious cycles that historical crises establish. The three criteria offered above that help us spot a historical crisis, and the contributions of thinkers who address the pathways into and out of historical crises, seem like a good idea at this critical point in our collective wonderings. It is not all doom and gloom. We do not have to withdraw from one another and make individualistic choices that seemingly protect ourselves and our families from the others we are told not to trust. We need compelling means to regain our connections with one another and tap into the incredible wealth of resources available to all of us as we choose and craft what’s next.

One assumption that I make in this book is that pretty much everything we need in order to thrive is already here, waiting for us. Connected to that assumption is the belief that circumstances reflect the reality that each person comprises dynamic energies that are both physical and nonphysical. As we live in both physical and nonphysical circumstances, we develop preferences and practices of naming, claiming, and distributing resources along habituated biases. One habituated bias addressed in this book is the assumption that our circumstances, which some refer to as reality, are outside of ourselves. With the help of Ortega’s body of work, we can see that the problem with believing that the self and circumstances are separate is that if reality exists separate from ourselves, we have limited power over its shape. Embodiment is the ability to find agency in oneself regarding one’s circumstances, and that agency can be revealed in dialogue, collaborative inquiry, presence, and the application of scientific discoveries, particularly quantum physics. Understanding how learning, creating, and adapting happen led me to a deeper engagement with attention, memory, communication, and the world of neuroscience.

Brain function and its influence on self-awareness, particularly emotional intelligence and self-determination, are keys to understanding who I am and how I operate in the world. The mysteries of neuroscience have been revealing themselves more and more with the advances of technology and brain imaging. It seems rather odd to me—and it’s part of the historical crisis that affects educational policy—that so few educators are proficient with brain form and function and social-emotional intelligence as they relate to and affect working memory, attention, self-management, and so on. Even more ironic is that policymakers in education rarely include developmentally appropriate information in their decision-making. This lack of proficiency with biological factors of learning and human development seems comparable to going to a doctor and discovering that, at best, the person about to advise me on my health, or surgically alter my body, has had two courses on physiology. Scary!

In this book, I assert that the design of secondary education to sufficiently engage the hearts and minds of adolescents in the United States is directly correlated to the will and skill of adults in the United States to deliberately and honorably share their wisdom with the next generation. I also assert that teacher preparation and teacher development programs are generally insufficient attempts at conveying and allowing that human learners are both physical and nonphysical beings. Allowing for the inclusion of the nonphysical aspects of being would be signaled by learning communities’ adhering to design principles of love, joy, and self-determination to guide expectations and