We Reap What We Sow: Modeling Positive Adulthood for Adolescents - Softcover

Nordholm, PhD Anne W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1475989563 ISBN 13: 9781475989564

Verlag: iUniverse, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

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 another's 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 we've 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.

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We Reap What We Sow

Modeling Positive Adulthood for Adolescents

By Anne W. Nordholm

iUniverse LLC

Copyright © 2013 Anne W. Nordholm, PhD
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8956-4

Contents

Introduction...............................................................
ix
Chapter 1: Know Yourself...................................................
1
Chapter 2: Understand the Necessity of Community...........................
29
Chapter 3: Adapt to the Changing Dynamics of History, Vitality, and Work...
51
Chapter 4: Communicate across Boundaries...................................
89
Chapter 5: Redesign Learning Environments to Inspire Adolescents...........
113
Epilogue: Now What?........................................................
157
Bibliography...............................................................
167
Index......................................................................
179

CHAPTER 1

Know Yourself

* * *

Make sure that [the device] is set up properly and connected to the network.

Before calling for service, review this list. It may save you time andexpense. This list includes common occurrences that are not theresult of defective workmanship or materials in [this device].

If [the device] is not operating, be sure the plug is pushed firmlyinto the electrical outlet and that the device is turned "on."

These samples are text from real user's guides. It seems that, increasingly,over the forty years that I have accumulated owner's manuals andmanufacturer's instructions for devices, the distributors of such documentshave added longer and more explicit troubleshooting tips to their booklets,which are usually prefaced by, "Before you contact our customer servicedepartment ..."

Now imagine that every time our lives get a little out of whack, weare able to consult an owner's manual for possible solutions to the currentoperational crisis. Believe it or not, human beings come equipped withmanufacturer's instructions and complementary troubleshooting guides.Though these remedies are not found in the convoluted, overly technicaltext of guides for technological gadgets and household appliances, we canengage our physical and nonphysical feedback systems to tell us whensomething is off. We can also use our skills of learning, creating, andadapting to get ourselves back "on" and operating in alignment again.We gain access to our self-contained and externally reinforced owner'smanuals by becoming self-aware and proficient in learning, creating, andadapting. Knowing oneself is the pathway to the owner's manual andsmooth operating.

The shuffled and dramatic version of the "owner's manual" isusually introduced to human beings in adolescence. Based on varyingcircumstances, the manual could be dumped on us all at once. In othercases, the manual comes more incrementally—chapter by chapter, sentenceby sentence. It all depends on the unique, nontransferable journey of eachlife. For example, in normal development, at around the onset of puberty,an adolescent's brains, hormones, physicality, and emotions reorganizein ways that highlight the contrast of being a member of a group as wellas a separate and unique individual. This realization is at once terrifyingand liberating. Anyone who remembers his or her own adolescence, hasparented adolescents, or has spent much time with them can speak to thetrapeze ride between autonomy and belonging that marks the adolescentpassage, a particularly challenging chapter of the owner's manual.

I remember when our son went through a challenging phase inhis early teen years when, according to his values, he had to be seenin acceptable, brand-name clothing—regardless of the cost or who waspaying for it. From his perspective, his identity demanded it. I gave greatspeeches about balancing individuality and peer pressure with a dash offinancial responsibility, but the line between autonomy and belonging wasnarrow and constantly changing. Paradoxically, it was essential to look likeeveryone else while individuating—the proverbial keeping up with theadolescent Joneses. We all know adults who are still working to reconcilethis duality of self and group, apparently having missed or misunderstoodthis chapter of the owner's manual.

Based on the work of José Ortega y Gasset and the other thinkersincluded in this book, being an authentic adult human being includesliving one's life mindful of one's design. By design I do not mean a linearpursuit of perfection. The assumption here is that human design is aflexible, dynamic tension among three components: learning, creation, andadaptation. These three design elements are common to all living systemsand serve life's intention of alignment and expansion with a universeof infinite energy. These dynamic system processes fluctuate betweencontrasting phenomena such as infinite/finite, death/birth, bliss/struggle,freedom/enslavement, ritual/novelty, and capacity/passion. Discoveringone's identity along these continua happens as a person engages with andresponds to his or her circumstances. Each of us attempts to reconcilethese tensions, and by doing so we consciously evolve ourselves to thrivein increasingly complex environments and with increasing understandingof our own alignment with possibility. The more we expand and evolve,the more we understand the owner's manual and the more self-aware webecome.

As early as 1914 in Meditations on Quixote, Ortega began to explorehis philosophical stance that individuals are not separate from theircircumstances. His now-famous philosophical premise—"I am I and mycircumstances"—provides a useful lens for revealing and pursuing thegeneral attributes of an authentic, self-determining adult. For Ortega,human being and becoming was all about what happens as each personnegotiates between the necessities of our physical world and the freedomof our nonphysical world. A human self who is fused with his or hercircumstances is, for Ortega, the most essential owner's manual tip forunderstanding the human "device."

The world is designed to expose contrasts and compel choices. By thesecontrasts, life reveals to us, individually and collectively, the harmoniousfunctioning and the discordant malfunctioning of human life. In turn, theexperiences and insights of life help one to have preferences and to choosepaths aligned with learning, creating, and adapting that satisfy the wantsand needs of the physical and the nonphysical self. In this process of self-awarenessand evolution, each person comes to accept and reject previousassumptions and beliefs that he or she and the community held.

For example, in the early twentieth century, many scientists andphilosophers began to seek clarifications and deeper distinctions in thehuman instruction manual and imagine the possibilities of human life froma quantum perspective rather than a Newtonian perspective. Beginningwith (and going beyond) Einstein's exploration of reality, a notion ofquantum fields has been permeating the thinking about matter, energy,their relationship, and the implications for understanding what it meansto be human.

Quantum theory is based on the idea that reality is iterations ofboundless energy that is interconnected across space and time. Thisquantum field of reality, considered to be all energy coexisting in timeand...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: iUniverse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1475989563
• ISBN 13: 9781475989564
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 216
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: KreGa Onlinehandel GmbH; 4950000000000; info@krega-onlinehandel.de; ; Birkenweg 31; Brakel; 33034; Deutschland