Teaching Teens

A thought-provoking article written by Herbert Puchta was published recently in The Guardian. Puchta, who is president of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language, claims that teachers of teenagers should spend less time trying to find trendy teen pop culture artefacts to engage students and more time on what he calls "emotional engagement".

He cites a book called Romantic Understanding by Kieran Egan as a source for this claim:
"According to those insights, teens – as cool as they may seem on the surface – often feel, deep down, threatened by the world. One reason for their insecurity is caused by the fact that they ask themselves questions that are of an existentially threatening nature, because teens cannot find any answers to them: Will I be successful in life? Will I be able to find a good job and earn good money one day? When will my parents die? When will I die? What happens when I do? Who will miss me when I die? etc.

"Although the world of teens is basically a contact culture, they hardly ever share their real fears with others, and this often leads to a feeling of loneliness and the assumption that they are the only ones in the world suffering from such problems. The only way out of this situation seems to lie in trying not to be an individual – not an easy task given the particular phase in their lives is also about developing their sense of self, their identity – and so they engage in copying each other: wearing the same brands of T-shirts and trainers, adoring the same kind of heroes and heroines, and finding the same kind of things either 'awesome' or 'gross' (current UK teen expressions for good and bad).

"Such behaviour, together with their choice of heroes, often seems to suggest superficiality to the adult observer. But it's anything but that. When teens choose their idols – the likes of Lady Gaga and Jay-Z maybe – they do so because they intuitively feel connected with what they perceive as the best human qualities through their heroes, whereas for adults every single one of those stars may well be representative of a tinsel world."

One method proposed by Puchta of emotionally engaging students is to spend more time discussing moral dilemmas/scenarios. He gives the example of "Subway Hero" Wesley Autry, who had to decide whether or not to rescue a man who had an epileptic fit and fell onto rail tracks, just as a train was approaching. {Another one might be that of Jews in hiding during the Holocaust, where a crying baby threatens to give them away, and the mother has to decide whether to kill her own child to save them all}

Food for thought.