Back when I was doing my Masters in Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I took a couple of classes in adolescent psychology. At the time, I didn’t find them all that useful, as many of the interesting and useful insights were duplicated in a wonderful class in the learning sciences which was a sort of applied psychology course with an interdisciplinary lens. We learned about how psychology and other disciplines allowed us to understand and utilize the science of learning to be more effective educators, and the class engaged us in experiments to help us understand the effectiveness of different learning and teaching strategies. Over the years since then, I’ve tried to adapt instruction to be responsive to adolescent development in general, and specifically in relation to technology, social media, and the internet. This is one of the reasons I picked up Alison Gopnik’s The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children.
I discussed Gopnik’s perspective on how parents tend to prioritize their own children over other children in society in the context of my transition from public to private school teaching this year, but Gopnik’s book focuses on some useful insights on teaching and learning and their policy implications, particularly for babies, and young children. Since I teach adolescents, I was especially curious to read her chapter on “The Technological Ratchet,” which presents an interesting argument: human brains are designed to adapt to new technology, so phones and the internet are rewiring child and adolescent brains just as reading does. Indeed, Gopnik says:
“Children who grow up with the digital world will master it in a way that will feel as whole and natural as reading feels to us. But that doesn’t mean that their experiences and brains won’t be shaped by the Internet, any more than my print-soaked twentieth-century life was the same as the life of a barely literate nineteenth-century farmer.”
This rings true to me as a millennial who spent much of his adolescence on a computer. The conventional wisdom is that many of the devices we now use are addictive to young brains in the way that reading is not and therefore there is some danger to children in overexposure. I am sympathetic to that perspective, but I can also recall long days as a child where I did nothing but read. To be honest, if I’m addicted I’m not sure I’ve recovered.
Gopnik’s central insight is that innovation is a natural part of child development and that parents should not expect their children to grow up as they did. She explains:
“What I can’t do, and shouldn’t do, is expect that my children and their children will exactly replicate my values, traditions, and culture. For good or ill, the digital generation will be their own generation and make their own world, and they, not us, will have the responsibility of figuring out how to live in it.”
In other words, adolescents need the space to use the new technologies of the day to link the world that their parents know with the world they are growing up in. For Gopnik and the researcher she cites, Dana Boyd, adolescents use the internet and social media to do what adolescents have always done: “establish a community of friends and peers, distance themselves from their parents, flirt and gossip, bully, experiment, rebel.” That they do this in a way that challenges their parents’ ideas of adolescence, is a critical part of youth innovation.
Gopnik cites studies by the neuroscientists B.J. Casey suggesting that what adolescents want most is social rewards and the respect of their peers. Today, these social rewards are often online, and as a function of adolescent development often involve risk-taking behavior. Think about any number of classically teenage behaviors- bullying and gossip – that once would have taken place in person, now taking place online. This is a part of teenage life that is often totally obscure from my point of view as a teacher.
Of course, I occasionally hear whisperings about what is making the rounds on social media and have heard stories about bullying and gossip happening over the internet, but because it happens online, through platforms like Snapchat or Instagram, it is mostly invisible to me except for when it crosses over visibly into the classroom (once in the last four years). However, alongside bullying and gossip, I’ve also learned a lot about how my students have connected to each other and to people with like interests around the world online. This broadens the nature of the community and allows students who may not fit in at school to develop relationships outside of their local community.
There’s a lot more I could say here, and certainly, I’ve learned plenty of my students are not on social media at all for one reason or another. But the big takeaway for me is that it’s typical that I will increasingly not understand my students’ relationship with technology, that this is okay, and that I need to provide more opportunities for student apprenticeship as a function of another important feature of adolescent development. More on that to come.