{"id":37,"date":"2016-03-18T13:28:47","date_gmt":"2016-03-18T13:28:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/cress\/?p=37"},"modified":"2017-02-02T11:18:01","modified_gmt":"2017-02-02T11:18:01","slug":"tony-schwab-on-phenomenological-approaches-to-youth-disaffection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/cress\/2016\/03\/18\/tony-schwab-on-phenomenological-approaches-to-youth-disaffection\/","title":{"rendered":"Tony Schwab on phenomenological approaches to youth disaffection"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Fidelma Hanrahan\u2019s thorough and compassionate 2013 University of Sussex doctoral dissertation <\/a>examines current social-psychological theory and practice in the area of disaffected youth with a focus on school-excluded teenagers in England. \u00a0Dr. Hanrahan\u2019s purpose is plainly to better understand this social group and to enlighten the educational community and government on how to help them. \u00a0She is working towards a unified theory that weaves socio-economic and familial aspects of the situation with the group\u2019s difficulties with self-image and self-efficacy, and she has been testing her model using quantitative and qualitative methods. \u00a0The thesis covers four areas: \u00a0dominant theories that help us understand the \u201cdevelopment of maladaptive motivational states in young people;\u201d qualitative research on \u201cthe lived experiences of disaffected youth;\u201d a new model of psycho-social pathways into and out of disaffection tested by quantitative analysis of the results of questionnaires and \u201csemi-structured\u201d interviews with students and staff at a Pupil Referral Unit; and the capstone, an account based on interviews with four at-risk youths about their life-changing experience creating and performing a theatre piece about their lives under the mentorship of two dedicated theater practitioners.<\/p>\n

Dr. Hanrahan\u2019s commitment to understanding and helping young people who are seen by the mainstream social system as failures and drop-outs has particular meaning.\u00a0 I have always worked with marginalized youth, and for my Masters in the early 1990\u2019s conducted descriptive phenomenological research of the experience of being in class<\/em> for two teachers and two students in my alternative high school in the South Bronx, NY, the poorest congressional district in the US.\u00a0 I have also led theatrical projects for at-risk youth, including plays written by ensembles of young actors, so I know the power of arts collaboration. \u00a0Because I find phenomenological research and the stories of school people so congenial, I was concerned that the thesis described the situation of disaffected youth chiefly through social science and psychological terminology.\u00a0 This is a logical way to attain the goal of a \u201ccore theoretical framework\u201d of disaffection (170) but it created distance between me and the young people whose troubled lives are described on each page. \u00a0In the thesis, since interviews termed qualitative are set up to test theory, the basic phenomenological attitude is not as focused as it could be. \u00a0For instance, it is one thing to set out to corroborate through interviews the predicted effects of an environment pre-determined to be \u201cneed-thwarting\u201d and another to simply get to know an environment as experienced by a group of teenagers who have been termed disaffected. \u00a0The second way would begin by conscientiously setting aside preconceptions.\u00a0 Hanrahan\u2019s qualitative interviews do offer a look at the here and now experience of being disaffected, but the general plan of the paper is to utilize the young people\u2019s feeling-reports to create an objective theory supported quantitatively.\u00a0 The semi-structured interviews are not meant to immerse the researcher in the lived experience of disaffection but \u201cto evaluate, and further develop, a theoretical model of school disaffection in young people which draws together perspectives concerning self-determination, self-discrepancy, and achievement motivation…\u201d<\/p>\n

To get even closer to achieving a holistic model of youth disaffection, Dr. Hanrahan and her colleagues could consider a wider view and add to the stated aims of their study another kind of knowledge gained through the descriptive phenomenological method\u2014to seek to describe what youth disaffection is<\/em>.\u00a0 For a period of the research, hold the natural scientific standpoint in abeyance.\u00a0 For example, Dr. Hanrahan is struck by the influence of poverty on human development, but the descriptive phenomenological method as propounded by Amedeo Georgi can help develop first \u00a0a general structure of youth disaffection itself; the findings will likely include life in poverty but the researcher would not assume this beforehand.\u00a0 Possible prompts for a phenomenological description could be, \u201cTell me about your day\u201d or, \u201cwhat happened today?\u201d\u00a0 Phenomenological analysis of youth\u2019s descriptions can enlighten researchers before <\/em>they utilize objectivized categories like \u201chuman development\u201d and \u201cpoverty.\u201d \u00a0A side effect of phenomenological interviewing can be that it might make a researcher lose sight of hope for a while\u2014the facts might be sad; but it will widen educators\u2019 understanding and knowledge base and help them make choices about what is important in their work with young people. \u00a0A second phenomenological project is to understand a drop-out by knowing what he or she is dropping out from: \u00a0what is his or her experience of Society, its ways and routines.\u00a0 An anecdote from my experience will help clarify:\u00a0 several times in the 1990\u2019s, when I rode the New York City subway with students from the South Bronx, I noticed and they told me about a change in many of them when the train stopped at and then left 96th<\/sup> Street in Manhattan.\u00a0 The simple reason was that this street was known by all New Yorkers as the dividing line between middle class and poor, the haves and the have-nots whites and people of color.\u00a0 My students became uncomfortable because we had crossed the line on our way to a play or a museum.\u00a0 Back then, first-hand knowledge of this \u201cline\u201d influenced my teaching.\u00a0 I offer the idea that now, whether interpreting data or teaching students, the felt energy of the first fifth of the 21st<\/sup> Century must be incorporated.<\/p>\n

I suggest that literature can help: Chapter One of Native Son <\/em>by Richard Wright helps us understand an excluded youth\u2019s day and his experience of society, and later I will look at how Tolstoy in one novel successfully describes Society itself by treating it as a powerful character.\u00a0 I am impressed that Dr. Hanrahan likens the \u201cintegration of theoretical frameworks\u201d she aims for to building a bridge across<\/em> multiple paradigms.\u00a0 Help in building this bridge will be provided by understanding the situation prior to paradigms–as lived by the disaffected, their families, their helpers, even those who despise them.\u00a0 For example, it would be illuminating to hear the theatre mentors\u2019 particular experience of shepherding the young actors out of boredom and distress to a feeling of renewal, and to read their play too!<\/p>\n

Dr. Hanrahan is certainly building a cogent \u201caetiology\u201d of school disaffection, but I propose adding an immediate and existential way of understanding this human situation to that forged by linking psycho-social constructs.\u00a0 I am encouraged in this line of thought by three sentences by Dr. Hanrahan that are inspiring.\u00a0 Her personal road to psychological research began with an intense early interest in literature.\u00a0 A \u201cchildhood spent thinking about people, and wondering why they are the way they are\u201d led to a realization that \u201cit was the people contained in the books \u2013 their lives, their stories \u2013 that really interested\u201d her. \u00a0Her passion for learning the experience of others through novels, poems, and plays shaped her identity.\u00a0 This shows her intuitive connection of literature and science, and I will build on this personal detail.<\/p>\n

Dr. Hanrahan\u2019s experience in youth shows the extremely close relationship of art to life for a thinking person–and up to now it is fiction that gives us the fuller picture of struggling lives in context or, as the literary critic Lionel Trilling called it, the conditioned world we live in with all its contingencies. \u00a0It is that<\/em> world I want to study to help researchers understand young people and schooling, and what a huge project it is!\u00a0 Literature will help, and the era does not matter because serious literature teaches us through a type of human osmosis. \u00a0As Trilling and Robert Coles the psychologist have shown in different ways, literature is its own kind of qualitative research.\u00a0 It happened that while I was reading Anna Karenina<\/em> I was re-reading Dr. Hanrahan\u2019s thesis.\u00a0 In Tolstoy\u2019s novel I realized I was encountering Dr. Hanrahan\u2019s \u201cspectrum\u201d of disaffected people but in pre-Revolutionary Russia and quite differently than I would through the lens of social psychology.<\/p>\n

Thinking about the two works together and having them interact in my reflections encouraged me in the view that we theorists and educators benefit by stepping back from social science and reflecting on both our and our students\u2019 environments. \u00a0We should discuss with one other our time and its stress, strain, yearnings, and anxieties.\u00a0 For instance, in a new way the internet delivers the world to us, therefore to comprehend what it is like to be part of any psychological, social, or economic category from the disaffected to the elite, we should include our subject\u2019s experience of the tenor of the planet<\/em>.\u00a0 Though most researchers are not members of the disaffected, we all at times experience the world as wonderful or as chaotic, without order and leader-less. \u00a0For us, disaffection is around the corner.\u00a0 If we can account for this phenomenon we come closer to the \u201cintegrated and holistic approach\u201d called for by Dr. Hanrahan.<\/p>\n

Disaffection as a Key to All Education<\/strong><\/p>\n

Education has always been idealistic, a plan to make people better so that they can make life better. This ideal informs all research and practice no matter which social class they concern. \u00a0Hanrahan\u2019s thesis focuses on the experience of one group, young and socially liminal, but the paper\u2019s hopes for its young people are universal and they touch on this ideal.\u00a0 When she emphasizes \u201cthe importance of need-fulfilling environmental experiences\u201d and aims \u201cto achieve positive behavioural and emotional outcomes\u2026and identify and examine the\u2026interplay of social environmental experiences, self-construals, and motivations that underpin self-development\u2026\u201d \u00a0any educator will understand.\u00a0 Each of us in the field imagines the same need-fulfilling world and hopes it will lead to positive social outcomes. \u00a0We are in this together, and this leads to another way we can solidify the research on disaffected youth:\u00a0 accept that it can help us teach anyone.\u00a0 We should see the disaffected as, in a myriad of ways, like everyone else.\u00a0 Thus, a new model of disaffection will augment our understanding of all education. \u00a0For instance, the more familiar we become with Ryan and Deci\u2019s self-discrepancy theory, the closer we get to the mechanics of working towards that educational ideal, for it is the discrepancy<\/em> in all of us between ought<\/em> and is<\/em> that frames all our journeys to competence, relatedness and autonomy.\u00a0 Hanrahan\u2019s list of effective approaches is applicable across class and psychological lines.\u00a0 Arts projects for all youth open \u201cspaces of transformation\u2026where new realities can be forged\u2026through self-expression.\u201d\u00a0 Likewise, a mentor\u2019s belief in any pupil\u2019s ability and relationships and students feeling \u201clistened to, valued, and encouraged…\u201d are crucial to the fostering of resilience. \u00a0An important question to ask about any student is whether he sees his abilities as fixed or \u201cmalleable;\u201d for as the paper says, anyone\u2019s perception of their cognitive abilities as fixed can lead to extrinsic motivation which can make school a site of permanent wounds to self-esteem, whereas if the student considers his intellectual traits to be \u201cchanging over time in accordance with experiences and efforts in particular domains,\u201d\u00a0 this is a sign of intrinsic motivation and that the very process of learning will lead to increased self-esteem.<\/p>\n

Actual, ought, ideal, and feared selves are characters that haunt us all.\u00a0 They appear in all the arts and are worth reflecting on for any teacher who wants to guide young people morally and intellectually.\u00a0 Good teaching demands two things, related only tangentially to the content we are teaching but essential nonetheless: \u00a0knowing something of each of our student\u2019s experiences and reflecting on our own roads to becoming teachers.\u00a0 This is why teaching is a vocation more than a job and why the highest nationwide test scores will never mean we are done with our work.<\/p>\n

What Tolstoy Knew<\/strong><\/p>\n

Preparing to teach a disaffected youth should be like preparing to teach anyone.\u00a0 Novice teachers should study children as George Dennison did in his book on New York City kids, The Lives of Children<\/em> in the 1960\u2019s or like Tolstoy did in the 1860\u2019s in his schoolroom at Yasnaya Polyana, to know \u201cchildren without preconceptions\u2026as human beings who [have] worries, fears, needs, joys, intellectual curiosity, abundant imagination, and a longing to know.\u201d \u00a0The same premise guided Tolstoy in his novels, and the literary critic Trilling uses a fascinating word to capture his method of work or how he covered human ways; he notes it is based on affection<\/em>.\u00a0 I hope it does not seem too odd to mention this emotion in a discussion of a thesis that seeks scientific precision, but Hanrahan\u2019s own affection and sympathy weave through the thesis.\u00a0 Apropos, Trilling points out that Tolstoy\u2019s affection achieves its own type of objectivity<\/em> which he puts alongside the scientific version, asserting that just as \u201ceverything in Nature exists in time, space, and atmosphere\u2026.everything in [Anna Karenina<\/em>] exists in the light of the author\u2019s love\u2014constant, pervasive, equitable.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0Imagine the discipline it took for Tolstoy to achieve this kind of fairness.\u00a0 Seeing respect and love as a way to get to a workable sense of a phenomenon urges us to look once again at the word \u201cobjective.\u201d \u00a0Christine Root, a teacher, literary critic and deep ecologist who studies how to think holistically writes of an object speaking rather than the observer speaking for it<\/em> which involves submitting one\u2019s attention to all possible manifestations of a particular phenomenon, \u201ctranscending separation\u201d (8). Here is a path to moving past or establishing a place before natural scientific objectivity in at least part of one\u2019s research. In Hanrahan\u2019s words, we would seek understanding by \u201cthinking about people and wondering why they are the way they are\u2026 their lives, their stories.\u201d<\/p>\n

To help our students know themselves we can bracket our preconceptions about their experience.\u00a0 Using Georgi\u2019s descriptive method, a transcript (protocol) would be made of a student\u2019s \u201cna\u00efve description\u201d of a phenomenon, for example \u201cboredom at school\u201d or \u201chaving a temper at school\u201d or \u201chappiness in class\u201d for a PRU student. \u00a0The researcher would then read through\/dwell with this and other protocols based on the phenomenon, mark meaning units, describe the units, group them into main constituents of the phenomenon, reflect, and then write a General Psychological Structure of the phenomenon.\u00a0 A novelist too arrives at general structures of human life through constant attention to details. \u00a0As I mentioned, a key constituent of Russian life Tolstoy highlights is Society<\/em>; he calls it \u201cthe coarse power.\u201d\u00a0 Educators can be inspired by his description.\u00a0 After all, they say fish don\u2019t know they\u2019re in water; do our students know they are in Society<\/em>? \u00a0For Tolstoy, the power provides a pre-formed place for us.\u00a0 We struggle, conform, question, hide, but (almost always) cannot escape.\u00a0 The force makes its first impression on the reader when Anna\u2019s husband discovers her infidelity.\u00a0 From many sides, Society sends him its decision that there are but two ways to respond, both aggressive, divorce or a duel.\u00a0 Only if he agrees to this will Society preserve his high position.\u00a0 But Tolstoy\u2019s attitude of affection reveals an alternative possibility.\u00a0 When Anna is dying after the birth of her illegitimate child, Karenin is stunned to realize he wants to forgive and to serve her and her daughter (and thus the lover).\u00a0 Karenin knows this is the best way to continue living and it has tremendous religious significance for him. \u00a0Now the character and the reader must choose: \u00a0we know in the human hierarchy forgiveness is higher than aggression or abandonment, yet we realize this cannot be.<\/p>\n

In terms of Hanrahan\u2019s thesis, the power of Society is also tied in with self-construal<\/em>.\u00a0 Social science asserts that Society\u2019s \u201caffordances\u201d combine to \u201cform complex \u2018niches\u2019\u2026normatively framed ways of acting\u2026 cultural and ecological constraints that scaffold action\u201d (Voyer and Franks).\u00a0 This forces constraints on disaffected youth, and the thesis explains thoroughly the psychological minefields they experience in their niche. \u00a0Literature records this phenomenon too. \u00a0In Anna Karenina<\/em>, when we first meet the future lovers, Anna and Vronsky, Society is good to them. \u00a0In terms of the thesis each has realistic aspirations, high self-esteem and self-efficacy and is comforted by the congruence of their actual and ideal selves.\u00a0 But as soon as they fall in love, their self-construal and self-definition are undermined. \u00a0Eventually they leave Russia, essentially as drop-outs, and as Hanrahan\u2019s model predicts, feel dejection, disappointment, and restlessness. \u00a0Disapproving Society is now an external locus of control and this leads to Hanrahan\u2019s \u201cnegative affect, lowered self-esteem and decreased motivation and inhibits the development of optimal self-motivation, social functioning, and personal well-being.\u201d\u00a0 Banished, and with their relatedness needs thwarted, Anna and Vronsky must be counted among the disaffected.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

In fact, Tolstoy describes with precision many of the maladaptive motivational states examined by Dr. Hanrahan, and his novel helps us imagine schools and programs that might be built on the foundation of such understanding.\u00a0 What would a program look like that was designed to bring Vronsky and Anna back into the fold? \u00a0As with all education the stakes would be high, nothing less than making them better, healthier people in order to add to the richness of Society. \u00a0Before Anna\u2019s death by suicide, two possible intervention programs come to mind.\u00a0 One would be for disaffected teen parents, and its main question would be how to reintegrate them into society after they have flouted rules, taken up lives as outsiders and had a child.\u00a0 Another program would come into play if they separated, and this would aim for the reintegration of each by taking into account their personalities, needs and environments. \u00a0After Anna is gone, a program for Vronsky would have to find ways to \u201crehabilitate\u201d this excluded man who is now in mourning and having thoughts of self-harm, a tall order.<\/p>\n

Each of these programs would be built on research in three areas essential for any educational enterprise: \u00a0psychological counseling, engaging academics and arts education plus analysis of overarching social forces.\u00a0 Each of these areas is mentioned on the CRESS website<\/a>.\u00a0 The psychological component and the arts are implicit in Dr. Hanrahan\u2019s thesis, and we see the lab\u2019s social analysis in its work on the effect of materialism and the consumer culture on children\u2019s well-being and learning<\/a>.\u00a0 In my twenty-ninth year in education, I see how much is involved in the ideal of educating every child well, and I am reminded of Garrett Hardin\u2019s idea in his 1968 article in Science<\/em> on \u201cThe Tragedy of the Commons,\u201d that in our time the problem of humans\u2019 use of the planet\u2019s resources \u201cmay not have a technical solution\u201d but needs new moral thinking.\u00a0 The same goes for education. \u00a0To take a larger view of the educational situation may mean seeing things as Hardin does, from a more tragic perspective. (Hardin uses the definition of tragedy from Whitehead\u2019s Science and the Modern World<\/em>, \u201c\u2026the remorseless working of things.\u201d) \u00a0In a society based on self-interest, we face a great challenge to imagine, much less plan how each disaffected, troubled or poor teen will get a decent education; indeed, how all middle class children will get a good one.\u00a0 I imagine a team on which educators, social scientists and psychologists think collaboratively about what social environment and educational components work best together to approach the ideal, a kind of \u2018starting from scratch\u2019 thinking to examine education in our fast-changing world that in many essential ways always stays the same:\u00a0 unbalanced, unfair, and seemingly unable to think collaboratively on a large scale.\u00a0\u00a0 For me the word tragedy<\/em> helps, but there is hope in the word for it captures a sense of the solemnity that is involved in working with one child at a time.\u00a0<\/u><\/p>\n

Tony Schwab, MEd
\n<\/u><\/p>\n

Principal of New Alliance Academy, New Jersey<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Root, Christine. \u201c<\/em>Participating in the Being of Another: The Importance of Goethe\u2019s \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Friendship with Schiller to the Development of his Science.\u201d<\/em> 2012. Draft sent by author.<\/p>\n

Voyer, Benjamin G. and Franks, Bradley. \u201cToward a Better Understanding of Self-construal \u00a0Theory: an Agency View of the Processes of Self-construal.\u201d \u00a0LSE Research Online<\/em>. Web. 1 February, 2016.\u00a0 http:\/\/eprints.lse.ac.uk\/60053\/1\/Voyer_Franks_Toward-a-better-understanding-of-self-construal-theory_2014.pdf<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Fidelma Hanrahan\u2019s thorough and compassionate 2013 University of Sussex doctoral dissertation examines current social-psychological theory and practice in the area of disaffected youth with a focus on school-excluded teenagers in England. \u00a0Dr. Hanrahan\u2019s purpose is plainly to better understand…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more ›<\/a><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":152,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[101300],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/cress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/cress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/cress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/cress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/152"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/cress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/cress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/cress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions\/38"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/cress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/cress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/cress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}