Textbook Reading: Adolescent Development ( Ch. 5)
Librarians need to know their readers in order to help them make choices about books to read. Helping students choose books can help them work out difficult issues they maybe facing or to live vicariously through the protagonist. Knowing how adolescences develop is important to librarians and teachers in helping with book choice.
1. Physical Development:
As adolescence go through puberty, their bodies are making rapid physical changes that effect how they feel about their appearance.
These young people worry about how they look, are they normal, and are often self-critical about their appearance. Many are not happy about their looks and feel self-conscience about themselves.
2. Intellectual Development:
Adolescence are usually transitioning from Piaget's concrete stage to the abstract stage around this time. This change can happen from ages 10-14. They are beginning to think critically about events and things around them.
Librarians can think about the questions we are asking these students and how we can help scaffold our questions to help them critically think about books and characters.
Librarians should also think about the student's intellectual development when helping a student choose a book.
Developmental Stages ( Havinghurst)
*Librarians and teachers need to remember that kids develop at different rates.
Students are learning:
1. How to get along with peers and form friendships. In adolescences, kids begin to look for others like themselves with the same interests and likes. Friendships from elementary may fade due to changes in interests.
2. Relationships with the opposite sex. Kids are learning how to interact and form friendships with the opposite sex, sometimes for the first time.
3. Working for pay. Kids may begin their first paying job such as babysitting, mowing lawns, doing extra chores for money. This creates independence for the child.
4. Changing relationships with parents. Kids begin to pull-away from their parents and begin thinking differently from their parents. They may challenge and question ideas, morals, and values taught by their parents.
5. Morals and values. Kids begin to form their own opinions and thoughts about what they believe and hold true.
6. Vocation. Kids begin to develop an interest in what they may want to do when they grow up based on their talents and interests.
7. Adapting to changing bodies. Kids deal with and learn to adapt to their physical changes such as bigger hands and feet, etc.
8. Sex roles. Kids learn most sex roles based on society. They learn the expectations for the way we act. Some kids may challenge these roles and may act differently.
Morals and Values-Kohlberg's Theory
1. Pre-conventional: most common stage of children which is based on rewards and punishment. Children are focused on the consequences they may receive based on right or wrong choices. Adults will sometimes fall into this category as well.
2. Conventional: this stage is typical of adolescences and adults. Individuals in this stage follow societies rules of what is right or wrong.
3. Post-conventional: these individuals recognize the rules, but know that human beings can rise above society's views. These individuals feel that liberty and justice are above the laws ( civil disobedience). These individuals fight for what they believe is the right thing ( EX: Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Ghandi)
*These developmental stages can help librarians find books that speak to kids in their particular stage of development.
Maslow: Needs Hierarchy
According to Maslow, each stage's needs must be met in order to proceed to the next level.
1. Physiological: kids must have their basic needs of food, water, shelter, clothing met first and foremost.
2. Safety: kids must feel safe both physically and emotionally. Librarians and teachers play an important role in setting up the classroom/library in order that kids feel safe emotionally and physically, as well as free from any type of bullying.
3. Love/belonging: kids must feel they are loved and liked by others and have a sense of belonging to a group.
4. Esteem: kids need to feel that their thoughts, ideas, and opinions are valued and respected by others. Teachers and librarians can create an atmosphere of respect in the classroom/library where other's thoughts, ideas, and opinions are respected.
5. Self-actualization: kids feel like they can be anything they want and they have no limits when the previous four stages are met.
Developing as Readers
1. Developing Empathy: reading can create empathy for others when reading about a variety of situations.
2. Unconscious Delight: this is when one gets "lost in a book". Readers may read series books, a particular genre, or reading books by the same author.
3. Reading Autobiographically: reading books about characters like you and experiences/situations like your own. (mirror reading)
4. Reading Vicariously: reading about other people's lives or situations ( looking through the window). Students can experience situations without actually going through with the actual event/process. Readers can experience different times, places, and experiences in a book.
5. Philosophical Speculation: readers are developing morals and values through their reading life. They may ask hard questions, may question society, or events in a book that form their own values.
6. Aesthetic Experiences: this is where readers enjoy the beauty of the story, care and connect to characters, experiences the beauty of the language, and become emotionally connected to the book.
Our jobs as librarians is to develop collections in which kids can find books where they can see themselves in the book, relate to the book and make connections, read for pleasure, and learn about life in a book. It's our jobs to make them fall in love with reading and grow as readers.
1. Physiological: kids must have their basic needs of food, water, shelter, clothing met first and foremost.
2. Safety: kids must feel safe both physically and emotionally. Librarians and teachers play an important role in setting up the classroom/library in order that kids feel safe emotionally and physically, as well as free from any type of bullying.
3. Love/belonging: kids must feel they are loved and liked by others and have a sense of belonging to a group.
4. Esteem: kids need to feel that their thoughts, ideas, and opinions are valued and respected by others. Teachers and librarians can create an atmosphere of respect in the classroom/library where other's thoughts, ideas, and opinions are respected.
5. Self-actualization: kids feel like they can be anything they want and they have no limits when the previous four stages are met.
Developing as Readers
1. Developing Empathy: reading can create empathy for others when reading about a variety of situations.
2. Unconscious Delight: this is when one gets "lost in a book". Readers may read series books, a particular genre, or reading books by the same author.
3. Reading Autobiographically: reading books about characters like you and experiences/situations like your own. (mirror reading)
4. Reading Vicariously: reading about other people's lives or situations ( looking through the window). Students can experience situations without actually going through with the actual event/process. Readers can experience different times, places, and experiences in a book.
5. Philosophical Speculation: readers are developing morals and values through their reading life. They may ask hard questions, may question society, or events in a book that form their own values.
6. Aesthetic Experiences: this is where readers enjoy the beauty of the story, care and connect to characters, experiences the beauty of the language, and become emotionally connected to the book.
Our jobs as librarians is to develop collections in which kids can find books where they can see themselves in the book, relate to the book and make connections, read for pleasure, and learn about life in a book. It's our jobs to make them fall in love with reading and grow as readers.
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