Inkshedding

1) Review the passage below from Petrone and Lewis
===2) Write your response in any mode: summarizing what seems important, questioning the authors' assumptions, critiquing the methodology, affirming what resonates with your experience, both questioning and affirmation ===

The “Othering” of Adolescents and Adolescence
===One of the central ways participants make knowable people between the ages of 12 and 18 is by othering them in relation to other stages of life and groups of people, particularly the life stage referred to as adulthood and the people toward whom that life stage points, adults. Participants frequently position their future students as dealing with life in ways unlike adults or developing “adultlike” capacities and ways of being. For example, one participant explained how adolescents “see the world in greater extremes (some might say drama) than adults do.” In these ways, people between the ages of 12 and 18 are understood by who/what they are not and specifically through comparison to a norm associated with an imagined sense of adults and adulthood. As the norm, adults—at least according to these participants—are level-headed, able to converse and interact intelligently, have concretized habits and ways of being, are analytical and critical thinkers, and, perhaps most significantly, have a stable and completely formed identity. In contrast, adolescents are made knowable by their not being these things and their moving toward this state of being. Whereas adults are stable in their identity, adolescents are in the process of forming their identities; whereas adults are capable of analytical thinking, adolescents are developing these adult-like capacities; whereas adulthood is a harmonious time, adolescence is a time of danger and conflict.=== ===In this way, the discursive practice of othering people between the ages of 12 and 18 may function as a system of reasoning related to how othering has been used as a mechanism to justify imperialism and other forms of domination. As postcolonial scholar Edward Said (1978) has famously argued, othering a marginalized group of people highlights their perceived weaknesses and otherness at the same time that it emphasizes the normalcy and legitimacy of the powerful group and justifies particular forms of intervention and domination. Thus, the practice of othering not only makes knowable a subordinate, needy, and dependent other but also constitutes a knowable, powerful, dominant self. In other words, how a dominant group names and knows a subordinate, othered group facilitates their naming and knowing themselves. For example, the Occidental self is defined and comes into being in relation to the Oriental other (Said, 1978). Lesko (2001) similarly argues that adolescents are typically positioned as the other in relation to adults. She explains, for instance, how conflicts between adults and adolescents are oftentimes rationalized as the adolescents being rebellious, which establishes the source of conflict as the transgressive behavior—oftentimes understood as a “normal” aspect of adolescence—on the part of the youth. She writes: “In this way, the discourse on adolescents tends to produce a fixed opposition between adults and youth approaching the permanent opposition of the colonizer and colonized” (p. 128). For the participants of this study—most of whom themselves would be considered to be in or barely leaving the life stage adolescence and are in close age proximity with their prospective students—the practice of othering may help them to differentiate themselves from their future students and constitute a more stable identity—as adults, teachers, superiors, authority figures. Interestingly, one of the most noticeable omissions from the participants’ discussions of their future students as adolescents was their identification with perhaps still being in that stage of life. This omission may, in fact, be symbolic of an attempt to distance themselves from their future students and an assuming of teacher roles and identities.===