Identity And Adolescence Essay

Adolescences has always been the most crucial time for developing identity. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between racial identity development of African American adolescents and the role of education. This paper will discuss the effects race has on identity and adolescent development. Following, it will compare students education from a racial perspective and the lasting effects after adolescence.

DeCuir-Gunby (2009) states that identity is “a formation process begins at birth, peaks during adolescence, and continues to develop throughout adulthood, thus allowing an individual to fully negotiate multiple identities.” During adolescence, the peak of identity development, it is the most judgemental and children

stumble upon role confusion and go through the three stages: foreclosure, moratorium and achievment. Role confusion starts with foreclosure where adolescence have a lack of commitment for goals and values and follows with moratorium where there is a great deal of avoidance and accepts traditional roles. Lastly, achievment is when adolescence reject a given role or path and choses another. Identity is considered to be seperated into two categories; social and biological (DeCuir-Gunby, 2009). The social and biological both influence identity development along with the influence of race (DeCuir-Gunby, 2009).
As early as preschool, studies were done using line drawings and portraits to recearch how black students identified themselves in a multiracial classroom and found that all of the preschool students associated themselves as white (DeCuir-Gunby, 2009). This study led researches like Cross (1971, 1995) used BRI and black psyche to create The Model of Psychological Nigrescene. This model was made for self-identification into five stages of negative to positive including: “pre encounter (pro-White/anti-Blank point of view), encounter (questioning of pro-White/anti-Blank point of view), immersion-emersion (embraceing Blackness and development of anti-White sentiments), internalization (racial understanding), and internalization-commitment (commitment to Black identity and racial understanding)” (DeCuir-Gunby, 2009). The Model of Psychological Nigrescene was used for many years, but is now researched to be to simplifed for racial identity development and is assuming that all experiences for each individual is the same. All adolescences in communities and school systems should be looked at as unique individual who share similar and different experiences. Stephen R. Covey, an American author, educator and businessman once said, “Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.” This quote expresses it is important to emphasize on the importance of not having a negative outlook on individual differences.
Cross’s Model of Psychological Nigrescene is now replaced with Measures of Black racial identity and is separated into four categories including: developmental, nationalisitc/worldview, reactions to racism and mutidimensional (DeCuir-Gunby, 2009).

Like the formation process of identity, BRI follows a similar structure. Racial identity are also influenced in school systems and who is teaching the curriculum to the adolescence. Students of different racial backgrounds express feelings of teachers expecting lower academic expectation in comparison to white students. Following, school systems do not have a great deal of diversity within their staff. This impacts all young adolescence directly and indirectly who come from different racial backgrounds (DeCuir-Gunby,

2009).
Within schools, adolescences search for peers that resemble them the most like needs, perspectives, interests, feelings, values, dreams, health, family, lifestyle, etc. All adolescence seek out peer power to help them through transitions and acceptance. In schools, adolescence have a tendancy to have friends who share similar experiences and backgrounds which often results in racial grouping (DeCuir-Gunby, 2009). These social groups extends on associating activities with race. “Since being Black is very important to African Americans, engaging in a “White” activity is somewhat insulting to the Black community” (DeCuir-Gunby, 2009). This makes finding individual identity more difficult for African American adolescents within their academics (DeCuir-Gunby, 2009). Physical features and preferences including: skin color, hair texture, gender, and sexuality play an effect on how Black adolescences want to be viewed in school systems and how they are treated by peers. Because of all of these social pressures, academics does not always receive as much attention. Teachers in schools systems need to be a positive role model to all adolescence while replacing all negative views on students from a different racial background with a positive one. Teachers tend to lose focus that adolescence is the most critical time for finding their identity and does not realize how much an impact they are because identity issues are not left in school (DeCuir-Gunby, 2009). “The educational context can have subjective experiences of African American students and impacts their racial identity” (DeCuir-Gunby, 2009).
The relationship between racial identity development of African American adolescents and the role of education is very important and has a huge impact on every individual.

Adolescence seek out help through transitions and acceptance because adolescence have a tendancy of associating activities with race while resluting in insulting other students from different racial backgrounds. The social and biological both influence identity development along with the influence of race and school systems and educators need to replace all negative views on students from a different racial background with a positive ones. By doing this, teaching children that you are different from one another and have different values in life is something to be proud of because it should not matter who you are and where you come

from.