The first set of social and emotional wellness skills The Project Happiness Handbook teaches pertains to self-awareness: exploring who I really am. Students learn to practice self-compassion, they build an understanding of their own emotions – particularly what brings them lasting happiness – and they gain confidence in their gifts.
But there’s bad news from postmodern scholars: there is no self! You thought you had thoughts and feelings, made choices, and generally went about your day as an individual, but all along you were just this freakish creature, an amalgam of all the societal and cultural influences around you. Bummer.
While the former may be philosophically true, it’s not very practically helpful (my husband, the philosophy Ph.D. feels there is no distinction, but try living with a philosopher and let me know what you conclude!). At the very least, we have a real, individual experience of selfhood and we need to honor that experience in ourselves and our students by practicing self-awareness. As a nod to those postmodernists, though, we do need to be aware of the influences on our selfhood: friends, family, cultural norms, and – the biggie – the media (see ShapingYouth.org for a great blog exploring issues of media and youth identity).
But how do you become aware of media influences when they are so complex and pervasive? You do something I’m very good at: make things strange (also called ‘denaturalization’ in the postmodern literature…)! Ads and TV and movies are all around us, so we get used to them, they become ‘normal.’ But if you can make them abnormal, you can see the inequalities and dangerous ideas behind them more easily. And what is my favorite way to make things strange/abnormal?…
You guessed it – linguistics! In this case, take a look at ‘you’ – no, don’t run to the mirror (or ask your students to do that – you won’t have enough bathroom passes). Simply become more mindful of the pronoun ‘you.’ How do the media position ‘you’? Ask kids what their favorite stores and products are and then ask them to write down all the actions a ‘you-who-is-a-teen’ takes part in. Take a look at the examples below from J.C. Penney’s wildly successful (as rated by ypulse.com, a youth marketing site) Facebook page. Teen consumers are asked to engage in the following 7 earth-shattering actions:
- Mix
- Match
- Make your own (=buy)
- Layer
- Wear
- Get (=buy)
- See faves (=a link for more styles)
To be fair, J.C. Penney is trying to sell clothes, but it’s simply dazzling how many verbs they have come up with simply for wearing and buying. And here is the central verb teen users are responding with:
- Love (J.C. Penney, Olsenboye [a new J.C.P. brand], jeans, etc.)
When broken down linguistically, it is a very clear, cut-and-dried consumer relationship: J.C. Penney asks teens to buy and wear (which they can do by mixing, matching, layering, etc.) their products and teens respond by buying, wearing and loving those products. There is, at base, nothing wrong with this: J.C.P. offers a product, teens buy it. But it is the last part – loving it – where a bit of a wrinkle comes in. In this case, teens are turning right back around and doing the advertising for J.C.P. And they are making J.C.P. a part of their online identity by making it a part of their ‘community’ on Facebook.
A simple exercise like this can start a conversation about how students see themselves, what roles they play in the broader culture, and what roles they want to play. This would be particularly powerful when integrated with the activity, “Who Am I?” on p.41-43 of the Project Happiness Handbook. This can help students become aware of not just how their friends and family see them, but how companies, governments, and social organizations see them.
“Who are you?” is a question adolescents are developmentally primed to answer (see chapter 2, section 3 in the Project Happiness Facilitators’ Guide for more information). Let’s provide them with the resources to answer it thoughtfully and intentionally.