Identity Pruning
“Personal identity is the concept you develop about yourself that evolves over the course of your life. This may include aspects of your life that you have no control over, such as where you grew up or the color of your skin, as well as choices you make in life, such as how you spend your time and what you believe.”
This is what I taught my kids when I explained their next project to them. I would take their photos, and they would overlay the picture with words that described who they were in the world. I told them to think about their “identity words”- sports they liked, roles they played within their families or communities, personality traits and preferences, and the way they looked.
The elementary school kids I teach often still have a pretty rudimentary grasp on the nuances of the English language, particularly because for the majority of them, it isn’t their first language. They describe things in their most basic form, and usually, things are pretty black and white. It’s one thing or the other; they either feel “happy” or they feel “sad”. Something tastes “good” or it tastes “bad.” Things we do in class are “boring” or they’re “fun.” It turns out though (to my surprise), that when its comes to kids’ perceptions of themselves, almost nothing is mutually exclusive in this way. Perhaps children’s’ sense of themselves is still kind of limitless; the cognitive pruning that results from lots of experiences out in the world hasn’t trimmed away self-perceptions that might conflict with each other yet. None of their “identities” have become permanent or overly dominant, leaving room for all of them to coexist inside the same little person’s self-perception simultaneously.
Here are some of their photo projects, and all the “contradictions” that to them, apparently, aren’t actually contradictory at all.
