Which picture comes to mind when you hear the phrase "stages of life"?
A stepladder?
Or a theatre?
If you're like most people, it's probably the ladder or some other step-like image. After all, from the late and great experts on human nature—Freud, Piaget and Erikson—to their lesser-known contemporaries, researchers have told us that the human life process is best understood as a series of progressively "higher" stages that people pass through.
I prefer the theatre image and here's why. I believe that we human beings create our development—it's not something that happens to us. And how we create it is by creating stages on which we can perform our growth. So, to me, developmental stages are like performance spaces that we can set up anywhere: at home, school, the workplace, all over. I'm going to tell you about one of many developmental stages I've helped to create over many years.
First, though, I have to tell you what the word “environment” means to me. Usually, it refers to a place, location, background, or context in which things happen. In child development studies, for example, claims are made that certain environmental factors accelerate and others retard the "normal" process of development. Homes filled with books supposedly foster early literacy development. Growing up in an abusive environment is said to be a good predictor of whether a child will be overly aggressive or violent. This understanding of environment goes along with the view that development happens to us.
I have a different understanding of environment. It's not something we find ourselves in that impacts on our development. No. It’s a life space—or a stage—that people create together. Environment is more an activity than a context. It’s created, shaped, and reshaped as an inseparable part of people developing.
Research suggests that most abuse has to do with people feeling they have no choice. In my own research, elementary school children tell us that "something came over them" or "they had no control" or "no choice" when they hit another child. Merely telling a child that he can do other things, even suggesting some to him, might stop the behavior for awhile—or it might not. What I advocate and what I have seen work is supporting children to create options.
One of the things I try to share with parents and teachers in as many ways as I can is how important it is to help children create new options for how to act and think. If we want them to become good choice or decision makers, then they have to have a lot of practice in making choices and decisions.
Here's where creating developmental stages comes in. The following example (taken from my book Schools for Growth: Radical Alternatives to Traditional Educational Models) relates an incident that occurred at the Barbara Taylor School in Brooklyn, NY, a laboratory primary school.
Justin (age 11) was lying still on the rug, surrounded by several children and an adult kneeling beside him peering at his bare stomach (his shirt had been hiked up to his neck). Len, the adult learning director, was holding a roll of paper upright above Justin's belly button. Caught by the scene and the children's rapt attention, I asked what was happening. "We're performing an operation," they told me, "the surgical removal of immaturity."
Later that day, Justin and Len performed a commercial break during a circus scene created by Alice (age 8) and Julia, another learning director. Len and Justin entered the stage walking. Len said, "Justin, you won't be going to your speech therapist today." Justin stopped in his tracks, yelled, cried, and fell to the ground in a screaming temper tantrum.
Len looked up at the audience for a moment, took some wads of paper out of the manila envelope he was holding and said, while he arched them toward Justin's mouth, "The miracle cure: 'Matchore Partz' [Mature Parts]." Justin "swallowed the pills." He stood up and he and Len began the scene again. Len: "Justin, you won't be going to your speech therapist today." Justin looked up at him and calmly said, "Oh well, I guess I'll go home then." The audience applauded.
Justin had been diagnosed as learning disabled and attended special education schools until he entered the Barbara Taylor School (about three months prior to this incident). His parents were concerned that he had "reached a plateau," as they had heard often happens with children like Justin, and that he just wasn't developing any longer. Justin had a long history of temper tantrums, which the staff and students at the Barbara Taylor School had been working very hard with Justin to change.
Justin is a performer. We all are. Performing is how we learn and develop.
The renowned Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky* told us that way back in the 1920s. It is through performing—doing what is beyond us (if only for that moment)—that when we are very young we learn to do the varied things we don't know how to do. Vygotsky vividly described how babies transform from babblers to speakers of a language through performing. When they are creatively imitating others, they are simultaneously performing (becoming) themselves. Performing is a way of taking "who we are" and creating something new—in this case, a new speaker—through incorporating "the other."
But what happens, as we perform our way into cultural and societal adaptation, is that we also perform our way out of continuous development. A lot of what we have learned (through performing) becomes routinized and rigidified into behavior. We become so skilled at acting out roles that we no longer keep creating new performances of ourselves. We develop an identity as "this kind of person"—someone who does certain things and feels certain ways. Anything other than that, most of us think, would not be "true" to "who we are."
Justin's emotional development was at a standstill; he repeatedly did what he knew how to do: have a tantrum. Like most of us, he was unaware that this particular emotional response to frustration, change or disappointment was (and is) constructed by himself and others. It did not (perhaps would not and could not, for whatever reasons) occur to him that there is an infinity of things one can do or say upon hearing that the plans have changed.
Creating an environment for Justin to perform, both his tantrum and something other than a tantrum, can reinitiate his emotional and social growth. Creating the stage and creating the performance changes Justin's location and relationship to his so-called emotional state, helping him to create, with others, new emotional forms of life. It creates a changed environment (which is inseparable from him and others). The difference between Justin performing his temper tantrum and his typical behavior of “having” a temper tantrum is the difference between developing and not developing.
Stages for development seems a more apt characterization of human development than stages of development. And this discovery about performance and the developmental value of creating stages for development is taking off. The number of programs for children and teens is now too big to count. In our culture, where young people are too often diagnosed and identified in negative terms, creating spaces for them to perform and, through performing, create new options for who and how they want to be is the greatest gift we can give them.
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