English 485: Expedition Adolescence

In both The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Speak , both protagonists use art in order to build upon their own voices as individuals who seek to belong.  In  The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,  Junior, an adolescent male Indian who lives on a reservation uses cartoons because they are a way for him to formulate his thoughts and experiences into a form of language everyone can understand.  He believes that languages are too specific and unpredictable, so if he is able to draw cartoons then can talk about the world in an artistic form, and maybe his drawings lead to a way to escape from his reservation; drawings are his lifeboats in a community where everyone is drowning.  Junior draws cartoons to better understand the world, to make fun of people, and to honor those who are close to him.  During a time where Junior is shunned by others on his reservation for enrolling in a white school, and failing to be accepted at his new scho...

What I really appreciated about The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian  was its ability to portray Junior's search for personal identity and acceptance, and juxtapose the adolescent development, experiences, and expectations of Indians on the reservation and whites. Sherman Alexie is able to critically juxtapose the development, expectations, and experiences of Indian and white adolescents through Junior's interactions with both environments. Junior is an Indian boy who excels in reading and other areas of education, and this causes tension between himself and the other Indians on the reservation who expect him to fall in line and fail. He seeks a sense of personal identity and satisfaction he cannot find the reservation so he chooses to enroll in a white school where such talents are celebrated and a pursuit of education is expected. While his academic abilities are in par and tolerated by his white peers at his new school, he is still not fully accepted because of hi...

The overall claim of the article appears to be that adolescent development has and continues to be a highly researched and debated area of study that has attempted to shift from a historical focus on problem behavior that had become the intrinsic nature of adolescent development to a more diversified, contextual, social, and biological approach to adolescent study. But according to the author, research and approaches to the study of adolescent development must continue to shift in their perspectives in order to create a comprehensive, normative and atypical theory of adolescent development that includes biological, contextual, social, and psychological influences.  While I agree with the author in the abandonment of problem behavior as the central focus of theories of adolescent development was the right course of action, I am not so sure I agree with the pressure to shift the focus of research from the overarching contextual, social, biological, etc. views of recent research in th...