Self excerpt webb magazine 2017

THE WEBB SCHOOLS

O N E S E L F

A T H R E E — PA R T C O N V E R S AT I O N

CREATING THE SELF

No man is an island entire of itself.

– John Donne,

“Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,” Meditation XVII

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Imagine… you’re an island. But entire of yourself? Imagine you’re a Hawaiian island, formed first from volcanic processes deep in the earth, but later shaped by outside forces: carved by wind, wave and rain; softened by green plants, flowers, birds and other living things. Not entire of yourself at all, then: you are the result, not only of own volcanic interior but of ceaseless outside action.

All these influences form your island self, and a tropical island is as good an analogy as any for the human self. Consider: humans have innate tendencies and temperaments, says The Webb Schools’ Director of Counseling and Health Education Melanie Bauman, before explaining that the development of the self is also the result of the individual’s interactions with the surrounding world, too.

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continuous process: we form and reform our selves throughout our lives. Still, our selves are largely formed during childhood and adolescence. From a learning perspective, the self is the ability to connect knowledge and intellectual growth with moral and humanistic reasoning, says Bauman. Our selves form through self-reflection; by considering ourselves, who we want to be, how we want to relate to the world and how to enact those ideas.

This, in turn, requires relational reasoning skill; that is, the ability to create relationships between things. Much of this relational development occurs during childhood. It begins with simple relationships: between egg and chicken, milk and cow, mama and love. By the time children become adolescents, they’re creating much more complex relationships—the type of relational reasoning emphasized in Webb’s science and humanities curricula.

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Webb’s focus on student-centered learning combines thinking and doing, which encourages relational learning, Bauman says.

It creates “authentic opportunities for students’ self-discovery in the classroom,” says Sally Mingarelli, Webb’s director of experiential learning. Webb’s freshmen and sophomore courses give students a solid grounding in the facts and background knowledge they need to build sophisticated relationships.

Electives in the final two years provide opportunities for unbounded thinking and “room to discover who you are and what you love… Every moment where you step more deeply into something is a moment of self-discovery.

“ Educating the whole student happens in the

24 hours we have each day, not just the seven hours in the classroom,” Mingarelli notes.

And as they’re learning and creating knowledge, Webb students are also shaping their selves.

Education, knowledge, and the capacity for relational and reflective thought is one aspect of the self. Character—the self’s values and morals, strengths and weaknesses—is another.

As adolescents develop their relational reasoning skills, they’re using those skills to shape and understand their character, too.

Webb encourages students to take an active role in their own character development. And like all aspects of the self, developing character is a continuous, experiential process. In this process, Webb serves as a microcosm of the wider world, a community in which students can develop, shape and ‘try on’ their emerging self and character.

Webb Magazine • Spring 2017

For some Webb students, that’s a very self-conscious process.

Dakota Santana-Grace ’11 found his involvement with the theater program allowed him to consider the creation of his own self by enacting other identities. “Theater puts us in a direct discourse with that process,” he notes: any good play involves character evolution, and connects with what teenagers are going through. Exploring the thought process of the stage characters he portrayed developed his empathy and his own self-reflection. Theater, along with Webb’s debate team and paleontology program, forced Santana-Grace to stretch himself, but within a safe space.

Sa ntana-Grace

At the same time, his coursework shaped how he approaches problems. “Because of these activities I spent a lot more time being thoughtful,” he recalls. Part of his self now, he says, is a concern for others, and a reflective internal dialog asking “What’s going on here? Is this the right path, is this the right step?” That practice isn’t always comfortable, he says, “but Webb gave me the ability to do it.”

Santana-Grace’s experience building self and character at Webb resonates with humanities teacher Rick Duque.

“One of the things we focus on is ‘who are you?’ and how can you be the complete you if you don’t know who you are?” he says. “The only way you can define who you are is to have some struggle… I want every kid to have an experience where they’re pushed to the limit and then they go further.” Webb encourages this character development in a safe environment, both inside and outside the classroom. “The novels and short stories we read relate to values,” explains Duque. “I really like making connections between what we read and their lives,” including characters’ struggles, failures and successes. At the same time, he adds, a lot of individual growth comes from within, and occurs outside the classroom—on the playing field, in afternoon activities and in the dorms.

“There are areas where you realize who you are and what you’re made of,” agrees economics teacher Will Allan ’94, often areas that present a challenge—overcoming adversity, for example, or taking on a leadership position. “Webb does a really great job creating these opportunities, both purposefully and organically.” The school emphasizes leadership, creative thinking and collaboration, giving students experience interacting with others as leaders and team members.

As teenagers develop their own selves and characters, they should be able to make their own judgements, Duque says.

Freshmen, he notes, typically are not yet comfortable with who they are and tend to follow along, rather than lead or speak out. By the time they leave high school as young adults, they should be strong enough in their own self-identity to speak up for their own character and values.

asked the same fundamental questions. “It struck me pretty quickly that we’re all in this together,” Dvivedi says.

“We’re all on a similar path here. Seeing that really prepares you for adulthood and that next stage in your life. There’s an underlying backbone or structure that Webb gives you.

It definitely sticks with you, through college and through your career.”

Another way to understand self and character is to create one on paper. “Building a character also helps you build the story,” says novelist John Scalzi ’87. There’s a lot of back and forth between character and story, internal and external forces shaping each other, on paper and in the real world. There is no one right answer for self creation, he notes; no formula for creating a perfectly self-actualized self.

Their years at Webb are a critical developmental time for students, says psychologist Michi Fu ’91, as they negotiate their own bodies, relationships and their sense of self.

A boarding school experience gives students a chance to learn how to navigate their relationships with the world and with other individuals outside the nuclear family.

“It isn’t just the academics and it isn’t just the dorm life and it isn’t just interactions

with teachers,” says Scalzi. “It’s a whole.

Dvivedi

S c al zi

And in fact, much of the process of self-creation remains unconscious, or barely glimpsed: a moment that reveals something of the world to you, and slips from conscious memory even as it carves a facet of your self and your character, becoming part of what author Leslie Epstein ’56 calls the hidden springs of your life. Nevertheless, a learning community like The Webb Schools can help students understand the processes of self development, even if they’re not always visible, and help adolescents build a positive self identity. “Webb,” Scalzi recalls, “was proactively engaged in character development as a portable thing you can take elsewhere.” The school inculcated a sense of honor and a sense that who you are matters, he says.

Being part of a close-knit yet heterogeneous community during the formative adolescent years can instill a lasting sense of the worth, not only of one’s individual self, but of others’ selves, as well. “You don’t just get this surface view of people, you really get to know what people are made of,” says Deval Dvivedi ’00. Originally from Bahrain, at Webb Dvivedi came to the realization that people share more similarities than differences. “At Webb, being in Southern California… it was the first time I was exposed to all sorts of different people and ideas,” he recalls. “You realize we’re not all that different.” Although the student body at Webb was diverse, he says, as a peer group of adolescents everyone

The entire experience builds a character.”

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That process doesn’t stop with adolescence.

The self matures through time, Fu says.

“Over the course of one’s lifetime we tend to see shifts in how we view ourselves and others,” she explains.

“We’re always redefining ourselves,” agrees Bauman. As children, we’re defined largely by others. In high school and college, we rework our identities, perhaps again in college.

Our selves are shaped progressively by our life experiences: work, family, aging. The emphasis of our selves shifts from ourselves as individuals to our relationships. As we mature over time, the fundamentals of the selves we created as adolescents can remain with us. “Those years of adolescence are the crucial years in life,” says Epstein. Our characters are the heroes in our life stories. “And when it’s all said and done,” Duque says, “you just look at yourself in the mirror and ask ‘am I happy who I am… did I treat somebody nice, did I give it my all?’”

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