Cheryl A. Canino
School—a place where adolescents spend a lot of time—is an important context where adolescents’ identity development can be supported.53 Different types of in depth and reflective explorative learning experiences can be organized to foster adolescents’ identity development. Such experiences can stimulate adolescents to explore new understandings or investigate existing self-understandings54
According to McCullough, in her study of girls in an urban school found that girls use school and the classroom environments to negotiate and extend power over their relationships with boys and teachers.55 However, she suggests that such acts of agency offer little resistance or opportunity to create systemic changes in the school environment concerning the understanding of sexism and strategies used when dealing with harassment from boys. Her study also concluded that girls’ acts of agency did not improve the conditions of the girls at their school. She contends that educators need to describe experiences of pain, oppression and suffering outside of the terms of victimhood.56