“This phenomenon has been called the ‘loss of voice’ by Gilligan and her colleagues (Brown and Gilligan 1992), who purport that a girl experiences a gradual silencing of an authentic, imperious and often willful self in order to identify with certain culturally prescribed roles of women as self-sacrificial and please to others. (238)” Brown and Knowles, page 60. This MVP especially stuck out to me because of my experience when our class “hit to streets” to interview passersby about their adolescence. The young woman we interviewed mentioned that schools tended to hurt female adolescents because she noticed a sense of passivity grew in female adolescents, and she felt that gender norms were all too apparent.  Gilligan’s research supports this idea, and so does my adolescence. Additionally, this crisis can be seen in many teen movies – a girl just wants to fit in at school (Mean Girls immediately comes to mind). However, this can be traumatizing to girls who don’t identify with the gender norms our society has outlined for females, (as proven in Mean Girls). The idea of women as the “fairer sex” still holds a lot of power and therefore we get cases like girls who are deemed too rambunctious being labeled as tom-boys. This labeling can then have negative effects on how adolescents perceive themselves and how they imagine they are perceived by others.

In the classroom, teachers play an important role in adolescent identity crises – I wholeheartedly agree with Brown and Knowles about this. Not only do educators model content, they also model behavior, both implicitly and explicitly. In my experience, students were impacted by my energy level, interest in the material and how I treated their classmates. If I started the class nervous or tired, it was surely going to be a rough lesson for everyone. Rather, if I came in and was excited about the material and treated each of them as an individual, the response was much better. Therefore, by constantly reminding our students that gender norms are a thing of the past, we can begin to fight the “loss of voice” phenomenon.