COURSE OUTLINE AND INTRODUCTION TO UNDERSTANDING THE SELF

COURSE OUTLINE AND INTRODUCTION TO UNDERSTANDING THE SELF WITH SELF CONCEPT

1. Understanding The Self ( Pagkilala sa sarili )

2. COURSE OUTLINE Chapter 1: THE SELF FROM VARIOUS PERSPECTIVES Philosophical Perspectives on the Self The Self, Society, and Culture The Self as a Cognitive Construct The Self in Western and Eastern Thought

3. Chapter 2: UNPACKING THE SELF The Physical Self The Sexual Self Managing the Material Self The Spiritual Self The Political Self and Being a Filipino The Self in the Digital and Virtual World

4. Chapter 3: MANAGING AND CARING FOR THE SELF Learning to be a Better Learner Dream Big and Make it Happen Less Stress, More Care

5. Chapter 1 focuses on the self as a construct

6. Chapter 2 focuses on the factors that make and break the self-concept

7. Chapter 3 focuses on self-care and management

8. Lesson 1: Philosophical Perspectives on the Self Objectives: state the importance of understanding the self explain various notions of the self from different philosophical perspectives examine one’s self in relation to the philosophical perspectives of the self

9. Understanding the Self Know thy self The Self is your main companion in living in this world Who you are, who you want to be, who society wants you to be, and who you can be are some ideas we will explore The Self is Complex

10. Activity 1 Name (and story behind your name) Your place of origin Previous school Interest /hobby Dream Job/ultimate dream

11. Activity 1: Reflection and Integration

12. Aside from your name, course, age, physical attributes, and interests, how would you characterize yourself? 2. Reflecting on your younger years, how did yourself develop? What external factors or personal decisions made the biggest impact?

13. 3. How is your “self” related to others, and what makes it different from others? 4. What do you think is the connection of your “self” to your physical body?

14. 5. Do you think a separate “self” exists after death? What do you think happens to this entity?

15. The activity serves to build a sense of identity. Directions: Draw 2 masks (one depicting what you look like in the outside and the other one depicting what you look like inside) Activity 2: Inside and Outside MASK

16. Mask-making can be both a powerful and tension-releasing avenue for self-exploration and self-expression. Mask-making can be a way to allow unexpected sides of yourself to emerge, or embrace those parts of yourself you have yet to befriend Enhances self-awareness and integrates past, present and future selves Self-reflection can be achieved

17. Self-Concept and Self-Identity

18. For today, we are going to talk about the concept of self-identity. But before we do that we need to start of by defining some very important key terms and grasping the understanding behind these terms. So the first is the idea of self-concept. Self –concept according to Psychologist refers to how someone thinks about, perceives or even evaluates him/herself. So to be self-aware is to have a self-concept.

19. Now, the development of self-concept has 2 aspects: Existential and Categorical Basically the existential self is the most basic part of self-concept. So it’s a sense of being separate and distinct from others. So these are 2 very important components of the existential self. We are separate and distinct entities or objects from others, from other objects, from other people. And an existential self is understanding and having an awareness that the self is constant. So it doesn’t change in life; its pretty constant throughout life. So if someone comes up and says to you “ I’m tired”. That’s not their self-concept, that not a good definition of self-concept of who they are. Is a temporary state. So self-concept is consistent or constant.

20. An a child as young as two or three months, baby, even realizes this. They realize that they exist separately from others, and that they exist over time and space. So this arises due to the part the relationship the child has to the world.. So you’ve always seen that when a baby smiles, someone else smiles back. Or have you seen babies play with the mobiles hanging above their crib? They have this relationship with other objects, and they realize that they are separate from that. Now, moving on, once we realize that we have an existential self, we can formulate a categorical self. In a categorical self comes once this baby realizes that they are separate. So its becoming aware that even though we’re separate and distinct objects or entities or human beings, we also exist in the world. We exist with other objects and beings and entities, in that, each of these entities has properties.

21. At this point the baby is growing and it’s becoming aware that he or she is an object with properties. Usually young toddlers categorize themselves by age or gender, sometimes by skills they have or even by their size, how big or small they are. Now the 2 of the first categories that young children categorize is by age and gender. You always hear little kids saying, “I’m three, or I’m a girl” So in early childhood, these categories that children apply themselves to are very concrete. But eventualy as they grow older, we start to categorize ourselves by including more internal psychological traits. We start to make comparison and evaluations with other people. We start to categorize ourselves by our careers or by the type of person that we want to be. So these developed categories.

22. Now, you probably remember talking about Carl Rogers’ Humanistic Branch of Psychology. And the first of these is self-image. Self image is the view we have for ourselves. The second component is the self-esteem. We can use this word along with self-worth or how we value ourselves. How much love we give ourselves, how much do we love ourselves? And the third is the ideal-self – it’s what we wish to be. Developing this idea of self-concept is a little further, we can use a theory called Social Identity Theory. It has 2 parts. The personal and Social. Personal refers to the things that are unique to each person, like traits. Social Identity. In order to understand the social identity theory, and how we categorize ourselves personally and socially, there is a mental process involved in this.

23. T his process involves 3 steps, and these are the steps we use when we are evaluating ourselves and others in the relationship between personal and social identities. All humans categorize themselves. We categorize ourselves even without knowing it, even without really knowing we do it, I guess part of the human nature. We categorize ourselves in order to understand objects and identify them. For example, we categorize people into groups – ones to which we belong and ones that are different from us. We often use social categories such as race, black, white, Australian, Chinese, Christian, student, accountant, whatever it may be. We categorize ourselves and poeple through these categories. And if we can assign people to a category, that tells us things about that person.

24. It kind of put a definition to them. A prejudgment without fully knowing the person, we have some sort of categorical term of them. Not all people belong to just 1 category. We can belong to many categories. The 2 nd step is, once we categorize is the identification. This is when we adopt the identity of the group we have categorized ourselves as to belonging. For example, if we categorize ourselves as students, the chances are we are gonna eventually adopt the identity of a student. We’re gonna start acting like a student and behaving like a student – this role starts to feel like a norm. We are starting to conform to the norm of the group, the category we belong to.. And there is an emotional significance to identification because our self-esteem, which we talked about, starts to become bound with this group identification and sense of belonging

25. The final step is social comparison. We are always comparing ourselves to others. All the time, subconsciously, consciously whatever it is. Once we categorize and identify, we are going to eventually start comparing ourselves with other groups or comparing other groups with other groups. The reason we do this is to maintain ouor self-esteem. We wanna compare ourselves to other person or groups in a favorable way. This whole idea is actually very critical in understanding prejudice because once 2 groups identify themselves as a separate and rivals then we start to compare in order to maintain self-esteem. So we’re gona look at self-esteem at another point. But understand that self-esteem plays an important role in this mental process that we formulate in developing a social identity.