I first learnt about Maslow's Hierarchy when I was teaching Belonging as an Area of Study to Year 12. Preparing students to approach a prescribed text (in this case it was Skrzynecki's suite of poetry from Immigrant Chronicle) required some conceptual underpinning. We talked about things like connections to people, belonging to a place, belonging to a culture, and so on.
I tell you what, I almost miss students writing that someone 'unbelonged' (though I definitely don't miss seeing The Blind Side and Shrek brought into class over and over again as related texts).
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs came up as a useful way of getting students to think about the internal and external lives of characters. We all know what it's like to belong or not belong, but being able to write about it with some degree of skill requires a framework for articulation. I've found Maslow's to be a very useful visualisation in this respect.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is one psychologist's interpretation of the different ways in which humans:
- Behave
- Are motivated
- Develop emotionally/mentally
Abraham Maslow believed that, once a set of lower needs are taken care of, a person can then work on developing the higher needs. I've seen many different visualisations of what this looks like but the five tiers basically remain the same. Here's an example:
The idea is that, if a person's physiological needs aren't being met, then it will be difficult for them to even think about the level above it. As each level is accessed by a person they can then access the one above. The state of 'self-actualisation', in which an individual can make space/time to engage in creative pursuits or to moralise, is something that generally can't be achieved unless the other tiers are met in some way.
I'll often put this pyramid in front of my class and ask students to consider the way the hierarchy builds on itself. Then we look at our class novel, for example Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and I then ask students to map each of the characters against the Hierarchy of Needs.
Consider the following characters:
- Lennie
- George
- Curley
- Curley's Wife
- Crooks
- Slim
- Candy
Once students get to know them, they should be able to posit whether a character is able to even consider the idea of friendship or not (Tier 3 of the pyramid). Is Crooks able to forge a friendship with Lennie and George? The possibility is raised in Chapter 4 but it doesn't quite work out that way. Why is that? In what way is Maslow's Hierarchy able to shed light on how Crooks might be feeling and why he's unable to form a lasting friendship with the others?
This kind of exploration can be repeated for each of the characters, and it gives students a framework for their empathetic analysis of the text.
It's a simple idea but I've found that it works well for a number of texts, and especially for something like Of Mice and Men, which is very much about humans and the extent to which they're able to have their needs met when living in times of hardship.