Motivation, Meaning and Learning Context
The
Cultural Context of Learning
How do we learn? Teachers and educators deal with this question each day as students struggle to compete for grades and advance to the next level of education. With increasing pressure on teachers to perform and measure student progress, many are faced with the only choice they have and that is to teach to the test so their students are able to show progress as soon as possible. There is even a strong movement to pay teachers according to their performance. Yet, with all of these desperate efforts to improve teaching and learning, the fact remains that students learn best in environments that are safe enough to take the risks necessary to learn and to grow. The high pressure competitive environments serve primarily to build distrust and self-interest. And, with all of the focus on teaching to the tests and cramming information into the heads of students, studies show that students forget up to ninety percent of fact-based information within one year. So, what is the answer for our students in order to help them learn better, motivate them and improve our educational system at every level of schooling?
Students learn best when they are able to make connections with their studies from their own experiences or the experiences of others and with familiar cultural context that they can relate to and understand. In other words, teaching subjects from business to science to math has more meaning and relevancy to students and they will remember more when they can see how the material relates to the world around them in a meaningful way. In addition, as they make meaningful connections with their culture, society and environment, they become more motivated as the information they are learning connects in a significant way with making a better world. The more high-minded students become the more motivated they are to learn and to develop as leaders and good citizens. This also will make them better doctors, lawyers and scientists as they will be able to interact collaboratively, socially and culturally better and at higher levels of performance because they can more clearly make the necessary connections that build understanding as well as increased learning potential.
So, as teachers are able to use cultural context and examples in class that are meaningful to students and connects them with the learning material in a significant way, students learn more and are more motivated to learn. And, in American Society democratic values and context provide this strong cultural foundation for students that are rooted in history and family ancestry in a way that helps students learn and can motivate them through role models and examples they can relate to. The following is an example of two teachers – one who teaches a fact-based curriculum and focuses on teaching to the test, and another who uses cultural context to motivate the students and help them to learn and make connections with the subject material in their coursework.
George is a competitive fellow who has been teaching for several years. He admires all of those impressive great competitive performances in sports and when the principal in his school announced that there would be a new system for teaching based upon performance, George jumped at the opportunity to teach to the test in order to measure the performance of his students against the performance of those of other teachers in his school so he could increase his pay. Since the testing used to monitor the performance of his students was primarily objective, he spent much of his time cramming as much fact-based material into the heads of his students as possible. And, since he taught economics there was considerable fact-based data for the students to memorize for tests including voluminous objective information on both theory and practice.
For awhile, George’s students worked hard to compete for the best grades on his tests and George was able to cram enough information in their heads that his paycheck grew faster than most of the other teachers in his school based on the narrow objective measures of student performance. However, after about a year his student’s began to grow tired of the constant testing and memorization of objective material and became increasingly less motivated to learn even though some students had conquered the system of memorization enough to continue to achieve the highest grades possible. Some were even driven enough to enter grad school and find jobs at the largest financial investment companies in the world where they were asked to use their financial engineering skills to create high risk profit centers such as the Credit Default Swap (CDS) with little regard for their negative impact on the economic system and the global marketplace. George continued to receive increasing pay based upon his student’s performance on tests.
In contrast, Tom is an economics teacher who takes a different approach to helping students learn. He also enjoys sports but appreciates the team effort that always seems to make the real difference over the hype of the individual performances. He is constantly looking for ways to help students to connect their learning of economics with benefits for society. He believes that it is very important for students to understand more than just the naked tools of financial engineering in order to be good practitioners in the field of economics in a global economy. And, he wants the students to remember as much as possible in his classes by connecting their studies with the cultural examples he uses in a democratic economic system. Even though Tom’s paycheck at his school is not based on his student’s performance on tests, he tests his students with essay questions and collaborative discussions regarding their understanding of the important connections and implications of the objective information with benefits to a democratic society and important regulations in a global economy.
Soon, the more his students learned the more interested they became in how improving the economy through financial engineering created not only better investment opportunities but also a better society of confident investors and consumers. In believing they could make a difference, Tom’s students became increasingly motivated and passionate about building a better world through economics. And, many of his students went on to become the skilled financial investment planners responsible for fixing and “reversing” the catastrophe of the Credit Default Swap (CDS) system that had become twice a large as the Stock Market and threatened to destroy the global economy. Tom never made as much money as George in his teaching, but his students became increasingly motivated with the in-depth understanding of the implications of their knowledge for society while most of George’s students changed careers or became motivated only by money without regard for the implications or meaning of their actions in relation to benefits for the global society.
Note:
The concepts and examples in the above essay are based upon the books, The Price of Freedom, 2005 and Collaborative Leadership and Global
Transformation, 2006 by Timothy Stagich, Ph.D.
Other sources: Knowles, Malcolm, The Adult Learner: A Neglected Species, Gulf Publishing Company, 1970; Stevens, E et al., Justice, Ideology and Education, McGraw-Hill, 1987 and Bruner, J., The Culture of Education, Harvard University Press, 1996.
- How do students learn better and how are they best motivated to learn?
- Why is “Cultural Context” important for learning?
- How does Cultural Context help students to make connections with subjects and learning material?
- Why are “High-Minded” students more motivated to learn?
- How do Cultural Context and helping students to make connections with benefits for society increase student motivation to learn?
- Why did George’s students become less motivated to learn over time while Tom’s students increased their motivation to learn?
- How did the attitudes and backgrounds of both George and Tom influence their teaching and abilities to motivate their students?
- After discussing these examples in detail, do you think “pay for performance” policies work to help students learn? Why or why not?
- How can we help teachers to develop students who understand and care about the implications and impact of their fields on society or the environment?
- How and why were Tom’s
students better able to make a difference in improving the economy and
creating benefits for society?
