Academia: What's My Motivation?
Thursday's Child Has Far to Go
When I wrote about Bloom’s Taxonomy a few weeks back, I took the time to read some common critiques of it by specialists in educational studies. One of the major complaints was that it doesn’t describe the reality of how most people learn. In particular, that Bloom’s doesn’t consider motivation as a key variable in how or whether people learn, and that internal or intrinsic motivation to learn is a better predictor of whether a student will develop towards creative and analytic uses of their education.
As I write this, I’m sitting in a classroom with 15 first-year Swarthmore students who are also writing about motivation, specifically about motivation to do STEM work in college. It’s part of a four-week program designed to introduce a small cohort of first-generation students to college before the semester begins. My job has been to work with writing, which I’ve mostly constructed as a conversation about social capital and the “hidden curriculum” that Rachel Gable talks about in her recent book. We’ve read Paul Tough’s The Years That Matter Most and John Warner’s Why They Can’t Write rather than doing a bunch of practice writing—only now at the end are we doing a bit of substantive writing, in as low-stakes a way as I can manage.
I decided that writing about motivation and STEM was a good way to open up the widest range of approaches and options for the hour or so that we’re going to be actively writing, and that it would let us do what Warner advocates, which is to use writing as a tool for thinking and rethinking that eventually comes back into the conversation.
So what do I think? I have no desire to contest the robust body of evidence that motivation is central to learning—and the obvious accompanying point that the lack of motivation is deadly to education. Moreover, I agree with numerous scholars who’ve found that intrinsic or internal motivation is a vastly stronger, more persistent and more generative form of motivation to learn and to put whatever is learned to use. That’s what the critics of Bloom’s Taxonomy are getting at when they bring up motivation.
So is that all that needs to be said? For all that I accept all that work, I am deeply wary about motivation. Why? The first is that naming motivation as a key variable in education sounds a lot like talking about grit. Or willpower. Or resilience. It’s giving a name to something deep inside a person’s sense of self and saying that we have to cultivate it or create it—and that if you don’t have it, then it’s your fault if you’re not learning well, if education isn’t working out for you. It’s hanging the success of educators on whether they help a student develop a private, personal, deeply individual quality that can’t be seen.
I get edgy every time we take that turn. It saddles educators with a task that can’t be one-size-fits-all and it saddles students with yet another way to think they don’t belong or don’t measure up.
Moreover, while the critics of Bloom’s are right that it doesn’t match what we know about how people learn, I think some of the talk about motivation doesn’t match how motivation and action really work together—or don’t.
I sometimes know that I have strong motivation to tackle a job. I am sometimes extremely aware that I am unmotivated and that I will do almost anything to avoid a job that I am unmotivated by, even if it would only take me ten minutes to do it. (I still have an end-of-year department report from when I was chair that I never finished, and that’s about three years back.) At least some of the time, I’m neither of these, or I don’t think about whether I feel motivated or not. I just do what needs doing. Maybe it’s routine, maybe there is sufficient compulsion or coercion involved that dwelling on motivation is beside the point. In a motivation-neutral situation where the work matters, maybe there’s nothing wrong with extrinsic motivators.
Sometimes when I reflect on motivation, I’m lying to myself, trying to con myself into doing something, working towards the most virtuous explanation of what I’m doing and burying the least virtuous explanation. Sometimes I’m doing cognitive labor to get my motivations in line with some ideology that governs what I’m doing, or at least to keep myself from accidentally making my real motivations visible. I once had to try and help a student who had made the strategic error of telling a professor that the motivation for being in the class was just to get a required credit for graduation and that they had no real interest in the material. It was true, and that was a motivation that made the student work, but it painted a target on the student’s head from that point on.
Sometimes I can’t possibly know my motivations: they’re not accessible to me. Sometimes I think I know what motivates me and I’m wrong. That’s at the heart of most novels and stories, after all: that other people can see what is really driving an individual and that individual can’t. That’s most of what spoils—or fulfills—real-life relationships and what makes therapy work, when it does: when someone can guide you to an understanding you can’t reach by yourself.
Most of all, I think you often can’t know anything about your motivations, or cultivate them in a particular way, until you are actually doing something. Here I am in this classroom with these students. If I’d asked myself before this program started what my motivations were, it would have been the following: 1) a colleague of mine asked me and I didn’t want to disappoint her; 2) I believe in the idea of the program; 3) I know how hard it is to keep programs like this staffed; 4) The extra compensation was a big help given that I have a child in college. But now? I feel motivated far more by the specificity of these particular students, who seem already like clear thinkers about college, themselves, and writing. I don’t know that they need my help, but I’m excited simply to be engaged with them.
You cannot make that happen, even if that last motivation is a more sustaining and generative one. I don’t think this point applies just to individuals. This is why mission statements and vision exercises as a prologue to acting or doing are such a terrible waste of time. We do not find what will drive us onward or make us committed before we act or do. We find it only in the doing—and sometimes only in the aftermath of the doing. Which means a lot of the time we have to throw ourselves into something whose nature and consequences we barely understand to discover whether there’s anything in it that feeds our souls and empowers our future.
Once again you've made me think hard. My personal experience as an adolescent (about which I have been honest in a couple of published interviews) always coloured my attempts to understand first year student learning problems. My childhood was such a mess that my experience of schooldays was that of total confusion modified by occasional bouts of shapeless hedonism. I had no idea of what I wanted and what I needed to do to get close to achieving anything I could identify as a goal. But I am now old enough to be unembarrassed enough to say that I was a rather clever mess. I looked, I read, I felt things that I now recognise as culture but manifested themselves as formless, non-contiguous enthusiasms that didn't fit into the categoric rigours of subjects and syllabi; there was no discernible motivation and if things like getting away from the suffocation of home might have been motivations then I had no text-books or counselling to help me achieve even that. I scraped into university with the cloud of chaos constantly overhead; I never really knew what was expected of me and consequently was a poor student. But in terms of some of the smart points you raised, almost none of my teachers ever troubled themselves to find out why a bright, largely self-taught kid who learnt by osmosis, wallowing in the unrelated things he loved (and had come to know about) found learning and writing in a disciplined fashion so damned elusive. They simply assumed that being relatively clever meant that the skills demanded in higher education simply emerged like the hairs on your chin. That long preamble perhaps explains why as a first year teacher I always tried to ensure that none of them wandered around in the confused fog in which I'd tried to navigate as a youngster. And I was especially keen to discover what they really were interested in and how well the menu of university served or utterly failed to satisfy those interests. If there was no conceivable way in which combinations could mesh with those interests then I felt obliged to help them seek other paths rather than toughing it out. But in recognising interests and (I hope) validating them even when they did not interest me (a frequent experience) I think I used to try to cultivate the capacity to recognise the potential of things seemigly tengential to their hearts' desires to afford them insights into the ways in which, in some magical way, everything has the potential to be folded into more obviously personal passions. In some ways I think I saw cultivation of motivation as the whetting of boundless curiosity, the hostility towards narrowness, the perception of possibility in the least pre-possessing subjects, the grasping of the relatedness of the apparently un-related. Forgive the long ramble but I regard the onfusion of my younger years as a really dark night of the soul and always wanted to help the young out of that morass if it was possible. Most university yeachers are smart as hell and know what they wanted and had pretrty good ideas about how to achieve that from the get go. Many of thoise we teach (or taught) lacked that facility.
I am such an outlier, because I did not begin college in my teens. I began it in my twenties, and I knew what I wanted from it—not a credential but a portal into more systematic learning. Like Richard, I had been an osmosis learner up to that point. Like you, Tim, I gravitated to what I thought I liked. But the College at Chicago forced me to come to grips with some of those previously skated over subjects, including math, and I have been grateful always for it. When I teach First Years, I want to encourage them to be less fearful about what they can do. Hey, guess what? You just read Aristotle and asked some good questions about him! Anthropology is more complicated than you thought? Truth! It’s what every anthropologist realizes every day. Writing is a learned skill as well as a talent. So let’s practice! As what today we call a “First Gen” student, I quickly sussed out all the hidden curricula (not only class but gender and race, too). Part of what made that possible was reading something like Freud my first week in Self, Culture, and Society and realizing, I can do this. I want my First Years to feel like that, too, when we start with Gilgamesh in two weeks’ time.