Motivational Immediacy

Fostering Engagement in Adult Learners

Jonathan E. Taylor

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781620369579
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

This book provides a fresh look at the question of learner motivation and engagement, beginning with an investigation of potential motivations not to learn, the better to help instructors find more successful ways to engage learners in any given situation. After examining various kinds of resistance to learning, the book goes on to describe effective ways of overcoming resistance and engaging learners.Grounded in the literature of many fields, such as Adult Education, Psychology, Sociology, Cultural Anthropology, and Communication (as well as the author's own decades of experience), the book connects the concepts surrounding learning resistance directly to engagement and human motivation, drawing these ideas together to make the case for practicing motivational immediacy in all learning spaces. The second section of the book focuses on the various tools effective teachers might use to mitigate learner resistance and foster authentic and lasting engagement. The author devotes a chapter to using curriculum and Instructional Systems Design (ISD) processes to effectively foster engaged learning in different learning spaces and contexts. Two chapters are devoted to applying the theory and methods to specific domains: online learning environments, and face-to-face classrooms with both undergraduate and graduate students. The last section includes a chapter that provides a potential method to measure effectual learning in the classroom, and one that addresses the ethical issues sometimes said to exist in efforts to mitigate learner resistance and foster engagement in its place. The final chapter draws the book to a close by presenting a fluid whole that will greatly improve understanding of the ideas as well as the methods best used to reduce learning resistance, increase learner engagement, and facilitate motivational immediacy and effectual learning.

I

SHIFTING PARADIGMS

It is not often that learner motivation is cast as the villain. Typical conversations run along the lines of whether a given learner is motivated and how one might foster more of it. This is a good question, but perhaps not the best. What, exactly, are learners motivated to do, and why are they motivated to do it? Those are the questions addressed in the pages of this book, and at the center will be this claim: All learners are motivated. All learners are motivated, but they may not be motivated at all to do the things that we are hoping they will do. Motivation will not be cast as the villain here, but it will not be cast as the hero, either.

Motivation is a value-neutral, bidirectional construct that can drive a learner to learn intently or to avoid learning at all, and it is vital that it be viewed as such. The important question is not one concerned with learner motivation being indiscriminately generated but with learner motivation being of the type that is conducive to learning. This sort of an intense but open-minded approach to motivation is one hallmark of a truly learner-centered education.

If motivation is, indeed, something learners could have in either direction, then the job of the teacher is to foster a change in learner motivation, not just to promote more of it. It seems odd, for sure, to talk about demotivating learners rather than motivating them, but generic talk of fostering motivation in learners rides on an assumption, and the implications of that assumption are of great importance for anyone serious about educating others.

Certainly, it may be true that what we mean when we refer to motivating learners is a motivation specifically to learn, but that may just add to the problem rather than eliminate it, because it places in stark relief another assumption that is just as bad—that learners can be sorted into two categories: those who are motivated to learn and those who are not motivated to do anything at all. This presupposes a sort of learner stasis, the existence of which does not hold up to scrutiny.

What if learners are very often motivated to not learn at all but to avoid it? How would that change how we practice? What could be done about it? What would a practice informed by this viewpoint look like? How would it affect the ways we might think and talk about motivation? Would research questions shift significantly? Should they?

I join Maritain (1943) in believing that “the surprising weakness of today . . . proceeds from our attachment to the very perfection of our modern educational means and methods, and our failure to bend them toward the end” (p. 3). Much of the discussion in this book is focused on the ends of our educational efforts and ensuring that our means are aligned properly and most effectively and efficiently with those ends.

Wenger (2000) pointed out that, when new terms are coined, they do not always break the ice for a new concept, but they almost always cause existing concepts to be thought of in new ways. I introduce a number of new terms in this book, or, at least, I use a number of terms in different sorts of ways than they are customarily used. Motivation has come under risk of being another dead horse to beat upon, and this most often happens only when an existing paradigm has nothing left to offer. Motivational immediacy is not a method for garnering more motivation; it is a call for a new way of seeing motivation altogether. That paradigm shift brings with it a wide range of practical methods for facilitation, and indeed a significant part of this book is focused on those methods. But to fully utilize those methodological means, we must only apply them with a full understanding of our educational ends in mind. To employ practical methods in our classrooms effectively, we first must grasp the conceptual principles in which they are rooted. There are always a number of key principles that inform any proposed paradigm, and the present case is no exception. The remainder of this chapter lays out the principles upon which motivational immediacy rests.

Learning Resistance Is a Lack of Engagement

Although learner engagement is the primary focus, learner resistance, as a dynamic, will serve as its point of departure. Learning resistance is viewed as a dynamic in which the learner does not engage in a learning situation. As such, it is not directly related to any particular classroom behavior, such as arguing with the teacher or, for that matter, smiling and nodding. Learner behaviors are not easy to decipher, and the same sort of behavior can be a manifest of many different motivational causes.

Learning Resistance Is a Systemic Phenomenon

Learning resistance is treated as a systemic phenomenon, but the system includes the learner as a significant factor. We cannot, on the one hand, speak up for the empowerment and agency of the learner, while avoiding the learner’s responsibility on the other. It is difficult at times to accurately differentiate between the two, and one must make any such attempts with great earnest and humility, but it is important for both the teacher and the learner to understand the student’s responsibility and the role it plays in successful learning. Treatments of engagement and resistance have, over the years, swung wildly between periods during which the learner was blamed for all such problems or blamed for none. Motivational immediacy acknowledges all forms of learning resistance as concrete realities of all learning spaces and casts them as legitimate forces to be aware of and reckoned with.

Motivation Is a Neutral Construct

Rather than being addressed primarily as a drive toward education, motivation is seen as a neutral phenomenon, which, in equal measure, can drive a learner both toward and away from engagement and learning. Therefore, fostering motivation for learning might require, at times, fostering a demotivation for resistance and rejection. The tendency to think and speak of motivation as only a positive thing leads the educator to, perhaps inadvertently, avoid, ignore, or simply miss the very real-world struggles that the learner may be facing.

Motivation Is Distinct From Engagement

In keeping with this line of thought, motivation is seen as distinct from engagement. This is consistent with some of the published work on motivation (e.g., Marks, 2000; Renniger et al., 2018) but quite distinct from others (e.g., Merriam & Bierema, 2014). These different approaches can create confusion in both theory and practice, and understanding the relationship between them is important when considering teaching applications.

A learner can engage with the learning situation because they are motivated to do so, but a learner can also disengage from the learning situation because they are motivated to do so. Only when the two dynamics (motivation and engagement) are divorced from one another can the power and impact of each be recognized.

A Focus on Learning Resistance Is Learner-Centered

Teaching with an awareness of and sensitivity to learner resistance is viewed as a humanistic, learner-centered, and positive approach to fostering engagement in any learning space. Although one’s intentions may be admirable when resolutely focusing only on positive aspects of the environment and only on learner strengths, any authentic attempts to connect with the learner and engage in learner-centered education must sit where the learner sits and see the world as the learner sees it.

Motivation Is Both Global and Immediate

The focus on motivation centers on the spectrum of global and immediate motivation rather than the more traditional intrinsic–extrinsic dichotomy. Although looking at global and immediate motivation are more novel approaches, they are not completely foreign. Kruglanski et al. (2018) provide an interesting conception of the intrinsic and extrinsic typology that can help bridge the terms and concepts.

Learning Requires Acquisition and Acceptance

Authentic, meaningful learning requires both acquisition and acceptance, and, if the teacher has any hope that the learner will demonstrate a future practical use of any particular learning content, the teacher must also work for a present conceptual commitment of the learning content. Fostering engagement is not, in itself, the same thing as fostering acceptance of learning content, but, in order for a student to be fully open to consider the content with a discerning but authentic eye, the learner must be engaged. The facilitation of the one brings with it enhanced opportunities for the other.

Motivational Immediacy Is a Theory for Practice

The academic treatments of learning resistance and engagement are provided for the express purpose of applying them in practical ways in everyday learning spaces to foster more effective and efficient learning. Concrete methods are bound to specific sets of circumstances, and what works very well in one situation may likely bring failure in another. Principles, on the other hand, have a much greater transcendent power, and that power is what breathes life into any particular method. Only when a teacher is fully aware of the principle that a given method is supposed to be serving can the teacher make adequate assessments of whether the method is actually working. Motivational immediacy represents a collection of conceptual principles that are intended to give wings to the enhanced use of practical methods.

A Measurement Focus Can Negatively Impact Practice

One of the reasons affect is not taken seriously in practice is that present-day politics require measurable outcomes, and affective outcomes are difficult to measure. Affective outcomes of learning can be measured effectively enough to secure support for the educational efforts and reforms they require. When considerations of measurement are at hand, it is important to understand the level of accuracy that is required in order to retain the efficacy of the measurement itself.

For instance, measuring bags of rock to put on a riverbank might allow a more flexible metric than determining the amount of a vaccine in order for it to be safely and effectively administered. Likewise, measuring whether an individual has memorized a set of facts or can replicate a specific skill might require more measurement accuracy than determining whether a learner believes that the facts are true or that the skill should be used in the future. Differing levels of measurement accuracy do not necessarily differentiate the two in terms of importance.

Five “Rules” of Teaching

Woven together, these principles are distilled to a set of five “rules” of teaching:

1. You never teach groups—you always and only teach individuals (who might be together in groups sometimes).

2. Connection is the “underneath” of all effectual teaching.

3. You must engage in motivational immediacy as you teach.

4. You must foster both the acquisition of content and the acceptance of content.

5. Focusing on the negative is positive—focusing on the learner’s strengths while ignoring their needs is not human-centered teaching.

Overview of Contents

Learning resistance has been used in many different ways to describe many different things. Chapter 2 leads off the first part of the book, which provides the theoretical and empirical basis for the work as a whole and introduces all of the key concepts that are applied in the second and third parts. It will provide a thorough analysis of the concept of learning resistance, grounded in the academic literature of many fields of study, such as adult education, educational psychology, psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, and communication. This analysis will culminate with a clear definition of the term, its types, its causes, and its effects. Four types of learning resistance will be identified and explained, and examples of each will be provided.

As it is used in this book, the phenomenon of learning resistance is described as the opposite of the psychological construct of “openness” and, as such, is rooted in the range of learner engagement. Learner engagement is, of course, a cornerstone of this book, and one of the primary purposes of chapter 2 is to connect the two concepts of resistance and engagement in a way that will provide a clear path forward for discussions of effectual learning and motivational immediacy.

Chapter 3 will turn the discussion away from learning resistance and toward the primary focus of the book by connecting the concepts surrounding learning resistance directly to engagement and human motivation. This chapter will tie together motivational concepts spanning nearly 90 years and introduce the concepts of immediate motivation and global motivation. It will draw these ideas together to make the case for practicing motivational immediacy in all learning spaces.

Chapter 4 introduces the idea of effectual learning. It ties together all of the primary concepts introduced in the book so far and introduces a cohesive way to understand teaching and learning. Learning acquisition is contrasted with learning acceptance, and the relative importance of both are discussed in light of the subsequently presented ideas of learning resistance, learning engagement, and motivational immediacy.

Chapter 5 marks out the transition to the second part of the book, which focuses on the various tools that effective teachers might use to mitigate learner resistance and foster authentic and lasting engagement. This chapter will lay out a wide range of suggested mitigation strategies for learning resistance. The strategies are drawn from the multidisciplinary literature and are organized according to the nature of their approach.

Chapter 6 bridges the more global and theoretically oriented concepts introduced in the first section of the book to the real-world practice of teaching a specific classroom session. It provides a very concrete set of strategies for connecting with students in the classroom in a given time-bound space, helping them better understand their own potential reservations about the class or content and fostering a high degree of engagement for the entirety of the class session. This is a general approach and must be adapted for specific contexts. Several of the most often-discussed and well-known contexts, domains, and/or learning spaces will be addressed in the following chapters.

Chapter 7 wraps up the second part of the book by providing practical applications for using curriculum and instructional systems design (ISD) processes to effectively foster engaged learning in all of these different learning spaces and contexts. The chapter contains a critique of some of the most common practices and suggestions for how to wield curriculum and ISD processes more effectively to foster learner engagement.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 SHIFTING PARADIGMS
• PART ONE: FRAMEWORKS OF MOTIVATIONAL IMMEDIACY
• PART TWO: FACILITATION OF MOTIVATIONAL IMMEDIACY
• PART THREE: DOMAINS OF MOTIVATIONAL IMMEDIACY
• PART FOUR: CONCERNS OF MOTIVATIONAL IMMEDIACY
• REFERENCES
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INDEX
• Backcover