Two Novice Teachers’ Negotiations of Figured Worlds and Their Developing Views of Student Motivation

• In Event: Motivation and Emotion in Context: Exploring the Influence of Culture and Context on Teachers’ Lives

Abstract

Objective/Purpose. I will present a cross-case analysis of two novice teachers’ changing views of their students’ motivation, and how those views were co-constructed in the social words in which they learn to teach.
Theoretical Framework. Situative motivation theory, in which motivation is seen, along with learning and identity, as situated in the ongoing practice of social worlds, frames this study (Nolen & Ward, 2008; Nolen, Ward, Horn, & Childers, in press). The notion of figured worlds (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998) frames this analysis of change in novice teachers’ interpretations of their students’ actions as motivated. Figured worlds are socially constructed realms where members’ behavior is guided by shared assumptions, values and motivations that arise through interaction. As the novices in this study learned to teach in TEPworld (their university teacher education program), Fieldworld (the schools in which they student-taught) and Realworld (the schools in which they were employed as teachers during the first two years), they used motivation filters to select teaching practices from among those promoted by people in those social worlds (Nolen et al., 2009). Filters were used to make utility judgments, based in part on novices’ representations of good teaching, of their students, of mathematics as a discipline, and their own identities as teachers. These filters were socially constructed through interaction within and among the various figured worlds in which they learned to teach. In this analysis, I investigated whether the same filters framed two novices’ thinking about their students’ motivation, and how that thinking developed as they attempted to recontextualize practices learned in one world to another with different assumptions, goals, and values.
Methods and data sources. The data comes from a larger study of novice teachers (Horn, Nolen, Ward, & Campbell, 2008; Nolen et al., in press; Nolen et al., 2009) and their activity in multiple worlds. For this analysis, data from two novice mathematics teachers included 11-12 observations and associated interviews across four years. These data include fieldnotes of interactions among novices, between novices and their instructors, supervisors, cooperating teachers, colleagues, and administrators, and observations of their work with students.
Results and significance. A number of the components novices used in constructing their utility filters to evaluate potential practices also seemed to contribute to their interpretations of their students’ motivation. In particular, their representation of good math teaching and its goals, their own motivations as learners, and their representations of students changed over time through interaction with others in their figured worlds, novices’ interpretations and responses to students’ motivated behavior also changed. Additional elements provided resources for or constrained novices’ thinking about motivation in each figured world, including views of student engagement promoted in TEPworld and Fieldworld, along with curricular structures, and departmental and district practices in Realworld. The implications for understanding and supporting teachers’ situated thinking about student motivation will be discussed.

Author

• Susan E. Cooper, University of Washington