Teachers’ Beliefs and Attitudes: Influences on Minoritized Students’ Engagement in the Learning Context (Poster 12)

• In Event: A Global Perspective of the Landscape of Research on Teachers’ Beliefs

Abstract

Student engagement, a multidimensional meta-construct encompassing observable behaviors, internal cognitions, and emotions, is crucial for students' psychological well-being and academic success. In this presentation, we explore students’ engagement along three dimensions: cognitive engagement, which includes motivation to learn and self-regulated learning strategies; behavioral engagement, referring to students’ observable actions and compliance with school rules; and social-emotional engagement, encompassing positive emotions and a sense of belonging.

Research distinguishes engagement from disengagement, viewing them as distinct constructs, with engagement described as energizing, motivating, and directed toward positive cognitions, actions, and emotions in the learning context, and disengagement as generating negative cognitions, actions, and emotions, such as feelings of alienation and withdrawal from learning (Wang et al., 2019). Earlier studies have taken a somewhat deficit-based perspective of marginalized students, placing the onus for engagement primarily on their shoulders, to suggest that marginalized students with positive engagement profiles adapt better to adversity (e.g., (Reschly & Christenson, 2012). It is essential to account for situational and contextual constraints that may influence these students’ coping, engagement, and learning.

Using an asset-based culturally situated approach, we examine how pre-service and in-service teachers deeply held enculturated beliefs (cognitive convictions) about and attitudes (evaluations and affective responses) toward minoritized and marginalized students shape these students’ engagement and/or disengagement in the learning context.

Our approach, grounded in dual-process theories of social cognition, analyzes how pre-service and in-service teachers’ consciously and unconsciously held cultural beliefs, biases, and attitudes toward minoritized students translate into proposed and current behaviors and practices in the classroom, respectively. Dual-process social cognition theories propose two main systems for processing information: System 1, which is automatic and relies on associative memory, and System 2, which is controlled and deliberate. Attitudes and beliefs can be activated either automatically or deliberately. The MODE model, a well-established dual-process theory, posits that motivation and opportunity determine whether spontaneous or deliberative processes guide behavior. This model helps explain how pre-service and in-service teachers’ beliefs and attitudes, both implicit and explicit, influence their actions toward students, highlighting motivations to control prejudiced reactions, whether genuinely motivated to be unprejudiced or simply motivated to appear unprejudiced (Dunton & Fazio, 1997). Not surprisingly, motivation to be unprejudiced was significantly and negatively associated with teachers’ self-reported explicit bias. Thus, motivations to control prejudice were instrumental in informing pre-service teachers’ intentions to engage in culturally and motivationally supportive instructional practices (Author, 2022). Ultimately, pre-service and in-service teachers’ beliefs and attitudes, shaped by their cultural frames of reference, inform their classroom motivations and behaviors to impact current and prospective students’ academic, cognitive, and behavioral engagement.

We conclude with implications for nurturing minoritized students’ engagement in the classroom. This includes the need for pre-service and in-service teachers to cultivate open-mindedness by developing the virtues of vigilance, diligence, determination, and most of all intellectual and cultural humility. We argue that it is only when learning environments reflect these foundational intellectual virtues can we foster minoritized students’ joy for learning and agentic engagement in the learning context.

Authors

• Revathy Kumar, University of Toledo

• Eric Pilcher, National Heritage Academies

• Amerah Archer, Toledo Public Schools