Читать книгу Student Engagement Techniques - Elizabeth F. Barkley - Страница 15

When asked, we often hear teachers describe engagement in phrases like “engaged students really care about what they're learning; they want to learn,” or “engagement to me is passion and excitement.” Interestingly, when we ask college students how they define engagement, many of their descriptions echo those of faculty, as they say things like: “student engagement means feeling motivated, being challenged, excited about the new.” Both teachers and students affirm the feeling aspect of engagement.

The etymological roots of the word engagement offer clues to this feeling aspect of student engagement. “Engage” is an Old French word for pledging one's life and honor as well as for charming or fascinating someone sufficiently that they become an ally. Both meanings resonate with teachers' emotion-based view of student engagement: we want students to share our enthusiasm for our academic discipline and find our courses so compelling that they willingly, in fact enthusiastically, devote their hearts and minds to the learning process.

The Glossary of Education Reform's (2016) definition supports the feeling or affective component of student engagement, as follows:

In education, student engagement refers to the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning or being taught, which extends to the level of motivation they have to learn and progress in their education. Generally speaking, the concept of “student engagement” is predicated on the belief that learning improves when students are inquisitive, interested, or inspired, and that learning tends to suffer when students are bored, dispassionate, disaffected, or otherwise “disengaged.” (para. 1)

A similar definition also suggests the feeling aspect of student engagement, describing such engagement as “students' willingness, need, desire, and compulsion to participate in, and be successful in, the learning process” (Bomia et al., 1997, p. 294). Much of the literature about engagement describes this factor of engagement as “affective” or “emotional” engagement (see, e.g., Fredericks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004). This feeling aspect of engagement relates to what the learner is thinking about in the classroom. It includes student feelings about the content or activity and also may involve something outside the classroom.

The feeling aspect of engagement at its most fundamental level boils down to motivation and whether students are motivated for learning in a particular course. The Latin derivative of motivation means “to move.” Brophy (2004) defines motivation in the classroom as “the level of enthusiasm and the degree to which students invest attention and effort in learning” (p. 4), which echoes many of the feeling definitions of student engagement. Motivation, then, is a theoretical construct to explain the reason or reasons we engage in a particular behavior. It is the feeling of interest or enthusiasm that makes somebody want to do something. In the classroom, we hope students will want to learn. Research demonstrates that motivation to learn is an acquired competence developed through an individual's cumulative experience with learning situations. It is a web of connected insights, skills, values, and dispositions that is developed over time (Brophy, 2004).

Some students come to our institutions and our classes with a high impetus to learn. Others are more motivated by the economic opportunities associated with the professions and careers they hope to have once they graduate. Regardless of a student's general disposition, motivation is also activated or suppressed in specific situations: even students who generally want to learn may be less enthusiastic in a course that they feel coerced to take because it is a required element of the general education curriculum. Conversely, students who seem generally unmotivated to learn may become quite enthusiastic about the concepts or ideas in a specific course.