[Xmca-l] Re: Intrinsic motivation?

[Greg Thompson]

Michael,
I like your reverse engineering idea.
And I like the idea of "intrinsic to the activity" too.
But, I assume, it is only "intrinsic to the activity" with respect to an
engaged (or not) subject? i.e. there must still be a "we" that is
interested (and different "we's" can have different levels of interest in
the same activity). I think this is implied in what you say but I'm not
sure (esp. if "intrinsic" is put back (solely) in the activity).
I guess I'm a little anxious here that the individual side of the
individual/context unity is swallowed up by the activity.
I should add that I've never been very good on the "activity" part of
activity theory so maybe "activity" already includes subjectivities?
Any help here would be greatly appreciated.
-greg


On Mon, Aug 4, 2014 at 8:03 PM, Glassman, Michael <glassman.13@osu.edu>
wrote:

> Hi Phillip,
>
> So can we reverse engineer the idea of motivation (I actually don't know
> what that means but I like the way it sounds and I'm hoping it impresses
> people).  But can we take the word motivation and replace it with interest?
>  And can we take the concept of intrinsic out of the individual and put it
> in the activity itself?  So we do an activity for one of two reasons - we
> do it because we are interested in the activity itself, or we do the
> activity because we are interested in the external rewards we might get
> from doing the activity.  One form of interest is not necessarily superior
> to the other in getting individuals to accomplish a task - but, as they
> say, sooner or later the candy man is going to get up and leave, and then
> why would you keep doing the task it there is not outside reward?  It
> really does double back to the mathematics discussion.  Do we do the math
> work because we just have to know how it turns out or do we do the math
> work because we like the rewards we get for doing a good job.  The former
> and we're always playing with math, the latter and we go into the financial
> sector.
>
> Michael
> ________________________________________
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu]
> on behalf of White, Phillip [Phillip.White@ucdenver.edu]
> Sent: Monday, August 04, 2014 9:18 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Intrinsic motivation?
>
> i enjoyed reading your posting, Andrew, and would like to add to it
> (realizing that this may not be a path you wish to venture on)  -  in my
> own experience as an elementary school teacher, as well as a university
> teacher, i have lost any faith in the notion of "motivation", intrinsic or
> extrinsic.  regardless of the age of the student, when i notice a student
> not participating, i consider the lack of participation as a lack of
> engagement.  that way, i don't have to see myself as having to "motivate" a
> student, but rather to provide multiple alternative activities which may
> interest a student's engagement.
>
> Bateson, as far as i know, never addresses the notion of motivation.
>
> Marie Clay, who worked with students who failed to engage in reading,
> worked out a wealth of activities in which the student could both engage
> and internalize self-monitoring behaviors that strengthened the multiple
> activities of fluent readers.
>
> Holland, et al, in Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds gives little
> credence to motivation, seeing motivation as "formed" through social
> interactions.
>
> Michael Cole in Cultural Psychology: A once and future discipline, doesn't
> even directly address motivation.
>
> for me as a teacher, the conceptual framework of motivation is too
> enveloped in Skinnerian behaviorism, and is an epistemological failure as a
> explanatory principle of human behavior.
>
> my two bits.
>
> phillip
>
>
> Phillip White, PhD
> Urban Community Teacher Education Program
> Site Coordinator
> Montview Elementary, Aurora, CO
> phillip.white@ucdenver.edu
> or
> pawhite@aps.k12.co.us
> ________________________________________
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu]
> On Behalf Of Andrew Coppens [acoppens@ucsc.edu]
> Sent: Monday, August 04, 2014 3:46 PM
> To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Intrinsic motivation?
>
> Hi everyone -
> Thanks in advance for bearing with a long post from a usual listener here.
>
> I'm also working on an alternative to the deeply entrenched
> intrinsic/extrinsic dichotomy. I'm trying to explain a pervasive cultural
> pattern among Indigenous American children: the motivation to contribute
> autonomously (i.e., under their own initiative) and with responsibility to
> productive family and community endeavors, as integrated participants and
> meaningful collaborators in cultural activities. What are the motivational
> affordances of children having opportunities to "take part" in mature
> endeavors? What is the draw of "bigger than me" activities?
>
> First, I've found it instructive to consider parallels in historical timing
> between the emergence of a motivational science and the segregation of
> children from productive work in the middle-class West, both around the
> turn of the 20th century. Kurt Danziger has written on this in *Naming the
> Mind. *I believe this cultural pattern (the segregation of children and
> workers from productive activities and their motives) has become somewhat
> of an unquestioned epistemological principle in canonical motivational
> theory, and certainly in the intrinsic/extrinsic dichotomy.
>
> >From a CHAT perspective, would the idea of an "extrinsic reward" even hold
> water? Mainstream motivational research gives enough evidence to defend the
> idea that when "extrinsic rewards" undermine intrinsic motivation, what
> might be happening is a transformation of the student's/child's activity
> and the material reward is the pivot. That new activity (e.g., getting a
> grade) is not nearly as compelling as mastering material to do something
> productive and interesting. But "getting a grade" is inherent/intrinsic,
> not extrinsic, to the activity of IPBSchooling. This motivational
> transformation can happen in the reverse direction too (see WM Roth and RM
> Larson), through a move from periphery to center a la Lave & Wenger.
>
> So, not "extrinsic" but also not "intrinsic" in the conventional sense.
> When self-in-activity is the unit of analysis for questions about
> motivation, the intrinsic-as-internal metaphor seems very inadequate.
> "Intrinsic" comes to encompass the entire activity, and the self in
> relation to it. This dialogic relation between self and object-motive is, I
> think, what's intended by mutual constitution of the subject/object-motive
> in Leont'ev and others' formulations. This is where I've started to make
> headway in thinking about motivation when a child contributes
> collaboratively and with initiative toward a shared motive.
>
> There is definitely work on this topic. Ruth Paradise (2005) has a very
> nice paper in Spanish also using the term "inherent" motivation, and
> Barbara Rogoff has alluded to this idea in several places in the mid-1990s.
> Dan Hickey and others have written wonderfully about sociocultural
> perspectives on achievement motivation theory, in ways that would coincide
> with thoughts on this thread so far. Dorothy Lee (1961) calls this
> "autonomous motivation". There are many others, including key insights from
> Carol Dweck and Mark Lepper.
>
> Thanks for listening and hopefully correcting,
> Andrew
>
> ---
> Andrew D. Coppens
> www.andrewcoppens.com
>
>
>
>


-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
883 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson