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Paper short abstract:

This paper will recount experiences teaching community-based rehabilitation workers in Bhutan to assist stroke survivors. It will speculate on the adaptation of future courses, focusing on how motivation may differ between the trainees and the stroke survivors.

Paper long abstract:

Working with stroke survivors requires an open understanding from the trainee community-based rehabilitation (CBR) worker to place them at the center of the interaction, usually termed 'person-centered care.' Developing this perspective is often a challenge to the trainee. Taught and developed by an experienced clinician educator and anthropologist, this course in Bhutan was implemented to bring the trainees away from a strictly biomedical gaze in their decision-making process toward treatment approaches guided by the stroke survivor and their lived experiences within the sociocultural context. Despite not having medical backgrounds, often, the well-meaning trainees in the past courses were deterred from the impact of sociocultural aspects of the stroke survivors' lives and instead emphasized the medical pathology post-stroke. This paper will explore how these trainees' motivations may have developed using an informed anthropological approach to seek changes to future courses. Future work may be structured within a more collaborative framework based on an iterative process of listening more openly to stroke survivors' narratives regarding their needs within the community and the family networks in which they live.

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Paper short abstract:

When studying the design of schools and school organisations, a design anthropology approach can offer new research methodologies and can deliver fresh insights. I will argue this based on a 3-year PhD research project investigating the relationship between school design and staff wellbeing.

Paper long abstract:

The situation with teacher wellbeing, recruiting new teachers, and retaining experienced teachers is routinely described as 'in crisis'. Also implicated in this ‘wicked’ problem are the motivation of different staff groups (teachers and support staff) and pupil attainment. Recent research has suggested that future studies should focus on designing interventions to alleviate the stresses associated with working in a school.

Exploring a multi-dimensional issue with multiple interdependencies requires a mixture of research methods to understand working conditions, contextual factors and everyday lives of school staff. Thus, inspired by design anthropology, my PhD research used a mixed-methods, linked-case-studies approach that drew on both qualitative and quantitative techniques. Rapid ethnographies at 4 secondary schools in Cambridgeshire and interviews with 12 staff were used to reveal the daily practices and meanings that might drive the design of successful interventions.

A year was spent gathering material, followed by a year analysing the considerable volume of data. Interview recordings were transcribed using Otter and analysed in NVivo, as were drawings and photos of spaces in the four schools. Timed observations of activities in the schools, particularly in staffrooms, were tabulated together with lesson timetables, school web sites, Ofsted inspection reports and government statistics. Visualisations were produced in NVivo and Excel.

In addition to ideas about the redesign of the employee experience in schools, a range of potential interventions emerged from the data. These included the provision of personal workspaces and other motivational designs, ideas that are being collated into a proposal for ‘Staff-friendly School Design’.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the different forms of defining motivation within Colombia's STEM Education policies. Specifically, it aims to approach the multiplicity of ways motivation is invoked in the Colombian educational sector from the specific framework of ethics and morality.

Paper long abstract:

Based on ethnographic material from 14 months of fieldwork in Colombia, this paper explores the different forms of defining and justifying motivation within STEM Education policies and projects. Since the 2010s, “STEM Education” has become a buzzword in the educational sector. In Colombia, the term is defined as a pedagogical approach that uses Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) methods to form skills that would make students more employable in the current world. Motivation becomes a vital term amongst policymakers, teachers, and education consultants in this context. For some, STEM Education is the pedagogical tool that would motivate students to continue their studies – and, therefore, improve their lives. For others, motivation is lacking in students and some teachers, which is why STEM Education cannot fulfil its promises of improvement. This paper aims to approach the multiplicity of ways motivation is invoked in the Colombian educational sector from the specific framework of ethics and morality. It asks: what happens if we approach motivation through the moral justifications and ethical dilemmas teachers and policymakers face when implementing STEM Education policies in Colombia? What would such analysis bring to a concept usually approached in psychological ways?

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Paper long abstract:

Singapore has – not undeservedly – a reputation as something of a ‘green tiger’ in Southeast Asia. With an increasing focus on green urbanism, the city has grown into what many consider to be a model that many developed states seek to emulate. Less said, however, are the ways in which Singaporeans themselves mediate with the rapid importance of climate change education – and hitherto unspoken is the place that Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) has in this new terrain. Standard language ideologies indexes particular globalist legitimacies, one that various registers of climate change education have often mirrored. Yet the actual enaction of environmentalist engagement straddles a fine line – global enough to maintain a veneer of transnational respectability, but local enough to connect with the average citizen.

In this paper, I seek to exemplify how CSE is embroiled in non-linear discursivity, where it becomes somewhat unclear how advantageous it actually is to ‘speak good English.’ When pursuing educational practice, especially in one as dire as climate change education, registers of political engagement become increasingly important and difficult to parse in a day and age where mandatory excellence in the English-language – be it reading, speaking, or writing – is being increasingly questioned. More to the point, in fields like anthropology, to what extent are eloquence and clarity a postcolonial project, and in the face of global ecological collapse – do such criticisms of postcoloniality matter?

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Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore the motivations underlying education systems by considering assessment as a primary indicator of educational values. It draws on ethnographic evidence collected in 2021 as part of a study on Buddhist monastic schooling in northern Thailand.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore the motivations underlying education systems by considering assessment as a primary indicator of educational values. Drawing on ethnographic evidence collected in 2021 as part of a study on Buddhist monastic schooling in northern Thailand, the paper will discuss the ways discourse on examinations helped to shape how education was valued by students and staff within the institution. Of particular interest are the competing modes of discourse that hold currency at the monastic school. On the one hand, staff at the school were engaged in a process of constructing an image of their school as a modern institution in line with national directives on the form and value of education. On the other, the monastic school is a fundamentally religious institution. As such, the students - all boys who have ordained as novice monks for the duration of their secondary schooling - are expected to develop virtues and abilities in line with a Buddhist ideal of comportment. The paper will present ethnographic vignettes demonstrating how competing ideals of motivation could cause frictions in how examinations were perceived and carried out.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses embodied, participatory ways of making knowledge within the creative writing and arts classrooms, all of which strive for students to be co-constructors of their own learning community. Motivation is constructed relationally as well as through body, movement, and desire.

Paper long abstract:

The western creative writing classroom has relied on a traditionally stale workshop format to detrimental effects that most negatively impact marginalized writers of colour (Chavez, 2021). My research engages with anti-racist and decolonial methodologies to propose new ways of engaging with student writers that cater to diverse artists historically alienated within institutions of learning. By broadening how and where writing is taught—namely, in community-based workshops that diverge from treating the process as a skill of grammar and diction (Strunk & White, 1999)—students can approach creative writing on their own terms, with goals that differ from those dictated by institutions of higher learning. This more accessible environment has impacts not only on creative writing outcomes but also on student wellbeing beyond the classroom. In addition to honouring anti-racist and decolonial research methods, I rely on my experiences as an arts facilitator, reflecting on successful practices that borrow from physical theatre (Lecoq et al., 2019), feminist studies (hooks, 2014 and Lorde, 2018), and theories of emergence (brown, 2017). The way that distinct pedagogies are applied (i.e., in a competitive vs. communal atmosphere) fosters contrasting levels of motivation across students of different backgrounds, with implications to shift dynamics of privilege and marginalization (Chavez, 2021). My work will be of interest to both educators and students interested in how specific pedagogies can dismantle dominant learning traditions within education.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a recognition-based theory of motivation and becoming through an analysis of two tutoring interactions. This approach shows how the semiotics of teaching/learning encounters are made consequential for the subsequent being and becoming of students beyond the learning encounter.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I present data from two tutoring sessions in order to advance a recognition-based theory of motivation for learning and becoming. The conception of recognition employed here builds upon the concept first introduced by Hegel and subsequently developed by a number of others (e.g., Kojeve, Lacan, Du Bois, Fanon, Bakhtin, Foucault, and Honneth). The approach forwarded here steps back from these more recent developments, and seeks to develop a more stripped down but richly semiotically informed approach that attends to the complex and underdetermined mediational means of semiosis by which subjects come to be revealed as being recognizable as certain kinds of persons. Taking this a step further, this approach proposes that such moments are never merely a matter of simply recognizing what is always already (presupposably) there, but that these moments of recognition can also be creative, bringing new possibilities of being into existence for students. This approach propose that, regardless of whether they are presupposing or creative, these moments of recognition of who people "really" are are consequential for what students subsequently do in these encounters and beyond. In closing, I note how this theory of recognition also offers insight into the becoming of students through learning encounters.