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The cultural experiences of students significantly impact how they respond to classroom experiences. Classrooms are likely to be more effective in developing the capacity of students from a broad range of backgrounds if teachers understand how culture can shape learning and how teachers can develop classrooms that tap into the intrinsic motivation of culturally diverse learners. This article proposes key principles and provides examples for developing classrooms that are motivating for diverse learners.
MOTIVATION IS A CONCEPT that is intended to explain one of life's most elusive questions: Why do we do what we do? Implicit in seeking to answer this question is the intention that educators might better understand motivation to encourage student learning. Conventional wisdom indicates that motivated students will surpass unmotivated students in learning and performance. Knowledge about motivation can give all students a better chance to learn.
This article discusses motivation as it relates to student learning within culturally diverse classrooms. Defining motivation as the natural human capacity to direct energy in the pursuit of a goal, an undergirding assumption is that human beings are purposeful. We direct our energy through attention, concentration, and imagination to make sense of our world.
Defining learning as a naturally active and normally volitional process of constructing meaning from experience and information (Lambert & McCombs, 1998), this article addresses how teachers can more consistently support motivation to learn among all students. There is substantial evidence that motivation is consistently and positively related to educational achievement. Uguroglu and Walberg (1979) found 232 correlations of motivation and academic learning reported in 40 studies, and 98% of the correlations were positive.
This article proposes that awareness of and respect for cultural diversity influences motivation. Culture can be defined as the webs of significance we spin as human beings: Who we are and how we interact with the world is an intriguing intersection of language, values, beliefs, and behaviors that pervade every aspect of a person's life, while continually changing and evolving. Culture is not is an isolated, mechanical aspect of life that can be used to explain phenomena in the classroom or that can be learned as a series of facts, physical elements, or exotic characteristics (Ovando & Collier, 1985). Across cultural groups, all students are motivated,...