Contribution
Description: Pupils driving force can be understood as the energy, the will, persistence and ability to perform their school work, irrespective of where the energy comes from. In other words, pupils driving force can be said to consist of all the forces that drive the work of the pupils.
When pupils ask questions like "How many pages must I write?" or "Is this enough?", the teacher has to ask how the work can be organised to interest the pupils - and not only interested in doing the least possible to pass, and not only interested in satisfying teachers and parents, and not only interested in being better or faster than others, and not only interested in a subject, but being interested as a way of being in the world. To be interested in this way is not a state that can be evoked on demand, it is something you are.
The intention of this paper is to present some of the results of an empirical study on pupils' driving force in compulsory school.
The aim of my study was to understand how pupils and teachers in compulsory school experience pupils' driving force. What do they learn? How do they learn? Why do they learn? How can the driving force be established through the work at school?
Earlier research in this field, mostly in a psychological context, primarily examined whether or not pupils approached and persisted at achievement tasks. Today many believe that the reason for engaging in a task is just as important as the level of effort spent or the degree of persistence. Researchers have therefore begun to examine the presuppositions and consequences of different goal orientations and the influence that different goals have on effort and performance.
Methodology: The method used in my study was interviews with 14 pupils and 13 teachers in nine different schools with pupils in the age of seven to 15 years.
Conclusions: The results of the study show that pupils and teachers look on pupils' driving force in almost the same way. A number of different things affect the driving force. The study also indicates that there is an opposition between how teachers view their way of teaching and what they see as one of the most powerful driving forces of the pupils. The teachers say that they work to stimulate pupils' joy as a driving force, but when it comes to their view of how pupils learn, they see the driving force as a need for affirmation.
Against the background of my results, it could be argued that there is a need for teachers to be aware of the pupils' life-world, and on the need of ontological dimensions of learning and knowing. Knowing is not exclusively cognitive, but is created, enacted and embodied in a regional world of practice and meaning. This means that it is necessary to understand not only the pupils' prior knowledge in the current subject, but also to know what the pupils' social practice is.
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