In this article, we discuss the issues of motivation and motive in education in the context of the zombie culture that permeates school life, where engagement in achieving goals is an action devoid of interpersonal relations. In the analysis, we go beyond the dualistic understanding of motive, which is construed as either inside or outside the subject. We refer to the proposal of cultural-historical theory of action, in which motive is understood as a system of social relations. From this perspective, understanding a child’s motive requires a methodological grasp of the dynamics and complexity of the relationship: the social situation of the child’s development and institutional values, goals, and demands. Recalling examples from studies on school practice, we show the significance of interactions based on the student’s and teacher’s mutual interest in each other’s activities, and we defy the common belief equating learning with development.
This article presents a research project carried out by academic researchers and practicing teachers who made an attempt to reconstruct the complexity of school reality and understand the cultural activity of the teams of teachers and students. We gained entirely different pictures of schools, filled with a unique language and symbols, specific organizational culture, exceptional sensitivity, methods of expressing understanding or disapproval of particular ways of perceiving in the school reality. A particular asset of our method of cultural studies is sensitivity to varieties of local determinants, focusing attention on conjunctive action patterns and cooperation with social actors.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.