14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research
Paper
What Motivates the Most Avid Readers? Norwegian Sixth Graders' Leisure Reading in the Span Between Control and Autonomy
Håvard Skaar, Gro Stavem
Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway
Presenting Author: Skaar, Håvard;
Stavem, Gro
Leisure reading contributes to literacy, but Norwegian students read less than before. This paper present findings from interviews with students who are going against this trend. They read more than their classmates. Why do they do that? Research has pointed to a lack of reading motivation as the main reason why students choose not to read (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000). If the school is to support students' leisure reading, strengthening their motivation should be central. Therefore, we investigate the type of motivation these most avid readers have, and what the motivation means for their reading habits. The purpose is to find out how the school can promote students' leisure reading in the best possible way. The theoretical starting point is Ryan & Deci’s (2017) distinction between autonomous and controlled motivation. Autonomous motivation is based on an experience of self-determination, while controlled motivation is induced by an internal or external pressure. Research has shown a positive connection between autonomous motivation and amount of reading (De Naeghel et al., 2012).When we conducted a survey among sixth graders at eight schools in the Oslo area, we were able to confirm this (Stavem & Skaar, accepted for publication). In this study, we continue to examine the motivation of the most avid readers. Teachers at the eight schools that had participated in the survey selected the girl and boy who read the most in their classes, and the students' parents gave their consent to individual, semi-structured interviews.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedIn the analysis of the interviews, we first carried out an empirically close coding of the entire material (Tjora, 2021 p.218).We then arranged these codes into six groups: Selection and acquisition of books, The reading situation, Students’ own valuing and benefit from reading, Others' valuing and benefit from reading, Reading and other leisure activities, The books the students read. Within all these categories, parents, grandparents, and older siblings emerged as the most important role models, norm-givers and facilitators of students' leisure reading. We used Ryan and Deci's motivation theory (2017) as the basis for the further analysis. Their continuum from lack of motivation to inherently autonomous motivation gave us the basis for making a typology of the students' reading motivation. Ryan and Deci link autonomous motivation to the satisfaction of basic psychological needs, and thus greater well-being or quality of life than controlled motivation.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsWe found that parents, grandparents and older siblings as the role models, norm givers and facilitators primarily contributed to autonomous, but also to a certain extent to controlled, reading motivation. Input from teachers, librarians and other school-based measures played a much more modest role in the students' description of what actually made them read in their leisure time. For the least autonomously motivated students, it was important to experience reading as pleasant, and as a better option than the alternatives. For these students, reading was closely linked to their parents' active facilitation. More autonomously motivated students made their own choices to a greater extent. Some shared their reading with friends, and some found the choice of books meaningful and significant for themselves. The most autonomously motivated students considered reading as an interest they prioritized regardless of social circumstances. They had independent reading preferences and were also the ones who read the most. Overall, support from home appears to be the most important prerequisite for 6th graders choosing to read in their leisure time. At the same time, the interviews suggest that a deep and strong autonomous motivation for leisure reading will be linked to more personal, and thus perhaps less influenceable, needs and dispositions. Under any circumstances, the school should, to the greatest extent possible, try to make use of the strong emotional bonds that parents may have established for reading in early phases of the student's life. Parents should be made aware of this and receive written information from the school or be informed at parent meetings about the importance of their own involvement in the student's reading. They should also be made aware of the value of engaging with the student's reading in a way that promotes autonomous reading motivation.
ReferencesDe Naeghel, J., Van Keer, H., Vansteenkiste, M., & Rosseel, Y. (2012). The Relation Between Elementary Students' Recreational and Academic Reading Motivation, Reading Frequency, Engagement, and Comprehension: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(4), 1006-1021.
Guthrie, J. T., & Wigfield, A. (2000). Engagement and motivation in reading. In M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, P. D. Pearson, & R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of Reading Research, Vol. 3, pp. 403–422). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: basic psychological needs inmotivation, development, and wellness. Guilford Press.
Stavem & Skaar (accepted for publication). Hva får elever til å lese på fritiden? Om lesemotivasjon, sjangervalg og mediebruk på 6. trinn. (What makes students read for pleasure? 6.graders’ reading motivation, genre preferences and media use)
Tjora, A.(2021). Kvalitative forskningsmetoder i praksis (4.edition). Gyldendal. (Qualitative Research in Practice)
14. Communities, Families and Schooling in Educational Research
Paper
Collaborative Autonomy-Support - School-Home Collaboration in Upper Secondary School
Gørill Warvik Vedeler
Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway
Presenting Author: Vedeler, Gørill Warvik
In this paper, I present results from a research project (period 2016-2022) about school-home collaboration in upper secondary schools. In the Norwegian school context, collaboration with students' parents has long traditions. The principle that schools, through their social mission, have an auxiliary role in relation to parents, was already formulated in the Almueskolelova [the Common People School Act] of 1848 (Vestre, 2012). At the time, the purpose clause stated: "It shall be the Almueskolen's purpose to support domestic upbringing...". The changes to the law up to today have largely followed similar thinking. Today, the law imposes the responsibility on school owners (municipalities, county councils and private school owners) to ensure systematic collaboration with parents (Education Act, 1998, § 13-3d); collaborative practices that include all students and their parents. This research project contributes to a comprehensive understanding of wholeness and coherence in practicing school-home collaboration at this level of schooling. In brief I share the results from three sub-studies, about practices, students’ needs, and jurisdiction, before I introduce a theoretical framework that is developed to meet and discuss these in conjunction. These results account for the complexity in practicing systematic school-home-collaboration and challenges schools to develop collaborative practices that include a diverse group of students and their parents.
The overall purpose of the project has been to theorize school-home cooperation as a pedagogical phenomenon in upper secondary school. This has been done by identifying various issues and by raising the following questions:
- How is school-home collaboration practiced in upper secondary schools?
- What are the students' need for school-home collaboration and how is the students positioned in this collaboration?
- How does the current legislation affect school-home collaboration in light of the students' need for this to happen?
One contribution from this project is the introduction of collaborative autonomy-support as a theoretical framework for developing collaborative practices to support the students. School-home collaboration, as part of the school's complex practices, involve topics such as the students' needs and agency, the role of the parents, the teachers' responsibilities, and the legal framework that regulate this. This research project draws on two overarching theoretical perspectives. Practice theory (the theory of practice architectures by Kemmis et al., 2014) is used to explain and analyse the collaboration as an educational practice, while theory of Nordic bildung (Doseth, 2011; Straume, 2013) and autonomy-support (self-determination theory by Ryan & Deci, 2017) are used to analyse the students' needs and positions in these collaborative efforts. This research project engages in a discourse that is relevant across national contexts – to collaborate with students’ parents – but it is site sensitive toward a Nordic education context.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThis research project had a qualitative, practice-oriented, and phenomenological approach; rooted in the understanding that phenomenology of practice (Van Manen, 2016) is based on the recognition that we live our lives in practices and that practices happens at particular sites. The research design included methods that reached out to participants practice experiences, created dialogues among participants, and analysed current legal documents. The three sub-studies covered three different data sets: 1) three dialogue café sessions with 77 participants (teachers, school leaders and students and 759 minutes audio recordings), 2) one dialogue café session with 113 previous students (603 minutes audio recordings), and 3) 26 legal documents (2666 pages).
Dialogue café was used as a research method in data set one and two, to involve larger groups of participants in exploratory conversations (Brown, 2010). The method proposes that the participants share, explore, and discover their own and each other's experiences, reflections and questions related to the topic being explored. The conversations at the café tables were led by the participants and not the researcher and it was important that the participants had an interest in the topic. The participants' interests also justified the selection; the participants are former students with their own experience and, teacher students (for two weeks) who in the future may be given responsibility for school-home collaboration in upper secondary school. The implementation followed seven principles: 1) inform about the topic and dialogue process, 2) create a hospitable and safe environment, 3) explore questions that matter to the participants, 4) encourage sharing and involvement, 5) connect different perspectives, 6) listen together to create insights and 7) share collective discoveries (Brown, 2010, p. 40). The purpose of the café method was to unfold and verify school-home collaboration as a phenomenon in upper secondary schooling.
A document analysis, as conducted for the third data set, intend to deconstructs texts to examine hidden hierarchies, dominance, oppositions, inconsistencies, and contradictions (Creswell & Poth, 2018). In this study, the documents were treated qualitatively. The purpose was to identify the documents' connections to the phenomenon being studied (Blaikie, 2010). Common to the legal documents that were analysed in this study was that, at the time the study was carried out, they were current and relevant public documents that supported and regulated the practice of school-home cooperation in upper secondary schools.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThis paper illuminates some challenges in school-home collaboration and address the need to adjust collaborative practices to address the students' need for support. The first sub-study revealed three aspects that collaborative practices should cover (Vedeler, 2021): a) to clarify the legal obligations of the teaching profession; b) to engage and empower students’ participation in the collaborative efforts, and c) to avoid a problem-oriented approach that drives the schools' collaboration with the parents. The second sub-study showed how school-home collaboration is an emotional and personal practice for students and uncovered an ambivalence between the students' need for increased autonomy and the students' desire for present and supportive parents (Vedeler & Strandbu, in press). In addition, this study revealed the students' position as both the object of the collaboration and a subject in the collaborative relationships. The third sub-study revealed three tensions in current legislation (Vedeler, 2020): students' self-determination versus parental obligations, the parent group's lack of formal representation in upper secondary school, and partly contradictory linguistics about parents across the legal documents.
This paper elaborated these results further and compiles how collaborative autonomy-support as a theoretical concept is useful for understanding the students' need for school-home collaboration at this level of schooling; the students’ need for collaborative support in their personal bildung and education process, as well as their need to have a subject position in this collaboration. My claim is that collaborative autonomy-support is possibly an unspoken goal for school-home collaboration in upper secondary schools. This is interesting, as we know that a systematic school-home collaboration in upper secondary school can contribute to ensuring that students get the parental support they need in a school context (Epstein, 2008).
ReferencesBlaikie, N. (2010). Designing social research. The logic of anticipation: Polity Press.
Brown, J. (2010). The world café: Shaping our futures through conversations that matter: ReadHowYouWant. com.
Creswell, J. W., & Poth, C. N. (2018). Qualitative inquiry and reserach design. Choosing among five approaches: SAGE Publications.
Doseth, M. (2011). Paideia–selve fundamentet for vår forståelse av dannelse. In K. Steinsholt & S. Dobson (Eds.), Dannelse: introduksjon til et ullent pedagogisk landskap (pp. 13-37). Trondheim: Tapir Akademisk Forlag.
Epstein, J. L. (2008). Improving family and community involvement in secondary schools. Principal Leadership, 8(2), 16-22. http://homeschoolconnect.pbworks.com/f/Improving+Family+and+Community+Involvement.pdf
Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). Changing practices, changing education: Springer Science & Business Media.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness: Guilford Publications.
Straume, I. S. (2013). Danningens filosofihistorie. In I. S. Straume (Ed.), Danningens filosofihistorie. Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag.
Van Manen, M. (2016). Phenomenology of practice: Meaning-giving methods in phenomenological research and writing: Routledge.
Vedeler, G. W. (2020). Collaborative Autonomy–Support–A Pivotal Approach in the Legislation Regulating School–Home Collaboration in Norwegian Upper Secondary Schools. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 65(7), 1187-1202. https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2020.1788155
Vedeler, G. W. (2021). Practising school-home collaboration in upper secondary schools: to solve problems or to promote adolescents’ autonomy? Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2021.1923057
Vedeler, G. W., & Strandbu, A. (in press). Skole-hjem samarbeidet i videregående skole. Autonomistøtte i elevenes danningsprosess. .
Vestre, S. E. (2012). Opplæringsplikt og foreldrerett [The duty to educate and parental rights]. In H. Jakhelln & T. Welstad (Eds.), Utdanningsrettslige emner [Educational law topics] (pp. 162-172): Cappelen Damm Akademisk.
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