How can you motivate high school seniors in an English class?

Maloney, D. & Taylor, M. (2010). How can you motivate high school seniors in an English class? Talking Points, 22(1), 20-27.



In some ways the title of this article felt a little like false advertising. I was expecting to read a tale of how a creative teacher devised projects to engage completely unmotivated adolescents in high level learning. What I got was a beautiful, utopian story about affluent, suburban kids who completed projects that dealt with ways to solve world problems, but who seemed to me not to be a particularly challenging group to motivate to learn. From the title, I envisioned sullen, disengaged teens who would have to be lured and scaffolded into caring about social justice and completing projects that were rigorous and high quality. They did complete such projects, but if any real motivational struggles did occur, we read nothing about them; we only see the success story here. Most of the high school teachers I know struggle to get their students engaged with anything to do with learning and school, not to mention engaging in a project aimed toward solving some of the world’s most serious problems.

Maybe I am being cynical. This project had beautiful goals, and beautiful results. Maybe my cynicism comes from envy that somehow Dana and Monica were able to pull the highest potentials out of these privileged young people. I’d love to see something like this project work in the troubled high schools in my own metropolitan area’s urban core, or even with the disengaged, bored students I see in the high schools in our suburban rim. I can think of a couple of very expensive prep schools in our area where I could realistically envision this sort of project being implemented, but not for the majority of schools I know. Where I am, simply getting the kids to graduation and able to enter some kind of college is a major victory. It seems like a dream to read about kids who would actually know enough about world problems to generate ideas for projects, who would actually be able to read the kinds of texts talked about here (and would be willing to read them), and who would do things like interview community members, make presentations, and participate in an “inquiry and action fair." How exciting would it be to work with students you could do things like that with?

Even though it often presents utopian stories of amazing literacy learning that I have a hard time envisioning in the urban, testing-driven, challenging educational contexts I am most familiar with, I always enjoy reading this particular journal because it does tell us stories about how classrooms could be, if it were not for all of the poverty and inequity and injustice and alienation that troubles our world today. I do enjoy dreaming about how classrooms could be, in a better world.