Engaging the Disengaged
I’ll begin by sharing an anecdote that is close to my heart. When I started working as a special educator, I was asked to work with a boy in 3rd grade who hadn’t received any intervention until then. He posed an interesting challenge, and proved to be a learning experience for me. A nature and art lover, and a football (soccer) enthusiast, he would often be more interested in what was outside the classroom than what was happening within. Getting him to my room was a challenge as he would often wander off into the playground or run away from any work that involved pen and paper. As I realised his passion for animals and nature, I offered to show him educational videos of his choice. This acted as a major incentive for him to come to my room, and helped develop our rapport. I then started designing learning activities and games around his interests, integrating his abilities, which led to a great rise in his motivation and engagement with academic work. Today, the same student, who’d run away from writing a three-letter word, writes his own stories and completes his classroom work.
Pause for a moment and reflect on your greatest learning experiences. Have they been the ones where you felt most engaged or least engaged? Yes, it is probably the former. Whether the experience was positive or negative, it was some sort of engagement that hooked you to it.
‘Engagement’ is one of the most central aspects of our lives and definitely an important factor for education. In spite of it being so critical for learning, it often gets overlooked in traditional educational settings/curricula. Based on my experiences of education in India, most often the primary focus of parents and professionals is to ensure that students perform well academically, get high scores and eventually get high-paying jobs. We get so absorbed in this competitive rat race that we forget to focus on true learning and engagement.
I worked with students who were often ‘disengaged’ in the mainstream classroom, primarily because the learning environment was not always responsive to their needs- both cognitive and emotional. In order to ensure their success, it was not only important to provide work that was within their Zone of Proximal Development, but also that attended to their emotional needs. It wasn’t hard to realize that these students were more ‘engaged’ in subjects where they formed a connect with the teacher.
So how do we really define engagement? What are the measures we look for? While this may vary across contexts, Prof. David Rose does a great job of explaining the neuroscience behind engagement and its various measures in his upcoming book on emotional design. Traditionally, curricula have been designed to meet the academic goals set for students, however it is high time we start incorporating goals for engagement and motivation as well. While signs of engagement may seem obvious or even instinctive, it would actually be beneficial to lay down parameters for it, and intentionally design for it. As Dr. David Rose mentions in his book, “While emotions have effects throughout the body, it is their effects on the brain — on what we learn (and don’t learn) — that is their most powerful effect.” Understanding this would help us design learning experiences that can be more responsive to the affective needs of all students. While learning technologies may show a lot of promise for emotional design, I believe, we as educators too can devise everyday classroom experiences in ways that capture and measure students’ engagement, thus promoting learning.
