Chapter 3: Object/Motives and Emotion: A Cultural-Historical Activity Theoretic Approach to Motivation in Learning and Work

More than 2 decades ago, when I was a high school science teacher and subsequently when I was department head of science, many of my students tended to return to the school after dinner to work in the computer or science laboratory. Even in economically deprived Newfoundland, where the unemployment rates for 18-25-year old was 75% and where nearly 50% of students never finished high school, students returned to the school often staying there until 11 P.M. or midnight. In one school, the administration tasked the library supervisor to lock the physics laboratory at 10 P.M., where students, according to the school administration, “were spending too much time taking them away from other subjects.” Thus, as a teacher, I never experienced the problem with “motivation” that other teachers complained about—even though I was teaching, in physics and mathematics, subjects students think of as the most difficult ones. In fact, the concept of “motivation” was not part of my vocabulary at the time; I did not feel it necessary to employ tricks that externally rewarded students—“fun activities,” “candies,” “stickers,” and other equivalent things. At the time, I did not understand what it was that brought students back to school, what “motivated” them in my classes while simultaneously, according to my fellow teachers, many of these same students were “unmotivated” in the courses they taught. Many years later, when I became thoroughly familiar with cultural-historical activity theory as Alexei N. Leont’ev and Klaus Holzkamp had developed it, I not only came to understand what had happened in my situation, but also began to take a critical stance with respect to the psychology of motivation. As the introductory quote intimates, the psychology of motivation can be understood as a tool in the hands of the ruling classes to get people to do on their own, voluntarily, what they have but do not want to do. The purpose of this chapter is to develop this alternate way of understanding motivation as articulated in cultural-historical activity theory.