next meeting:Motivation, Alienation and ADHD

Not   the usual how to motivate yourself with ADHD, but a discussion of    possible interactions between the motivation problems that we, as people with ADHD are especially prone to, and alienation in modern life arising from compartmentalisation of different aspects of life; work, family, social, school and neighbourhood.

Hopefully some practical ideas for bringing immediacy and meaning to our work will emerge …  More Background to this topic below this message

Background: link to  an interview with Dr Rogoff , who  inspired this topic

  Some researchers have emphasised that motivating children to learn the skills they need is not only not a problem; but also an unimaginable problem to adults in unschooled societies   to e.g.

In contrast to American parents, who seem to feel that knowledge is something like medicine – its good for the child and must be crammed down his throat even if he does not like it – Rotuman parents acted as if learning were inevitable because the child wants to learn. (Howard, 1970)

Rogoff and others have shown that children (and adults) in a range of unschooled societies are self-motivated to learn through observation and intent participation in the meaningful work of their community *.  However, schooled societies seclude children    from the work and concerns of parents and communities into age graded cells to   learn abstract material presented and organised for them by an unrelated adult in preparation for uncertain future work of an unknown nature. This industrial mechanisation of children’s learning is both influencing   and influenced by the segregation and  organisation of   adult work environments

* Also interesting is that the unschooled learner’s attention is described as broader than schooled learners, variously as ‘simultaneous time shared’ (Correa-Cha ́vez, Rogoff, & Mej ́ıa Arauz, 2005) ‘or ‘open ‘ attention. (Gaskins & Paradise, 2010) A form of attention hypothised to support observational learning of complex skills by facilitating event detection and processing of a broad range of information.

Thus   there is no one optimal attentional style for all learning: raising the question if interindividual differences in attention were adaptive in other environments? Another time!