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The remaining five students each appeared to be motivated in their goal to make progress towards becoming a qualified healthcare professional. I want to make a clear distinction here between motivation and confidence because whilst all five students (Bella, Carl, Dawn, Eliza and Gina) appeared motivated by something to achieve their goal of successfully completing their pre-registration course, not all appeared confident in their ability to achieve this goal. This distinction is important because the motivation to engage in an activity has been shown to have an effect on confidence levels. Kluger and Van Dijk (2010) and more recently Jiang and Kleitman (2015) report that perception of confidence tends to be task-focussed and thus directly situated in the social construct within which it occurs.

Jiang and Kleitman (2015) examine the purposely divorced motivational aspects of self- protection and self-enhancement and relate these to motivation. They found that individuals who were motivated to be self-protective (i.e. their primary motivation to succeed in a task/situation was to protect themselves from failure) tended to demonstrate lower confidence levels, whilst those whose motivation was self-enhancement (i.e. their motivation to succeed in a task/situation was to enhance themselves further) or with a desire to increase their self-esteem demonstrated higher confidence levels. This

demonstrates the importance of recognising the underpinning want of motivation from the perspective of the learner’s “self” in order that it can be more accurately understood in relation to their level of confidence. Furthermore, these authors claim that judgements about confidence that are made “in vivo” (Jiang & Kleitman, 2015; p. 222) – i.e. during the task - predispose immediate reflection [on action] in response to engagement with a

cognitive skill. They suggest that this is a positive action that subsequently promotes further learning based on the confidence outcome. This suggests that both higher and lower

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confidence level can have a direct effect on learner motivation, albeit based on different motivational drives. This augments the argument presented in the “Worth and Reward” chapter around the potentially detrimental effects of feedback that is not well managed.

7.3.2.1 The significance of others

The influence of people and relationships will now be explored with regards to ownership. It is clear that Dawn is motivated by external factors, with little or no regard of her own “self” gain. Whilst an able student based on her summative assessment profile, Dawn lacks confidence in her own ability and yet remained motivated to complete her course. This first quote from Dawn highlights the importance of her daughter as an external motivator in her strive for success:

I always have my daughter at the back of my mind, sort of like you’re going to be able to make her life better by reading it [the course material] and doing it [reading] and passing your exams and stuff, so that’s always been there. (Dawn)

The importance to Dawn of enriching her daughter’s life through her own success is evident within her quote. Interestingly, in this response to my question about what motivators she has, Dawn does not reflect any of her own personal gains, only those by proxy of her daughter. Dawn is motivated to succeed for external gratification rather than intrinsic

reward. This suggests that Dawn is validating herself and her achievement not by rewarding her “self” but by the “sociality” aspect of the lifeworld in the form of others, in this case her daughter, as an alternative reward. Dawn’s worth as a mother to be able to provide for her daughter is more motivational to her “self” than gain as an individual learner. It seems that the mother “self” of Dawn is more important to Dawn than the learner “self”. This echoes the earlier argument regarding Dawn that was presented in the “Worth and Reward” chapter.

Another example of Dawn’s narrative suggests her need for external acknowledgement of success. In this example Dawn is describing how and why a particular verbal feedback experience was useful to her:

Because it was somebody else [a lecturer] understanding that I have learnt my theory and everything that they’ve taught me…

Followed by:

She [the lecturer] started with the really positive elements …. And she were impressed because maybe the couple of months before the exam, she was really worried about me, thinking she’s not going to be able to do it [pass the assessment]

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… and I think it’s been really useful for me to know that I’m doing something right. (Dawn)

In this quote Dawn views external verification of learning by an educator as important. The first part describes that a useful feedback experience to Dawn is one in which she gains external confirmation of her learning. Dawn makes no reference to the authenticity of the feedback with regards her own developing professional practice, nor of how the feedback helped her to confirm previous learning or scaffold further learning (Race, 2005). For Dawn, it appears that the only focus was external confirmation of knowledge. Noticeably here is the implied passiveness of the learning process by Dawn’s use of the phrase “everything that they’ve taught me”; self-regulation and ownership of learning will be considered further in the next section.

The second part of this quote further supports the value that Dawn places on the behaviour of another, in this case the lecturer, in recognition of her learning. Dawn’s use of the phrase “she were impressed” suggests that she perceives the positive acknowledgement of her learning favourably and that she gains reward and pleasure in her actions of learning being externally recognised. Furthermore, at the end of the quote Dawn makes explicit the value that she places on having her learning verified as correct as part of the feedback

experience. Whilst this is perhaps not surprising of any learner, it strengthens the argument that, in Dawn’s case, external confirmation of success is of particular importance to her “self”.

These quotes appear to demonstrate Dawn as perceiving her successes as being primarily significant to others – her daughter and her lecturer – in contrast to her verification that they are fundamentally beneficial to Dawn herself. It seems that in this discussion she is unable or unwilling to recognise achievements for her as “self” implying that her own personal presence and gain from the feedback experience is, at best, less important. In consideration of lifeworld dimensions (A. Ashworth & Ashworth, 2003), the lack of a

presence of “self” within her achievements could reflect Dawn’s lack of confidence in herself and/or genuine lack of acknowledgement that she herself is important and worthy in the context of the outcomes of learning. Here, and also earlier in this chapter, I have discussed issues that appear to reflect how Dawn views herself as a learner in terms of a clear

“learner” identity; this concept will be discussed in the next section.

The two quotes from Dawn are also interesting when considered together. In the first quote, Dawn places her daughter central to her own learning agenda. In the second quote, she focusses on the impact her learning had on her lecturer, i.e. the gain for Dawn was that her

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lecturer was impressed by her learning. Together, these suggest that Dawn’s “self” is influenced by how she believes others perceive her and that relationships are important to her. Dawn appears to be covertly veiling her own gains from learning with the identity of others – her daughter and lecturer. In considering an identity, Dawn certainly recognises herself as a mother to her daughter within the known “community” of a family with which she is familiar. Dawn is confident in this maternal role and motivated to ensure that her daughter is well-provided for. The construct of “mother” would not have been inherent within Dawn’s “self” and would have been learnt by her in those initial days, weeks, months and years of her daughter’s life. As supported by Christie, Tett, Cree, Hounsell, and McCune (2008) it is likely that the social structures, or communities of practice, with which she was familiar influenced her formation of this new “self as mother” identity. This structural influence of a community of practice appears to be significant in the adoption of a new identity.

In contrast to feeling comfortable as a mother, Dawn does not appear to view herself

primarily as a learner. I have already claimed in the “Worth and Reward” chapter that Dawn does not appear to perceive herself as worthy of feedback that relates to her as a learner. In a learner-focussed clinical setting Dawn’s view was that the educators should be

prioritising giving feedback to other students who were currently treating patients at the expense of putting her “self” as a learner at the centre of the feedback opportunity. When exploring her educational background in my initial interview with her, Dawn discussed her educational journey to date and she explained that she felt that an earlier further education environment had not suited her learning style:

It was really, because I’m not an A [grade] student and I think there was a lot of focus on the top students and me being more a B, C, wasn’t, I didn’t feel that I was in the right environment or the lecturers didn’t sort of, sort of just pushed me to one side because I wasn’t one of them top students … so it was very difficult for me to have a rapport with the lecturers and to really help me really. (Dawn)

Dawn’s narrative highlights that she has previous experience of perceiving herself as different to other learners and that this was seemingly reinforced by, in her view, the behaviour of educators during her further education college years. Dawn saw her peers in the further education college as students who were higher-achievers than her (despite her now being identified by me as an able student) and she believed that the educators

invested time in these “top students” to her detriment. Whilst I did not pursue her view of other students with Dawn, she did not freely mention the support she saw being given to students who were less able than her. It is likely that weaker or less able students also had time invested in them by the college educators – as this is certainly where maximum

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support tends to be invested in higher education (Thomas, Hill, O’ Mahony, & Yorke, 2017) given the goals set for and by academic institutions – and that often this is the student group who appear to be worthy of academic investment. The apparent lack of investment by others in Dawn as a learner during her further education years and the relationship that she felt she had with her educators has not allowed her to develop a positive learner identity, moreover it appears to have reinforced a negative perception that is continuing into her pre-registration healthcare education.

Dawn’s relationship with her “self” as a mother in comparison to her “self” as a learner is worthy of further scrutiny. As a mother Dawn has a community of practice in the nature of her own family and wider society as a point of reference. In contrast, as a learner Dawn has experiences of being an outsider. Dawn’s use of the phrase “just pushed me to one side” suggests that she feels as though the academic community within which she was learning did not value her as a learner, and suggests that this generated an emotional response. It appears that Dawn has not had the positive influence of an academic community within her educational history by which to develop as a learner. Dawn is the first member of her family to go to university and therefore she does not have a firm point of reference nor a positive societal or community influence by which to role model (Eick & Reed, 2002) her learner identity (Reeves, 2009). Rather the opposite of feeling valued as a mother, her worth as a learner has, in fact, been dismissed by others and therefore subsequently by her.