One of the social issues facing children of poverty is emotional trauma. The emotional climate can often be very stressful and emotionally depriving. The lack of emotional nurturing can lead to feelings of alienation, inadequacy, depression and anxiety. Aggressive or impulsive behavior and social withdrawal can also result. Emotional security and self-esteem are often lacking.
There is a craving for attention and a need to belong. The characteristics that are lacking in the poverty environment are those that help foster effective learning and academic success. Emotional draining and negative self-status can literally zap the motivation to learn out of children.
We need to place an emphasis on sparking that desire to learn or (motivation) by not only helping to restore the child's self-image but also by encouraging students to see the demands and rewards of schooling. Children will work hard, for intrinsic rewards, only if they have a very good reason.
We need to make them feel that they are lovable, important and acceptable human beings by making them feel secure and good about themselves and by building trusting respectful relationships with them. The teacher may be the dependable and caring adult, often the only adult of this kind, who is a consistent and reliable figure in their lives of unpredictability and change. Positive and respectful relationships of this nature are essential for at-risk students.
Educators also need to work to foster resilience in children, focusing on the traits, coping skills, and supports that help children survive in a challenging environment. Children need our help if they are to adapt successfully despite adversity; alter or reverse expected negative outcomes; and thrive in spite of negative circumstances.
We need to set high expectations for all that communicate guidance, structure, challenge, and, most importantly, a belief in the innate resilience of children. We need a curriculum that supports resilience and discusses the technique of total positive response to student misbehavior as a method of developing relationships with students and a method of effective classroom management.
Every incidence of student misbehavior is dealt with in a positive versus negative manner in an effort to disarm students who may exhibit some of the most challenging behaviors. Total positive response involves the use of positive strategies to meet student needs, combined with caring and total acceptance. The challenge is to find the positive in the negative.
Because at-risk students have egos that are often severely damaged, criticism can cause them to tune teachers and authority out. Additionally, emotionally damaged students cannot effectively deal with criticism and channel it to improvement.
We must make it our responsibility to find ways to generate and maintain student interest and involvement on a consistent basis by making our classrooms safe, accepting, interesting and engaging places. By creating lessons that have meaning to these children, teachers are responding actively and constructively to the background or prior knowledge and experience of their students.
The concepts of agency and conation, which encompasses self-efficacy and self-regulation, are key to understanding motivation as it relates to children of poverty. The living environments and the culture of poverty often leave poor children with low levels of motivation to learn. Besides the fact that all of their energies may be directed elsewhere in their struggle to survive, they may have poor experiences with schooling or may perceive that they don't really need school to be successful. They may translate money or belonging into success, and perceive careers in criminal activity that permeate poorer neighborhoods (such as drug dealing, prostitution, gambling, theft and gang involvement) as lucrative careers and as the only ones possible for them.
Children from low self-esteem live in environments with social conditions over which they have little control. It is not their choice where they live. It is not their choice that their parent may be unemployed or disabled. It was not their choice to be born into poverty. They often have the feeling they want or need to escape this environment and do better; but they feel they have no control over the nature and quality of their lives. The concept of agency is that an individual can intentionally make things happen through their actions.
This is an underlying concept in social learning or social cognitive theory. If we can show children that they can be agents, we can enable them to play a part in their self-development and take responsibility for their learning, personal development and achievement.
As agents, children do not simply undergo experiences. They become actively engaged participants by using sensory, motor and cognitive processes to accomplish tasks and goals that give their lives meaning and direction. They explore, manipulate and influence the environment. We need to get children to act mindfully to make desired things happen rather than let themselves be acted on by their environments. When children with low self-esteem run into difficult challenges, they engage in negative self-talk and may perceive their failures as challenges they cannot overcome.
They may not increase their efforts and may become despondent if they interpret failure to mean they are personally deficient. Because of the culture they live in, they may also feel exploited or disrespected and respond hostilely or apathetically. Goal setting is a critical aspect of agency because it allows individuals to construct outcome expectations. This provides direction, coherence and meaning to life, and can also enable these students to transcend the dictates of their environment.
The social environment has an impact on goal-oriented motivation. We need to work towards developing cognitive components that enhance self-direction, self-determination and self-regulation. Low SES children need to realize the possibilities in their lives, set goals that they can attain and experience success directly, through mastery experiences, and vicariously, through the success of others.
Teachers should focus on the learning process, effort and striving, not solely on the ability of the child or results. Personal standards should be stressed as opposed to normative standards. Because success helps to raise self-efficacy, we should do whatever possible to help our students succeed and work to strengthen confidence through our words and actions.
Student self-beliefs have great influence on whether they fail or succeed in school. We need to provide intellectual challenge and create classroom climates of emotional support and encouragement to help students meet the challenge. We need to nurture the self-beliefs of our students and provide them with successful models that transmit knowledge, skills and inspiration. Improving self-efficacy can lead to increased use of cognitive strategies and, in turn, higher achievement. A high sense of efficacy also promotes pro-social behaviors such as cooperativeness, helpfulness, sharing, and mutual concern for welfare.
Many of the difficulties students encounter are closely connected to beliefs they hold about themselves and their place in the world they live in. Academic failure is a consequence of the beliefs that students hold about themselves and about their ability to have control over their environments.