Rewarding students for excellence in class, or even for doing their best, is a well established approach to motivation. Well I dont think it works too well for remote-community indigenous kids.
Scenario - students are told that first 3 to finish their assigned task ( I wont say worksheet ) will receive a small reward. Lets assume its a stationery item or worst case its a lolly.
At the end of the lesson the rewards are distributed and the lucky 3 are quite happy. But the others are not. They know that you still have rewards in your bag that you have not given out. And they are quite annoyed that you refuse to hand them a reward regardless of the progress they have made on their task.
My theory is that 'demand sharing' is coming into play. Demand sharing is a practice in indigenous communities that says you have to share what you have with anyone who asks you to share. Well, not quite anyone, but at a minimum it's anyone who is relate to you. And within a remote community that usually means most people. So when you hand out rewards to a selected few, and still have other rewards being held back ,there is a sense of injustice. You've got some more of those, why cant I have one ?
An idea that could motivate students to greater efforts becomes a barrier that breaks down the teacher-student relationship.
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