ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the pockets of personalizing interactions between teachers and students that sometimes emerged in the investigated youth detention homes and how they could foster motivation for schoolwork. School motivation is often perceived as internally driven, but here it is analyzed as socially constructed. In the study's data, motivation proved to be practically and discursively anchored in actions that affirmed and brought forth the student-as-person, in contrast to the institution's often totalizing and depersonalizing tendencies. Motivation was thus distinct from actions that instead undermined students’ ability to appear as persons. The chapter presents a theoretical discussion grounded in the works of Erving Goffman, George Herbert Mead, Hans Joas, and C. Wright Mills, which is further developed and nuanced through empirical cases from the field. The schoolwork that emerged within these pockets of personalization appeared discreet, unobtrusive, and built upon relatively informal interactions.
