Sustained Flow Experiences from Facilitative Structures Can Create Guiding Post-Hoc Visualizations and Positive Affect: Get Students to Tell their Positive Stories to Operationalize the Process

Tim Murphey, Visiting Professor, Kanda University of International Studies

Murphey, T. (2019). Sustained flow experiences from facilitative structures can create guiding post-hoc visualizations and positive affect: Get students to tell their positive stories to operationalize the process. Relay Journal, 2(2), 409-414. https://doi.org/10.37237/relay/020215

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Narrative One

My father encouraged me to go to Europe the summer before my last year in high school (at 16). He thought I was going to stay in a youth hostel in Geneva, but instead someone invited me to go with him to the Alps and he taught me how to hitch-hike by sticking out your thumb on the roadside.  We hitched up into the Alps together. I hitched back by myself. Then hitched to southern France and up through Italy to Switzerland again and then around Switzerland. The most agentive-awakening 6 weeks of my life.

“Sustained flow” (SF) theory, also known as “directed motivational currents” (DMC: Dörnyei, Muir, C, & Ibrahim, 2014; Dörnyei, Ibrahim, Z, & Muir, 2015) proposes three active components: visualization, facilitative structures, and positive-affect. Visualizations are images in our minds that can provoke us to take action (e.g., seeing myself getting a ride from a car going by). Facilitative structures are means by which something might be accomplished (e.g., a highway with cars which can stop on a curb, me with my thumb raised for drivers to see communicates I would like a ride). Positive-affect are the good feelings I got when a car stopped, when the drivers smiled and asked me questions, when I noticed my French getting better, etc. Research is showing (in press: a journal article [reviewing about 15 research articles on the topic] that I just reviewed) of these three components, students rarely mention visualizing and that the main affordance is facilitative structures that guide students to act first in appropriate manners resulting in positive affect. My explanation for this is that the visualizations, I propose, are post-hoc, i.e. we visualize ourselves performing autonomously, agenticly, and altruistically in the past and that inspires us to perform more so in the future, and yes to imagine (visualize) how we might do something in the future. My proposal is that your present visualizations depend greatly on what you have done and seen in the past. This is perhaps why students telling their language learning histories (LLHs) are so powerful: they get to create visualizations in their minds that they had filed away in a dark chamber. Telling their stories gets them to re-view, re-remember and analyze their behaviors and understand how they may have been agentive and somewhat autonomous in ways that they had not realized before. These post-hoc visualizations can spur motivation to perform in similar ways in the future, to be daring!

Visualizing before you have done anything is probably vague at best. But when presented with facilitative structures to act (without necessarily having knowledge, i.e. unknowingly), we perform in ways guided by the facilitative structures (e.g. we sign a petition, we stick out our thumb, etc.) and later we realize that we were creating our own future, supporting a cause, we are agentic, and we may be altruistic. These post hock visualizations can then guide us, and the world, to a better future.

Why it is good to be a reader for Journal Articles

I would like to thank the authors of the blinded journal article that I just reviewed who sparked my thinking about sustained flow and dynamic motivational currents and the three components (facilitative structures, visualizations, & positive affect). They reactivated my visualizations with my agentic /autonomous past which also gave me a positive rush!–Unfortunately it was blind-reviewed so I cannot yet thank them. If you liked this article, maybe you should sign up to be a reviewer too! Becoming a reader for a journal is a “facilitative structure” that can create visualizations and positive affect (usually), and which can turn into “sustained flow” within your field.

Narrative Two

Teachers in a small research team in Tokyo do the Ideal Classmates prompt (i.e., a facilitative structure) for their interactive EFL classes in their universities the first day of new classes. They simply ask students the question:

“Please describe a group of classmates that you could learn English well with. What would you all do to help each other learn better and more enjoyably?” The teachers collect the students’ comments and then loop (Murphey & Falout, 2010) the answers (anonymously) back to the students in the next class so they read all the comments from their classmates and visualize what everybody wants in order to learn well. This simple question taps into memories of good and effective learning times (i.e., visualizations) and positive affect when things went well, the things that allowed them to have a good learning environment, but also they have reminders of what did not go well that they can warn their teacher of as well–see one class example in appendix 1–(Murphey et al. 2014).

 Narrative Three

Now this article can become a facilitative structure for you (of course the Relay Journal, and all journals, have already been such structures since they were started and all the articles were just sub-facilitative structures for those who read them). So we could ask readers now “What are your autonomous/agentic stories?” Tell them and emphasize the positive visions and affect, and they could sustain and enlarge your flow, your self-directed motivational currents!

At a meta-level, Dörnyei et al. (2014 & 2015) have created facilitative structures (i.e., theories) that we can use to push our better visualizations and positive affects. Perhaps our job is to make sure our students know about the facilitative structures (e.g., books, facilitation groups, SALC areas and advisors, etc.) and that they all have an invitation to use them to create visualizations and positive affect which naturally come through the facilitative structures.

References

Dörnyei, Z., Ibrahim, Z., & Muir, C. (2015). ‘Directed Motivational Currents’: Regulating complex dynamic systems through motivational surges. In Z. Dörnyei, P. MacIntyre, & A. Henry (Eds.), Motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 95–105). Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Dörnyei, Z., Muir, C., & Ibrahim, Z. (2014). Directed Motivational Currents: Energising language learning by creating intense motivational pathways. In D. Lasagabaster, A. Doiz, & J. M. Sierra (Eds.), Motivation and foreign language learning: From theory to practice (pp. 9–29). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.

Murphey, T. (2013). Ideal Classmates and Reciprocal Idealizing through Critical Participatory Looping (CPL) in Socially Intelligent Dynamic Systems (SINDYS) [.mp4 file, pdf file] (NFLRC Video #25). Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, National Foreign Language Resource Center. doi: hdl.handle.net/10125/14566 http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/search/?q=Tim+Murphey

Murphey, T., & Falout, J. (2010). Critical participatory looping: Dialogic member checking with whole classes. TESOL Quarterly 44 (4) 811-821.

Murphey, T., Falout, J., Fukuda, T., & Fukada, Y. (2014). Socio-dynamic motivating through idealizing classmates. System, 45, 242-253. doi: 10.1016/j.system.2014.06.004

 Murphey, T. & Iswanti S. (2014). Surprising humanity! Comparing ideal classmates in two countries. ETAS Journal, 31(2) Spring, 33-35. https://www.academia.edu/7037276/Surprising_Humanity_Comparing_Ideal_Classmates_in_Two_Countries

[Appendix]