Motives and Actions

Achievement Standard:

Year 9: They explain the motives and actions of people at the time
Year 10: They explain the context for people’s actions in the past

Ok – so what does this even mean? What is a motive and what is an action…and what even is context? Lets define these hey:

Context: the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood.
Motive: a reason for doing something.
Action: the fact or process of doing something, typically to achieve an aim.

So…motive….action…context, three fancy words we can use to view historical events and to begin to analyse them with. In terms of a process you could view them as follows;

So, bearing this in mind, motives are the driving forces that lead individuals, groups and societies into action that can create an event. Context is the overarching ‘bigger picture’ of a situation – what was occurring around an individual, group, society etc. So with this in mind, lets look at an event which almost blew up the world (like seriously, almost did…almost game over…)