On the notion of agency in studies of interaction and learning (original) (raw)
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Agency and learning: Researching agency in educational interactions
Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 2016
During the last decade, agency has gained popularity in educational research, when discussing practice and in policy discourse. For many, agency accounts for the opportunity, will and skill of people to act upon, influence as well as transform activities and circumstances in their lives. Agency is hence closely related to autonomy and power relations in human activity and learning. Several rationales justify the increased educational interest in agency. For one, a focus on students' agency reflects aims to overcome narrow conceptions of school learning that are argued to downplay transformative and deliberative aspects of learning, and alienate students from formal education (Rajala, 2016). In science education, for example, students consistently report positive attitudes towards science in general but are not interested in school science studies (Osborne, Simon, & Collins, 2003). Agency has also played a central role in educational efforts that aim to create coherence and transformative interaction across young people's diverse spheres of experience with the goal of promoting educational equity and opportunity (Barton & Tan, 2010). Another rationale for the growing focus on agency in education is that schools are struggling to fulfil their role in preparing students for adult lives in this century. For example, as citizens, students need to be capable of collectively dealing with such major challenges as climate change and ethnic conflicts. In these circumstances, routine performance is not adequate. Instead, transforming activities and circumstances calls for human agency. Finally, increased interest in agency also reflects initiatives that stress young people's right to participate in society and to express their opinions in matters that affect their lives (Niemi, Kumpulainen, & Lipponen, 2016; The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1989). Whilst agency appears as a promising lens for addressing societally relevant issues facing contemporary schooling, in this special issue we argue for the need of a more nuanced understanding of how different perspectives on agency can disclose its mediating resources and mechanisms in various educational settings (see also Arnold & Clarke, 2013). We do not see a variety of approaches to agency as problematic, but encourage debate akin to the historical debate on the meaning of the term 'learning' by educational psychologists (see Säljö, 2009). We argue that clear articulation of diverse theoretical and empirical underpinnings of agency is required to capture its diverse aspects and manifestations in and out of the classroom. This special issue aims to contribute to the evolving research agenda for conceptualizing and researching young people's agency in educational interactions. The articles of this special issue of Learning, Culture and Social Interaction offer socioculturally grounded approaches to operationalizing agency to examine and understand social processes of learning. Employing these approaches, the papers contribute novel empirical insights to understanding how young people's agency is negotiated in educational interactions and what enables and constrains its emergence. As this collection argues, agency cannot be adequately theorized as an individual attribute; sociocultural contexts within which agency is enacted need to be accounted for. Whilst the contributions to this special issue approach the theorization of agency from psychological, anthropological and/or sociological standpoints, each advances the sociocultural turn to researching and understanding engagement, learning and agency in educational interactions. This effort contributes to a re-evaluation and expansion of the classical legacy of sociocultural perspectives on learning in which the emphasis was initially placed more on enculturation into an existing culture and not so much on human agency in learning. To balance this over-emphasis on the collective and reproductive dimensions of learning, the notion of agency can be used to re-theorize culture-learning interfaces in terms of both enculturation and transformation (Kumpulainen & Renshaw, 2007). This special issue presents five empirical studies of young people's agency in educational interactions drawing upon research from Finland, Luxembourg, Australia and the USA. This international collection of studies illuminates diversity in the range of methodological approaches and novel research designs to conceptualize and research agency. Together they shed light on agency as a multi-faceted, situated and relational phenomenon. Each paper contends in its own way with the theoretical problem of acknowledging the psychological within a sociocultural framework. In doing this, the papers highlight young people's agency either in terms of overt interactions or as reflective accounts of one's capability and willingness to take action, or both. What sets these
Agency as Culture: Learner Autonomy and Motivation as Ordinary
Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Teaching and Learning Today 2019: Autonomy and Motivation for Language Learning in the Interconnected World, 2019
Learner autonomy and motivation have been recognised by academics, researchers and practitioners as both a critical and problematic element of linguistics and language learning, among other disciplines in higher education. The ongoing challenge lies at the heart of students exercising a critical sense of agency over their acquisition of disciplinary knowledge, educational experience, and applied practice. However, rather than being understood as a socially constructed action or outcome within limited frames of reference, learner autonomy and motivation may be viewed expansively as culture. Drawing on Raymond Williams' theory of culture, and John Law's sociological concept of symmetry, this work attempts to explore how learner autonomy and motivation might be fostered and sustained, in an attempt to rethink how learner agency might be positioned as a normative practice.
Frontiers in Education, 2019
The recent scholarship on agency is mostly centered around a relational (also known as situative, contextual, distributed, and ecological) approach that draws attention to agency being situated in context and contingent on sociocultural interactivities and contextual dynamics. My central argument is that there is a residue of passivity in these conceptions. Illustrative of this are the works by Bietsa and colleagues which I analyse to reveal conceptual flaws that need to be addressed. To overcome these flaws, it is important to reconstrue no less than the very basic premises about human development, context/reality, and teaching-learning to foreground a more radical view of agency conducive to combatting inequalities and injustices in education. In the alternative approach, termed the Transformative Activist Stance, human development is posited to be not only fully immersed in the world and its contextual dynamics but, more critically, realized by each individual's agentive contributions to communal practices, whereby these practices are changed as a whole every time a person acts as an active member of community. The emphasis is on the nexus of people changing the world and being changed in this very process of them changing the world-as two poles of one and the same, bi-directional and recursive, co-constitution of people and the world in a simultaneous self-and world-realization. People never merely react or respond to what exists but agentively act in co-realizing both the world and themselves. Agency in this account is accorded with a formative role in the processes of co-realizing both human development, the overall sociohistorical dynamics, and the world itself. Importantly, agency development is contingent on access to cultural tools that need to be provided by society and agentively taken up by each individual. There are starkly contrasting sociopolitical conjectures and implications geared to the issues of inequalities and injustices in education. The notion of a radical-transformative agency is deployed in order to expose and overcome ideologies of passive adaptation to, and acquiescence with, the existing order of things and the world as it presumably "is."
Human agency and educational research: A new problem in activity theory
Actio: An International Journal of Human Activity Theory, No. 1, 19-39, 2007
In this paper, I address the reconceptualization of human agency that can shift to an analysis of both distributed and multiple agency in networked learning activities. As human activity becomes increasingly dialogical, boundary-crossing, networked, hybrid, and weekly bounded forms of work and organizations, the new generation of activity theory invites us to focus educational research efforts on the evocative and supportive new forms of agency to design and implement new patterns and forms of collaborative relationships of multiple activity systems. After a conceptual overview, this paper will analyze findings from a case study on an inter-institutional, collaborative after-school learning activity for children called New School promoted by the Center for Human Activity Theory at Kansai University in Osaka. In conclusion, this paper will propose that evoking and supporting new distributed and multiple forms of critical design agency for networked educational work and organizations among different actors involved in and affected by educational practices must offer a lifeline to educational research as an intervention to break away from something old (e.g., institutional boundaries of traditional school learning isolated from society) and move toward something else (e.g., advanced networks of learning across boundaries). Such agency might include the will and courage to create school innovations so that schools can become collaborative change agents.
Mapping Concepts of Agency in Educational Contexts
2015
The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore and map the “espoused theories” (Argyris and Schön 1978) of agency used in educational contexts. More precisely, we limit the focus on the normative view of student agency assumed within dominant school practices, desired by educational practitioners, leaving out non-normative emerging agencies such as student agency of resistance. Agency is a “tricky” concept, and often scholars who use the concept of agency do not define or operationalize it (e.g., Archer 2000). One reason is that there is no consensus among scholars about the notion of agency, especially when applied to educational contexts (Hitlin and Elder Sociological Theory, 25 (2), 170–191, 2007). Moreover, the recent neoliberal framing of individuals’ agency as fully autonomous, flexible, and self-entrepreneur is adding the dilemma of agency manipulation in the sphere of education (Gershon 2011; Sidorkin 2004). To tackle this dilemma in educational contexts, we suggest to further interrogating the normative notion of agency in all its modes and develop a more nuanced conceptualization. We hope that such conceptualization would produce an understanding of the diverse manifestations and definitions of agency within a human ideal, educational content, behaviors, and social settings. We observed diverse uses of the normative term “agency” in educational discourse. We examined the term as used by researchers and practitioners. We also looked at the different ways it has been used in philosophical discussions of education, political framing of the civic role of schooling, disciplinary policy statements, school mission statements, and in everyday common use. It is worthy to note that our categorization of the use and meaning of the normative term “agency” depends on the scholars’ epistemological paradigmatic assumptions, socio-political and historical situatedness, and ontological projects being translated into diverse scholarships of education. As a result of our research, we suggest four major normative conceptual frameworks related to agency mainly being adopted in educational contexts that we labeled as: 1) instrumental, 2) effortful, 3) dynamically emergent, and 4) authorial. In this paper, we discuss these normative approaches to agency as we compare and contrast the assumptions and their consequences for the current field of education, mostly from a point of view of authorial definition of agency (our bias).
Section 1 : Conceptualising Learner Agency : A Socio-Ecological Developmental Approach
2018
This paper was commissioned to clarify and deepen the understanding of the key concepts of the OECD 2030 Learning Framework: Section1: Conceptualising Learner Agency: A Socio-Ecological Developmental Approach by Ingrid Schoon, University College London, Institute of Education Section 2: Attitudes and Values and the OECD Learning Framework 2030: A critical review of definitions, concepts and data by Helen Haste, Harvard Graduate School of Education/University of Bath The participants are invited to: NOTE the draft prepared by Ingrid Schoon to use research to inform the discussion on "student agency" during the item 3d. 16.20-18:00 on 14 May. NOTE the draft prepared by Helen Haste to use research to inform the discussion on "attitudes and values" during the item 3d. 16.20-18:00 on 14 May.
Agency as dynamic and rhizomatic: An exploration of learner identities in two secondary classrooms
This thesis is premised on “a politics of becoming” (Gowlett, 2013, p. 149), a Deleuzo-Guattarian notion which speaks to social justice research. Rather than a focus on reductionist reformist politics, I explore moments of possibility as lines of flight that disrupt dominant discourses. As outlined in the New Zealand Curriculum, New Zealand schools are charged with the task of strengthening students’ key competencies (Ministry of Education, 2007a) to lay a foundation for lifelong learning. Learner agency is embedded in a dispositional view of these competencies but there is a paucity of research from a poststructural perspective in this area from New Zealand. Agency is also fundamental to a sociocultural conception of assessment for learning (AfL) where learners initiate, participate and contribute to learning in their classroom communities. Positioned in theoretical landscapes of socioculturalism and feminist poststructuralism, this study investigates agency through a rhizo-textual analysis in two year nine classrooms. The dynamic poststructural view of agency theorised in this thesis is derived from Judith Butler’s (1993) notion of performativity which precludes any prediscursive autonomous subject. Using data from episodes in two year nine classrooms I explore: how students engage as authoritative, active participants, authoring and directing their own actions in social activity within multiple discourses; how students move themselves from one set of culturally and socially structured subjectivities to another; and how agency can look, sound and feel in the discursive space of the classroom. In keeping with a rhizoanalytic approach, I construct plateaus of discourse based on episodes of classroom activity. These three short episodes of classroom discourse serve to illuminate the subjectivities in play. There are two forms of analysis used to construct these plateaus. Firstly, conduct a discourse analysis of identity affordances and discourses to examine the nature of learner positioning. I then use rhizo-textual analysis (Honan & Sellers, 2006) to map the students’ and teachers’ moves in discourse and shifting subjectivities. The findings highlight how agency can appear as a rapid series of rhizomatic discourse moves that take place as students and teachers deterritorialize and reterritorialize discourses as they enact specific identities. They resonate with Davies’ (2000) observation that learners can accept, resist, subvert and change or ignore a range of discourse positions. The study also illustrates that what can appear to be ‘off-task’ behaviour can be also read as highly agentic. The dynamic and rhizomatic theory of agency proposed illustrates that learners can inhabit multiple subject positions across discourses as they respond to the interpellations of their teachers and peers. Rather than a performance where individuals act out roles as pre-discursive identities, students exercise performativity within and across classroom discourses as they are constituted agentically through their lines of flight. The research makes a methodological contribution through combining sociocultural and poststructural theories to explore the discursively constructed social and cultural environments of two classrooms. This is a deterritorializing move away from conventional sociocultural learning theory to incorporate an ecological (Boylan, 2010), rhizomatic view of classroom participation. This research has implications for how educators conceptualise learners’ identities and provide affordances for learners to initiate learning and take up agentic positions in classroom discourse. It also has implications for the ways in which the key competencies can be interpreted and strengthened in classrooms. Rather than ‘having’ agency to transfer competencies from one situation to the next, competencies are produced and enacted as learners shift subjectivities within and across discourses. The findings also offer students, teachers and policy makers insight into the learning dynamics of classrooms which embody the ‘spirit’ of AfL (Marshall & Drummond, 2006) where students can be afforded opportunities for lines of flight to initiate learning. Through being aware of learners’ rhizomatic moves, teachers may be able to notice, recognise and respond to learner initiatives more readily, and assist them to develop their capacity to be agentic learners.
Human Agency: Its Pedagogical Implications
Let us suppose that we accept that humans can be correctly characterized as agents (and hence held responsible for their actions). Let us further presume that this capacity contrasts with most non-human animals. Thus, since agency is what uniquely constitutes what it is to be human, it must be of supreme importance. If these claims have any merit, it would seem to follow that, if agency can be nurtured through education, then it is an overarching moral imperative that educational initiatives be undertaken to do that. In this paper, it will be argued that agency can indeed be enhanced, and that the worldwide educational initiative called Philosophy for Children (P 4C), and others like it, are in a unique position to do just that, and, therefore, that P4C deserves our praise and support; while denigrations of such efforts for not being "real philosophy" ought to be thoroughly renounced.
Constructing student agency: The nexus between classroom activities and engagement
International journal of education and practice, 2024
Student agency refers to the quality of students' self-reflective and intentional actions and interactions concerning their activities and engagements both inside and outside the classroom. The engagements and activities help to increase the level of personal agency. This study mainly aims to determine the nexus between constructing student agency and engagements and activities in higher education English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classrooms. This study adopted a sequential explanatory mixed method design. To collect quantitative data, a survey was conducted with a set of fivepoint Likert scale questionnaires among 107 students studying at bachelor's level in Dhading district, Nepal. The students represent different years of the bachelor's level. Semi-structured interviews were conducted among three teachers teaching at the same level to collect qualitative data. The findings of the study hold important insights for higher education teachers, emphasizing the significance of incorporating agency into classroom activities and fostering engagement. Additionally, this study contributes to the development of agency when students have opportunities to be selective in actions, engagements and interactions in classrooms. To effectively address this issue, the researcher strongly advocates highlighting the importance of classroom engagement and activities as essential components in enhancing student agency in EFL classrooms and beyond. Contribution/Originality: The article's focus contributes to the field of higher education by providing a succinct insight into fostering student agency through involving students in intentional actions and interactions with engagements within and beyond the classroom. 1. INTRODUCTION Recognizing student agency is vital as it enables students to have command over their learning, promoting autonomy, meaningful engagement, and improved educational achievements (Heilala, Jääskelä, Saarela, & Kärkkäinen, 2024). In the present context, the ongoing progress in educational methods has prompted shifts in the responsibilities of teachers to foster agency in the classroom. Multiple factors contribute to shaping agency within the learning environment. The practical implementation of agency involves collaboration between students and teachers, comprising activities both within the classroom and in broader social contexts. Thus, agency is not separated from action, rather it is co-constructed with the teachers and the peers (Lave & Wenger, 1991) in classroom and societal contexts. Additionally, teachers need to engage students in differe nt agency-boosting activities and engagements.
Towards Relational Agency in Finnish Early Years Pedagogy and Practice
2020
This socioculturally-framed doctoral dissertation focuses on understanding and researching agency in early years pedagogy from the perspective of both children and teachers in Finnish early childhood education (ECE), preprimary education and early primary education. In the study, agency is understood as a relational activity and underscores the interactional nature of agency that is constructed into being between people, environment and cultural resources in context. This understanding of agency has been applied in three independent studies that uncover the relational nature of agency (respectively) in children transitioning from pre-primary education to primary education (Study 1); in teachers’ work whilst creating the early years pedagogy according to the new Finnish national core curriculum recommendations on the enhancement of children’s multiliteracies (Study 2); and finally, in the interactions between children and teachers in everyday ECE practices (Study 3). This doctoral di...