Recently a group of Masterton teachers were able to learn from Dr Jean Annan, who shared his expertise on student agency. The following extracts are from his presentation to the Whakaoriori Kahui Ako in this month.
There are exciting new opportunities for young people who
are active in learning, engage in relevant learning tasks and connect with
others across the globe. Promoting student agency requires that teachers,
students and others who support students’ learning become active agents in the
teaching and learning process.
Agency involves using power thoughtfully,
collaborating and helping one another learn rather than meeting immediate
personal needs at the expense of others. Agentic teaching and learning
comprise negotiations between students and students, students and teachers and
among students, teachers and family. This presentation has reported several teacher
practices and student perceptions associated with agentic interactions.
Taking
agency means having a degree of choice in the topics selected, the partners with
whom students collaborate and timeframes for their particular tasks. Agentic teachers
know their students’ learning sufficiently well to provide just enough support.
This sensitive portioning of support provides the less experienced students with
information from more experienced teachers while ensuring that the students’ drive
to pursue learning remains intrinsic. Students vary in their readiness to take agency
in different circumstances as it is influenced by personal, social, cultural
and political factors.
Pivotal influences on students’ agency are teachers,
schools’, parents’ and students’ beliefs about how people learn, where they
learn and why they learn. Various writers have suggested that agency emerges
within specific social and cultural environments and encompasses aspirations,
openness to new opportunities and perceived power within interactions.
Understanding interactive agency in specific circumstances, therefore, must
take into account the broad, dynamic contexts in which actions take place.
When students take agency they exercise a measure of power,
making choices about the topics they study, the people with whom they work, the
rate at which they complete tasks and the nature of interactions within
collaborative inquiry. This does not mean that teachers assume laissez-faire
approaches to teaching or that students act without regard for others. Student
agency, understood in a social context, requires positive connections with
others and activity negotiated in good faith. In a teaching and learning
environment, every participant is constantly learning and consequently acting
in new ways. The emergence of tensions between agency and control among participants
is inherent in the social context, calling for genuine negotiation of roles, tasks
and participation.
Teacher beliefs and perceptions
Possibly the greatest support for teacher agency is their
ability to envision a positive future for young people in the transforming
world (Hannon, 2017). Understanding how education can prepare students for this
new world requires agentic teachers who find out what young people need to
learn and how to support this learning. With a genuine concern for students’
futures and faith in the efficacy of agency to support students’ learning in
the future, teachers may experience new activity as exciting and meaningful.
Reconciliation of the contradiction between agency and
guidance
Teacher support for student learning can be viewed as an ever-shifting scaffold that provides just-the-right-amount of support required
to optimise students’ learning and active engagement in a learning activity.
Adults have much experience in the world and one of their roles is to make
their knowledge and skill available to those for whose learning they have
responsibility. As noted, student agency is not without boundaries; it is
actively negotiated, meaningful and relevant, taking into account the positions
of others. As in any negotiation, there will be inherent tensions. However,
these tensions offer opportunities for reflection and growth. Analysis of these
tensions provides active teachers with information about the conditions and
interactions that will support and actively engage students (see Rajala,
Kumpulainen, Rainio, Hilppö, & Lipponen, 2016).
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