Students’ contextual meaning making in Upper Secondary School:

agency in theory and practice

Abstract

Research has identified a seemingly puzzling student attitude that indicates a non-appreciative stance toward gaining freedom and room for action in education. Students do not always welcome agentic hallmarks such as legitimately having freedoms, for instance, freedom of choice or decision-making. Instead, they tend to prefer teacher-led guidance and, accordingly, the state of being relationally dependent on the teachers. In this article, we explore the mechanisms for such a student preference and the opposite view, represented by students from the 70s enrolled in the historic Swedish democratic school: the Experimental Gymnasium - Experimentgymnasiet - in Gothenburg.

There is a growing concern for the general tendency to restrain students by monitoring and controlling them closely, during their learning trajectories. The problem is that such a pedagogy might be seen as counter-productive, especially when academic freedom is a part of the learning goal. Hence, we also deal with this issue, as we discuss and illustrate notions of student agency in theory and practice throughout different school contexts and implicated cultures. More precisely, we distinguish between two theoretical concepts of agency in schooling that ultimately result in very different didactic implications. Furthermore, we adduce empirical qualification by providing exemplifying excerpts and a written student report relevant to our theoretical reasoning (i.e., distinct types of student agency in theory and practice). These empirical constructs are derived from two distinct corpus of data through time and space which radically differ from each other in school contexts and the applied pedagogical views. The data sets contain upper secondary students’ own voices, revealing their respective perspectives on participating in the same kind of task: learning to write academically and collaboratively in peer groups about Social Science. One data set is a collection of contemporary students’ video-documented reasoning from three focus groups. The other one is an extract of data derived from a peer group of students who vividly write about their everyday learning experiences in a school journal back in the 70s, as they were enrolled in a democratic, experimental state school (Experimental Gymnasium in Gothenburg, Sweden). Their text contribution aimed to share and inspire other students at the school.

Research focusing on student agency has recently become more common in the current field of Educational Science. However, more research is needed to fully understand the role of students’ actions, needs, and rights throughout different educational contexts. Accordingly, differentiated conceptualizations of student agency should also be addressed. We see a chance to contribute to filling this knowledge gap. This article aims to explore diverse notions of agency that have not yet been explicitly discussed in our national context. Due to the conceptual nature of this paper, our research question addresses the issue of conceptualizing student agency. We examine two contrasting concepts deriving from scholars who engage in Bakhtin-inspired dialogic pedagogy: instrumental vs authorial student agency. These concepts are also rooted in a pedagogical research field oriented to democratic education; dialogic pedagogy influenced by Bakhtin’s dialogue philosophy. The concept of authorial agency is here related to the student group from the Experimental Gymnasium in Gothenburg (it existed 1969-1975). When launching this experimental, democratic school was, above all, to encourage the students to feel free to engage democratically in decision-making about their studies, teaching, and organizational practicalities in developing the school together with the leader and the teachers. By implication, this type of agency concerns creative, new thinking, and person-oriented learning that resonates with the notion of authorial agency, further explicated in our present article.

The other illustrated concept in the present text is instrumental agency. It is explored in the context of students in our current age participating in a research project in which they discussed their writing experiences in focus groups. These writing experiences refer to a school course in doing so-called project work in peer groups, and the task of their performed activity has aimed at writing up an academic text about Social Science. The participating students are enrolled in a conventional, municipal upper secondary school in Sweden, in a program that orients to Social Science. In our interpretation, we link their reasonings to an instrumental agency, representing the idea of a limited agency and creativity in (written) meaning making, including being highly dependent on the teacher. We discuss how they were confined to such a goal-rational student position of educational subordination due to predefined goals and rules dictated from above.

In our final discussion, we problematize why the contemporary student group did not search for full-blown student agency and why the students from the experimental, democratic school in the 70s articulated the opposite. We conclude that there is an analytic need to address the role of contextual premises for didactics when considering the implied links to democracy in practice, the teacher role, student motivation, creativity in learning, and assessment regimes.