New NYKids Article Explores the Relationship Between Student and Teacher Agency

By Aaron Leo & Kristen C. Wilcox

In educational research, the concept of agency has provided a valuable conceptual alternative to deterministic portrayals of schools as oppressive institutions where teachers and students have little power over how they teach and learn. While a number of studies have investigated teacher and student agency separately, a recent NYKids article explores their relationship.

The anthropologist Laura Ahearn defines agency as “the socially-mediated capacity to act.” Her definition draws attention to several key features of agency:

• Agency consists of intentional efforts to shape one’s social environment
• These efforts can be explicit and direct or subtle and covert
• Agency is always limited by structural constraints, and these constraints may vary depending on one’s position in society

Research on Teacher and Student Agency and Why They Matter in Policy and Practice

At a macro-level, teachers reinterpret and mold educational policy in classrooms as they teach. While educational policy may be seen as constraining teachers’ pedagogical choices, scholars have noted the ways in which educators seek to maintain control over curriculum and pedagogy. Local contextual features such as school boards and district leaders play a role here as they can help foster or inhibit teacher agency.

Students also exhibit agency as they may take initiative on projects and seek to exert control over their own learning. Even in constraining circumstances, students may display agency through resistance and rejection of school norms as well.

Agency in New York’s Odds-Beating Schools

Our analysis of agency in odds-beating schools demonstrated a close relationship between teacher and student agency and the important role played by district and school leaders. Specifically, teacher agency can be enhanced when constraints are weakened or mitigated by school and district leaders. At odds-beating schools, leaders helped to mitigate the effects of compliance-oriented state accountability practices and helped facilitate teacher decision-making and autonomy.

Agentic teachers not only exerted control over curriculum and pedagogy but felt empowered to voice their opinions to school and district leaders. School and district leaders explained the need to enable teachers’ agency as both an effective leadership style and a way to improve the functioning of their school, and leaders entrusted educators to make the best decisions for their students by providing them with freedom to adapt their teaching practices to students’ needs instead of tightly controlling and standardizing instruction.

Teachers, in turn, utilized their enhanced agency to position students much like the way leaders had positioned them – as active agents. Drawing on support from school and district leaders, teachers sought to position students as critical agents and active learners. Students were thus expected not to passively regurgitate knowledge transmitted to them but develop an agentic and critical view toward content.

Many teachers utilized an additive approach to build from the strengths and resources already possessed by their students. These efforts often combined a culturally responsive and locally-relevant twist to the curriculum with a desire to develop students who recognized their own agentic capacities.

Conclusion

Agency can be seen as an important characteristic for young people to develop in order to fully participate in today’s society. Because increased student agency is positively linked to engagement and self-efficacy, these findings suggest that leaders and policymakers recognize the way teachers may help facilitate student agency. School and district leaders can play a crucial role in weakening the constraints that educational policy might pose on teachers’ agentic behavior.

Read the full article here, and visit our website for more research on the odds-beating schools highlighted in this study. We welcome your feedback and suggestions at nykids@albany.edu.