As an educator for the past 25 years, I have seen countless students giving up on learning. Whether that be on a task, preparing for an evaluation, a course, or to some extent giving up on learning in a structured environment completely. I feel that it is import that students feel empowered to make change. Students require agency (life-long learning) so that they can tackle the issues the world faces.
Unfortunately, my experience in the educational field, has re-enforced, that students often are unsure about the future state of the world, and express a lack of confidence and a lack of interest in developing real world skills which could be used beyond their formal structured learning. I personally wish to try and support students’ mindsets to become more agentic so that they can build confidence and increase their perceived control of their own learning and their own lives.
From my perspective, the institution of education is not prepared, to prepare students, for our current societal condition. The early industrial society, from which our current educational institution was forged, is equally incongruent with the current state of affairs, and yet, the institution is slow and has competing needs. Looking at a time scale, one would expect that if the institutional needs were aligned with learning needs that we would have seen greater fundamental changes within the educational institution.
(Sawyer, 2022 p. 28) Sawyer, R. K. (2022). An introduction to the learning sciences. The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences, 1-24.
In my career of 30 years as an educator I have seen virtually no fundamental change to the processes used within institutional educational organizations. The world is changing faster then it ever has before so how could agency help push learning beyond the traditional model.
“In 1900, about 95 percent of jobs were low-skilled and required workers to follow simple procedures that were designed by others. By 2020, in advanced economies, less than 10 percent of jobs were like this. Many working-class factory jobs have been taken over by computers and robots (Sawyer, 2019). A century ago, in a world without communication technology – without phones and the Internet – it was not easy to find someone else who knew the information you needed; you had to know it yourself. Memorizing information was a large part of being educated. With today’s Internet, everything that can be memorized is a quick search away. Instructionism fails to educate students to participate in this new kind of society” (Sawyer, 2022, p. 2) Sawyer, R. K. (2022). An introduction to the learning sciences. The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences, 1-24.
I see the traditional educational organisation model as a train. At the time in the 1880’s, the train was revolutionary. Its self similarity propagated itself across land, nations, and boarders. It was a symbol of technology, growth, and expansion. To a large extent, the industrialization of education followed the conventional wisdom of its time. With an assembly line tone, with bells as time signals, training students to be complicit and vessels to be filled. As if the students could simply walk onto the line or step into the machine (class) and they would be brought to knowledge.
“The traditional role of educational research has been to tell educators how to
achieve their curriculum objectives, but not to help set those objectives. But
when learning scientists went into classrooms, they discovered that schools were
not teaching the deep knowledge that underlies intelligent performance.” (Sawyer, 2022, p. 4) Sawyer, R. K. (2022). An introduction to the learning sciences. The Cambridge handbook of the learning sciences, 1-24.
The rail system is designed beyond the agency of the students and teachers and has, an external to learning, educational infrastructure with coordinators and examiners to track and test along the path of learning. The stations are schools where students get on and off the learning train. The train cars are classes, currently dressed with smart boards but passive conditions prevail. The students are attended to, much the same way, from car to car, to ensure accountability. They go around and around from grade to grade until they reach the terminal stop, and graduate.
From a single room classroom in the 1880’s to the present, the foundational path has not changed much. The rails are set by exam boards, publishing companies, and national organizations. By design the institutional educational train has the agency. As technology emerges and educational trends come and go these new components are added to the existing infrastructure of educational rail yards. However, currently with distance education, artificial inelegance, and third-party examinations, couldn’t we start to see a shift in the roles and expectations between the student and the institution?
Swayer, 2022, p. 5
What if we built up student agency? Developing self-regulation, reflexivity, and self-efficacy so that the student had sufficient agency to pursue their own learning? Having students be the pilots of their own learning flight path. We could image educational airports where student’s check-in, but ultimately the student would design and develop there own learning paths and check points. By teaching students how to be their own teachers they would have the metacognitive skills to be able to seek out their own scaffolds and take responsibility for their own learning.
I want to build such an educational airport. Which is why agentic variables are so important to me. I wish to understand more about agency in conjunction with groups and systems to find ways to increase student agency and measure the impact agentic manifestations have on student learning succuss.