Over the past decade, we have conducted three separate school-based research studies designed to improve the engagement and learning of elementary and middle school students who were deemed at-risk based on their schools’ end of course assessments. In each of our three studies, set in schools with diverse populations, students had frequent opportunities to provide input into the nature of their daily learning, allowing them to renegotiate past school challenges with future goals and present achievement histories, (referred to as prolepsis by Cole, 1996). This input allowed them to use their agency to participate as critical partners in a co-creation of instructional activities based on what mattered most to them. This view of agency is based on Stetsenko’s (2012) call for students to assume transformative activist stances, where students and teachers are considered learners who mutually co-construct new understandings, using dialogue to develop evolving learning agendas.

Given our students’ backgrounds, we selected situated learning as a theoretical framework, because it underscores the potential for learners who have been marginalized for whatever reason to develop new learning histories if they had frequent opportunities to reflect on who they are as learners and who they might become (Stetsenko, 2012). Such developments depend on collaborative efforts within a community of practice, defined as students who come together with a common purpose where teachers and students, through demonstrations of agency, talk about changing abilities both individually and collectively. Engagement and identity development are viewed as critical to long-term success as are performances on traditional achievement measures (Wenger, 1998).

In our paper, we first outline the organization of each study, followed by case studies to highlight the examples and outcomes of promoting agency across the three different contexts. Case studies will underscore how students’ authorial perspectives influenced their understandings of the curriculum and an interpretation of its meaning in future learning efforts. Key to this conversation will be a discussion of the unintended benefits as students regularly assumed direct responsibility for managing several key instructional responsibilities. We will also discuss how our use of the term agency fits into an historical overview of this topic and the potential for students to have a significant impact on what occurs during daily instruction if teachers would promote their agency.

References:
[1] Cole, M. (1996). Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline. Harvard University Press.
[2] Stetsenko, A. (2012). Personhood: An activist project of historical becoming through collaborative pursuits of social transformation. New Ideas in Psychology, 30(1), 144–153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2009.11.008
[3] Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Keywords: Agency, education, literacy.