Toward an agency-centered pedagogy : A teacher's journey of expanding the context of school learning

Abstract

Despite the immense stability of the social structure of schooling, recent social, economic, and technological developments are widening the gap between schools and the surrounding societies so much as to challenge the foundations of public education. Conventional educational practices are hard-pressed to deal with the challenges that contemporary knowledge societies pose for learning and education as lifelong and lifewide processes. This dissertation project is about my journey as a teacher, researcher, and teacher educator to develop a pedagogical model for expanding the context of school learning to engage with students lives and the wider society. My argument draws upon the analyses of three data sources. The backbone of the dissertation study is a retrospective analysis of the video data collected from my own pedagogical practice as a primary school teacher. As a teacher, I intended to bridge the gap between the students personal worlds and the world of school and to promote their agency and personal sensemaking. Together with my coauthors, I engaged in a critical analysis of my pedagogical practices. These analyses contribute to the agency-centered pedagogical model that I outline in this summary. To enrich the pedagogical model, I build on the analyses of two datasets in which I am not myself involved as a participant. The first is derived from an innovative upper secondary school project that aimed to develop stu- dents citizenship and agency by involving them in efforts to influence local political decision-making concerning cycling. The second concerns a literature review of pedagogical approaches that sought to expand the context of school learning to students lives and the wider society. I draw upon a sociocultural and activity-theoretical conceptual framework for the study of learning and education. I posit a transformative ontology that not only focuses on how individuals are enculturated into existing social practice through participation but emphasizes how individuals contribute to the transformation of the norms, discourses, and forms of activity of their communities. Thus, learning is a contested process that inevitably involves a struggle over what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge counts. In particular, I build on the theory of expansive learning and the concepts of context, agency, and personal sense. The empirical data consist primarily of video-recorded classroom interac- tions. These data were analyzed with micro-level interaction analysis. In addition, I analyzed interviews of teachers and students as well as documents. The findings of this dissertation study underline that a broad definition of pedagogy is needed to study and design pedagogical approaches for expanding the context of school learning. Moreover, they show how pedagogical features that do so make specific forms of agency available to students. Furthermore, they illuminate the tensions and challenges that emerge for students and teachers when the context of school learning is expanded. Based on these findings, I present an outline of the agency-centered pedagogical model that has the following features: (a) building a pedagogy on the foundation of students personal sense and agency, (b) connecting instruction to activity systems and expert communities outside school, (c) mastering the institutional context of public schools, and (d) pedagogy as a continuing journey. This dissertation study is timely from the perspective of current educational policy in Finland. In August of 2016, Finland will start to implement the new National Core Curriculum for Basic Education (FNBE, 2014), which explicitly encourages teachers to experiment with student-centered pedagogies and to take learning out of the classroom. In this study, my coauthors and I have analyzed two empirical cases that can be regarded as realizations of the recent Finnish educational policies which have culminated in the new national core curriculum. Overall, this dissertation study argues for an approach, which does not in- volve excessive control and assessment of students, to address the challenges that knowledge societies pose to public education. Instead, a basic premise of this approach is that teachers and students are seen as contributors to educational change. The study concludes with suggestions for avenues of further research addressing the consequences of agency-centered pedagogy for students development. In addition, the study raises new research questions about the development of instructional practices in schools and beyond.

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