What is student agency and why is it needed now more than ever?

ABSTRACT

In this article, research tracing the historical progression of agency within recent educational reforms and empirical research from a variety of classrooms (geographic regions and grade levels) is discussed to document the power of agency across contexts. This article aims to propose a collaborative way of thinking about student agency from across the literature and provides insight into how to promote agency in classrooms today. The main focus is placed on examining structures and supports conducive to supporting student agency.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional Resources

1. Barton, A. C., & Tan, E. (2010). We be burnin’! Agency, identity, and science learning. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 19, 187–229.

In this article, Barton and Tan explore the development of student agency in urban youth (ages 10–14) during community youth club focused on green energy technologies. One of the strengths of this article is the ways in which the authors examine and focus on students and the ways in which they initiated learning opportunities as they worked as “community science experts.”

2. Ivey, G., & Johnston, P. H. (2013). Engagement with young adult literature: Outcomes and processes. Reading Research Quarterly, 48, 255–275.

Providing engaging contexts where students have the ability to make decisions is a central tenet of supporting student agency in classrooms. In this article, Ivey and Johnston, locate agency as students enacted their positions in the literacy classroom. Specific dimensions of agency that were found include five domains of agency: (1) agency in reading, (2) social agency, (3) moral agency, (4) agency with respect to one’s life narrative, and (5) agency in self-regulation.

3. Vaughn, M., Premo, J.T., Sotirovska, V. Erickson, D. (2019). Evaluating agency in literacy using the Student Agency Profile (StAP). The Reading Teacher.

Understanding how student agency can be conceptualized by the students is an important next step in advancing the research and practice of student agency. In this article, authors describe the development of the Student Agency Profile (StAP), an instrument that can be used to measure student agency in literacy contexts that can be used by educators, scholars, and administrators.