Control and agency in student–teacher relations: a cross–cultural perspective on Finnish and Korean comprehensive schools

ABSTRACT

Drawing on a cross-cultural, qualitative study in Finnish and Korean comprehensive schools, we explore how teacher control and student agency are manifested and exercised in the teaching and learning practices of the “official school” and in the student–teacher interactions of the “informal school”. We also elaborate on how students reflect on control and agency. Bernstein’s concepts of framing and classification are employed as a theoretical lens with which to examine control, agency and hierarchy. Data consists of school observations and interviews with students aged 12 to 14 and their teachers, conducted in six schools. The findings indicate that student agency is intensively constrained in their participation in teaching-learning practices. The analysis also reveals a paradox where students do not welcome increasing their agency through student-oriented lessons. Moreover, the controlling and caring roles of teachers and the exertion and limitation of student agency appear differently in the Finnish and Korean schools studied. Students seem to desire a refined balance between control and agency while revealing conforming and self-critical attitudes towards the school system and teacher control. Finally, our analyses of control, agency and hierarchy among school members leads this article into a discussion of democratic school culture from a cross-cultural perspective.

KEYWORDS:

• Student–teacher relations
• control
• agency
• framing
• classification
• cross-cultural
• democratic schooling

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the students and teachers who participated in this study. We are also grateful to Lisbeth Lundahl, Per-Åke Rosvall, Tero Järvinen and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on previous versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In order to study the school life of early-teen adolescents, FA collected data from two Finnish comprehensive schools, which commonly provide schooling for students who belonged to grades one to nine. Subsequently, FA collected Korean data in two primary schools and two lower-secondary schools, which correspond to Finnish comprehensive schools.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Turku University Foundation under Grant 5-979.

Notes on contributors

Junghyun Yoon

Junghyun Yoon is a researcher at the Department of Education, University of Turku, Finland. Her current research interests include school life of adolescents, democratic schooling, and cross-cultural and comparative education research from sociological perspectives.

Maria Rönnlund

Maria Rönnlund is associate professor at the Department of Applied Educational Science, Umeå University, Sweden. Her field of research is sociology of education and youth studies. Recent studies highlight processes of democracy, gender and identity in schooling, including spatial perspectives on education.