Mapping Concepts of Agency in Educational Contexts

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore and map the “espoused theories” (Argyris and Schön 1978) of agency used in educational contexts. More precisely, we limit the focus on the normative view of student agency assumed within dominant school practices, desired by educational practitioners, leaving out non-normative emerging agencies such as student agency of resistance. Agency is a “tricky” concept, and often scholars who use the concept of agency do not define or operationalize it (e.g., Archer 2000). One reason is that there is no consensus among scholars about the notion of agency, especially when applied to educational contexts (Hitlin and Elder Sociological Theory, 25 (2), 170–191, 2007). Moreover, the recent neoliberal framing of individuals’ agency as fully autonomous, flexible, and self-entrepreneur is adding the dilemma of agency manipulation in the sphere of education (Gershon 2011; Sidorkin 2004). To tackle this dilemma in educational contexts, we suggest to further interrogating the normative notion of agency in all its modes and develop a more nuanced conceptualization. We hope that such conceptualization would produce an understanding of the diverse manifestations and definitions of agency within a human ideal, educational content, behaviors, and social settings. We observed diverse uses of the normative term “agency” in educational discourse. We examined the term as used by researchers and practitioners. We also looked at the different ways it has been used in philosophical discussions of education, political framing of the civic role of schooling, disciplinary policy statements, school mission statements, and in everyday common use. It is worthy to note that our categorization of the use and meaning of the normative term “agency” depends on the scholars’ epistemological paradigmatic assumptions, socio-political and historical situatedness, and ontological projects being translated into diverse scholarships of education. As a result of our research, we suggest four major normative conceptual frameworks related to agency mainly being adopted in educational contexts that we labeled as: 1) instrumental, 2) effortful, 3) dynamically emergent, and 4) authorial. In this paper, we discuss these normative approaches to agency as we compare and contrast the assumptions and their consequences for the current field of education, mostly from a point of view of authorial definition of agency (our bias).