What is agency? Conceptualizing professional agency at work

The concept of agency has become widely used in learning research, especially in studies addressing professional and workplace learning, but also in policy discussion on how to promote individually meaningful careers and life-courses amid rapid changes in working life. The purpose of this article is to provide a critical review of the multidisciplinary concept of agency, and to suggest a fruitful conceptualization of professional agency at work. The following questions are addressed: (i) How have the ontological characteristics and manifestations of agency been understood? (ii) How have the relationships between the social and individual aspects of agency been understood? We examined previous studies and discussions on agency in the fields of education and social sciences, looking selectively also at psychology and gender studies. We identified four major research traditions in which notions of agency were prominent: (i) the social science tradition, (ii) the post-structural tradition, (iii) the socio-cultural approach, and (iv) the identity and life-course approach. Analyses within and across these traditions brought out a range of understandings and manifestations; thus agency might be viewed merely as rational and intentional activity, or else it might be seen from a temporally broad perspective, covering subjects’ ontogenetic development, and encompassing discursive, practical, and embodied relations with the world. Analysis of the relationships between individual and social/contextual elements revealed assumptions ranging from analytical inseparability to separateness, and in case of analytical separateness assumptions of strong or weak contextual influence. Based on our review, we suggest a conceptualization of professional agency from a subject-centered socio-cultural perspective. This takes individual agency and social context to be analytically separate, but mutually constitutive, and in complex ways highly interdependent. The suggested conceptualization is summarized in terms of seven propositions.     

《新标准英语》第二册 What do you do at the weekend?

一、教学目标(略)二、教学重点1.Words:weekend,play2.Phrase:watchTV3.SentencePattern:Whatdoyoudoattheweekend?Iplaybasketball.三、教学难点Usethepatterntosolutethetask.四、课前准备Multi-media,somepicturesandsomeobjects.(basketball,football,tabletennis)五、教学过程Step1.Warming-up1.Sayachant.2.Listentoasong.【设计意图:通过课前的热身活动,活跃课堂气氛,调动学生的学习兴趣,为本课的教学创造积极的条件。】Step2.Revision/Leadin1.Greetings.2.Revisionandleadin.①Showabasketball/foot-ball/tabletennistopup…     

What are you going to do?

新年到了,辞旧迎新之时,美国人常向别人表明他们新的一年的打算,这就是他们的New Year's resolutions(决心)。同学们在新年开始也一定有很多计划吧,怎么用英语说出来呢?跟我老T来学几个句型吧。I’m going to study hard.我打算好好学习。I want to do more exercises.我想加强     

What Will Robots be able to do in the Future?

What will robots be able to do in the future? Let's have a guess.I think if I have robots,I will let them clean the house.They will help me to do my homework.They will help me to buy some things that I want to buy.Robots will tell some jokes to me and that will make me laugh.They will also take care of my little sister,so my parents will have more free time.     

What do students gain from games? Dice games vs word problems

Learning the fundamentals of probability and random variables can be a struggle for many students. Games by their nature require active participation and reward mastery, lending naturally to the framework of active learning. In this study, we designed and evaluated the efficacy of a lab activity using a game where strategy hinges on sums of dice to teach about linear combinations of independent random variables. We found that both activities lead to improved understandings of course concepts, but the dice game provided increased student engagement and interest.     

What do they do?

Four friends live in a small town. Their names are:Cook, Miller, Smith and Garter.They have different jobs. One is a policeman; one is a worker;one is a farmer; one is a doctor.One day Cook's son breaks(摔断) his leg, and Cook takes him to the doctor. The doctor's sister is Smith's wife. The farmer isn't married (结婚). He has a lot of chicks. Miller often buys eggs from Garter. The policeman's house is near Smith's, so he sees Smith every day.     

What matters to supervisors and is this reflected in what they do? Analysing the work of university supervisors of the practicum

This study analyses the contemporary work and potential contribution of university supervisors supporting preservice teachers´ during their practicum experiences in initial English language teacher preparation. The study draws on a complex data derived from surveys, interviews, and observations of university supervisors working in a diverse array of English language teacher education programmes across Chile. A cultural historical activity theory perspective is employed to explore and analyse the motives, activities, and actions that underpinned the work of these supervisors. Findings suggest that supervisors have to respond to often contradictory demands and an overemphasis towards quality assurance actions that are potentially detrimental to preservice teachers´ development. The work of supervisors is analysed to understand how potentially to re-envision their role and functions, toward proposing how to productive expand supervisory practices as an integral part of teacher education.     

What do primary students say about school-based social work programmes?

This article focuses on primary school children’s experiences of school-based social work programmes. These students, aged between 6 and 11, and drawn from a student population comprising 28 different cultural backgrounds and from low socio-economic backgrounds, participated in a case study that researched a school-based social work programme, the St Paul’s Model. The importance of this research lies in the fact that in the area of Australian school social work there is no documented information on how primary school children experience school-based social work programmes. Findings indicate that the school-based social work programmes enhanced the social, emotional, and personal well-being of primary school-aged children and provided enhanced social inclusion programmes and access to resources otherwise denied to primary school-aged children located in economically, socially and politically disadvantaged circumstances.     

What to Measure? A new look at the concept of creativity

It is argued that the concept of creativity is too loosely defined, and too much driven from a bottom-up operationalist view. It is also argued that current popular definitions of creativity, by focusing on novelty and appropriateness, do not distinguish the concept of creativity in a satisfactory way from standard definitions of the concept of intelligence, which also focus on novelty and appropriateness as key defining features. A solution to this conceptual dilemma is offered by way of making a clear-cut distinction between novelty on the stimulus and novelty on the response side. This distinction is used as a platform for the development of a new taxonomy of different kinds of creativity and intelligent behaviour. A major feature of this new model is the distinction made between proactive and reactive creativity. Finally, the conceptual model is used as a basis for pointing out some shortcomings of existing tests of creativity and, with a practical-educational perspective in mind, some specific suggestions on the anatomy of a new kind of creativity assessment are made.     

What do the public know about anatomy? Anatomy education to the public and the implications

Public knowledge of the anatomical “self” is lacking and evidence points towards a growing need for anatomy education to the wider public. The public were offered the opportunity to learn human anatomy and complete an anatomical knowledge survey afterwards. Sixty‐three participants volunteered to attempt to place 20 anatomical structures on a blank human body template. Responses were scored independently and then collated. A mixed effects logistic model was used to examine any associations with participants’ as a random effect and all other factors as fixed effects. Results showed a statistically significant quadratic trend with age. Participants in health‐related employment scored significantly higher than those not in health‐related employment. There was a significant interaction between gender and organ type with males scoring higher than females in identifying muscles, but not in identifying internal organs. The current study demonstrates the general public's eagerness to learn anatomy despite their limited knowledge of the human body, and the need for widening participation. Furthermore, it raises an awareness of the anatomical literacy needs of the general public, especially in school children and young adults. Furthermore, it emphasizes the value of health literacy as a focus in undergraduate medical education. Anatomy literacy appears to be neglected, and this experience provides an example of a possible mode of public engagement in anatomy. Anat Sci Educ 11: 117–123. © 2017 American Association of Anatomists.     

What do set facilitators bring to the party? (And do we need them?)

This account of practice discusses the learning of a set that met for five years as part of undertaking a research degree. It focuses on questions relating to the role of the facilitator that emerge from the experience of an action learning set that was first helped by an external facilitator and that, after 18 months, became self-facilitating. Key to our success as a set was the openness to the emergent learning about the process; each difficulty we faced (as a set and individually) was taken as an opportunity for deepening our learning about set dynamics and facilitation. This article shares some of the highs and lows of our journey, illustrating how we learned to be an effective set that became self-facilitating.     

What do foreign students eat for lunch at school?

One of your favorite topics of conversation at lunchtime must be the foodprovided by your school(食堂)."The dishes are boring,"you may say.You are not alone.It seems children all over the world complain about theirschool food.So what do students of your age eat for lunch at school?     

What can teachers do to raise pupil achievement?

Improving weak teaching may be one of the most effective means of raising pupil achievement. However, teachers’ classroom practices and the teaching ‘process’ may matter more to student learning than teachers’ observed résumé characteristics (such as certification and experience). There may also be important differences in teacher characteristics across government and private schools which may help explain the large documented public-private achievement differences often found in studies. This paper delves into the black-box representing ‘teaching’ to uncover the teacher characteristics and teaching practices that matter most to pupil achievement. This is done using unique school-based data, collected in 2002-2003 from government and private schools from one district in Punjab province in Pakistan. The data allow exploitation of an identification strategy that permits the matching of students’ test scores in language and mathematics to the characteristics of teachers that teach those subjects. Within pupil (across subject rather than across time) variation is used to examine whether the characteristics of different subject teachers are related to a students’ mark across subjects. The data are also unique in asking all subject teachers questions pertaining to their teaching practices and these, often unobserved, ‘process’ variables are included in achievement function estimates. Our pupil fixed-effects findings reveal that the standard résumé characteristics of teachers do not significantly matter to pupil achievement. Perversely, however, teachers are found to be rewarded with higher pay for possessing these characteristics, highlighting the highly inefficient nature of teacher pay schedules. Our findings also show that teaching ‘process’ variables matter significantly to student achievement. There are important differences across school-types.