Posthuman feminism and the rhetoric of silent cinema: Distributed agency,ontic media,and the possibility of a networked historiography

This essay pursues a pressing question in the study of posthuman rhetoric: Now that distributed agency has, to a degree, been theorized, to what use can it be put by feminists? In attempting one provisional response, the essay argues on behalf of the importance of a posthuman conception of ontic media, recuperating feminist agency not within a particular historical individual but, instead, in the relationships between her mediational networks and their nodes. Taking as its primary artifact Anita Loos’s groundbreaking 1916 film His Picture in the Papers, the essay historicizes and articulates Loos’s particular brand of indirect-qua-distributed feminist agency. In doing so, the essay gestures more broadly toward the role of such networks in the recovery of feminist critiques previously resistant to historicization due to their distributed nature.     

The critical, relational practice of instructional design in higher education: an emerging model of change agency

This paper offers an emerging interpretive framework for understanding the active role instructional designers play in the transformation of learning systems in higher education. A 3-year study of instructional designers in Canadian universities revealed how, through reflexive critical practice, designers are active, moral, political, and influential in activating change at interpersonal, professional, institutional and societal levels. Through narrative inquiry the voices of designers reflect the scope of agency, community and relational practice in which they regularly engage with faculty in institutions of higher learning.

Youth cultures,activism and agency: revisiting feminist debates

Following the invitation issued by the London Feminist Salon Collective in the pages of Gender and Education, this paper offers further theoretical suggestions for understanding agency. Based on an ethnographic study with young people engaged in activist politics, I offer a conception of agency that is at its core relational. I build this theoretical contribution upon a lineage of feminist theorising about the nature of agency, which began in debates about poststructuralism/postmodernism but have since moved to incorporate Pierre Bourdieu's cultural sociological approach. I suggest that while previous theorising has been enormously important for yielding insights into the possibilities for agency, it has not adequately accounted for the everyday means by which agency takes place. My empirical work highlights one of the modalities through which young people come to take political action – that is, through relational processes. I suggest that such an understanding about agency can further illuminate the means by which progressive and feminist goals might be reached.     

Reconciling rigour and impact by collaborative research design: study of teacher agency

This paper illustrates a new way of working collaboratively on the development of a methodology for studying teacher agency for social justice. Increasing emphasis of impact on change as a purpose of social research raises questions about appropriate research designs. Large-scale quantitative research framed within externally set parameters has often been criticised for its limited potential for capturing the contexts and impacting change, while smaller, locally embedded, mostly qualitative inquiries have been questioned on the grounds of their limited generalizability and sometimes compromising research rigour. New ways of working collaboratively are increasingly explored as a way of reconciling research rigour and impact. The paper presents the procedures for designing a study that is both methodologically rigorous and potentially impactful. Twelve researchers, practitioners and policy-makers in Scotland were extensively involved in designing a mixed-method study of teacher agency for social justice. The Critical Communicative Methodology was employed to establish egalitarian dialogue between researchers and practitioners. The procedures and the resulting research tools can be used in future studies, including large-scale quantitative analysis. The paper discusses the challenges of ownership, choice of methods, and knowledge transfer, that need to be addressed in these ways of working.     

Judging Teachers: Foucault,governance and agency during education reforms

Over a decade after publication of Thinking Again: Education After Postmodernism (1998) contention still emerges among Foucaultians over whether discursively made‐up things really exist, and whether removal of the constituent subject leaves room for agency within techniques of caring for the self. That these questions are kept alive shows that some readers have not rethought Foucault, finding what possibly comes after postmodernism. Using Wittgenstein to ‘reciprocally illuminate’ Foucault (after Tully and Marshall), I open teacher inspection and reforms to problematization, as relations to bedrock rules governing games of truth. ‘How, upon entering classrooms, do inspectors know “teaching” is taking place and not crazy and fuzzy things in its name?’ Taking up Hirst's vexing question, I move beyond liberal‐analytic concept‐mapping and neo‐liberal individualism to more fully assay the political ground for judging teaching practices through genealogy. Epistemological, political and ethical concerns intersect as we approach the problem through Foucault's three axes of an historical‐ontology of the present: knowledge(s), power relations, and arts of the self. Drawing on recent Governmentality Studies in Education (Peters ., 2009), we aver the impasses of postmodern relativism while finding limited ranges of agency along each axis, as teachers practice freedoms by critiquing and renegotiating rules.     

Referencing and identity,voice and agency: adult learners' transformations within literacy practices

Referencing skills contribute much to the emergence of voice in students' academic writing. Such skills have a bearing on the identity of learners as writers. In referring certain ideas to certain sources, the writer is able to distinguish voices of others and, in doing so, provide space for the hearing, or establishment, of their individual voice. However, an understanding of the rationale behind referencing and taking on the techniques required for its conventions often proves a complex, intimidating affair for students. Much fear is incited within learners by the convention of referencing, together with the scourge of plagiarism. Thus, rather than learners being ensconced within the academic environment through being able to relate to and engage with other voices, thereby acquiring agency in their writing, issues around referencing can actually serve to alienate them from the academic environment and deter them from their own agency. It may involve much practice and discussion before students see referencing as an asset in their writing. This process entails deconstructions, renegotiations and reconstructions of relationships with ideas and identities. This paper focuses on the relationship of agency and the issue of referencing in the development of an authorial identity for adult learners in the academic institution.     

Teacher agency,positioning, and English language learners: Voices of pre-service classroom teachers

This study explores the identity (re)negotiations and agency of three pre-service classroom teachers who received their ESL (English as a Second Language) endorsement at a research university in the United States. An analysis of interview data and teachers' journal entries, from a narrative positioning perspective, indicates that the teachers took on various, and sometimes conflicting, positional identities in relation to their social context (e.g., mentor teachers, ELLs, etc.). The findings further indicate that those positional identities have shaped teachers' agency and self-reported classroom practices. The analysis presented provides implications for teachers of ELLs and teacher educators.     

Making agency matter: rethinking infant and toddler agency in educational discourse

This article engages critically with the concept of agency in infant and toddler educational discourse. It is argued that agency, when conceptualised with emphasis on individuality and the autonomous self, poses a conceptual ‘dead end’ for those who are not-yet-in-language, such as babies and toddlers. In considering agency as an aspect of becoming that is inherent in all matter, the article seeks to explore new pathways for conceptualising agency in infant and toddler education. Methodologically, the article aims to generate complex questions and, following Nigel Thrift's call, ‘wild ideas’, rather than solutions by addressing the relationship between discourse and matter to open up new spaces for thinking and doing ‘agency’ in education, for babies and toddlers and beyond.     

浅析信托与代理、行纪的异同

在对信托与代理、信托与行纪进行比较的基础上,析出信托制度在财产管理方面灵活、安全、高效的优势.     

Education of women with disabilities in Pakistan: enhanced agency,unfulfilled aspirations

This paper examines the extent to which the capability approach captures the complexity of the lives of young women with disabilities in Pakistan, particularly in relation to their education. Focusing on their educational experiences and outcomes, we examine the ways in which education shaped what these young women were able to achieve – what they wanted to do and be. In undertaking this research, we adopted a collaborative, qualitative approach involving in-depth interviews with six young women with disabilities. All these women were interesting and exemplary cases, given their very high levels of education. Our findings suggest that the capability approach provides a framework that is able to capture the educational experiences–outcomes journey of the young women. However, also interesting to note is how the expansion of their capabilities is bounded, primarily because their freedoms are intrinsically linked to their sociocultural positioning and largely negative perceptions of disability in the wider society.     

Learner agency and the curriculum: a critical realist perspective

Abstract

Agency, understood as the capacity to act independently and to make one’s own choices, is considered central to children’s development. Thus, education, and hence education curricula, have a role in the development of learner agency. While curriculum development is a key focus for educational theory, research, policy, and classroom practice, the potential implications of curriculum content selections for learner agency remain underexplored. Theoretically, this paper engages with critical realism, explaining how it can provide theoretical foundation for a more comprehensive view of learner agency and, by implication, more balanced curricula. Empirically, the paper draws on the findings from a content analysis of the national curriculum documents of four countries with relatively high scores in international comparative tables, England, Australia, Hong-Kong, and Canada, to develop a new typology of primary curricula. Based on the extent of emphasis placed on knowledge versus skills, values, and attitudes, three types of curricula were identified: knowledge-based, skills-oriented, and learner-centred. Due to its significant theoretical and practical influence globally, we focus on the knowledge-based model and its likely impact on students’ agency. We conclude by highlighting the importance of making learner agency a key orientation of the curriculum and suggesting directions for future research.     

On personal and collective dimensions of agency in doctoral training: medicine and natural science programs

The purpose of the present study was to investigate knowledge-creating agency by examining doctoral students' accounts of their pursuits, using structured interviews. We examined all of the talk apparently related to agency of 13 doctoral students taking part in collective doctoral training in two, highly regarded Finnish research communities (natural science and medicine). The doctoral process involved the participants pursuing article-based theses based on collectively shared research problems and journal articles co-authored with the supervisor and other senior researchers. Based on the qualitative analysis of the interviews, three categories of agentic talk were identified, respectively, for three proposed types of knowledge-creating agency: personal, distributed, and ‘object-related’. Personal agency involved participants' reflection on their academic competence, self-efficacy, and personal strengths and weaknesses. Distributed agency played an important role in assisting these participants overcoming challenges; this includes sharing of expertise, receiving social support, and having a sense of collective efficacy. Object-related agency, in turn, represented integration of a doctoral student's efforts with those of her immediate research community while pursuing shared research objects (e.g., co-authored articles). Apart from issues of agency which, the authors propose, are raised in the interviews, the data provide content-rich accounts of the collective nature of doctoral experiences.     

Becoming economic subjects: agency,consumption and popular culture in early childhood

This paper considers how young children in early childhood education draw on popular texts and consumer goods in their constitution of subjectivities and social relations. The paper draws on poststructuralist theories of subjectivity, agency, consumption and power, to explore how performative practices of consumption figure in the constitution of economically oriented subjectivities. Drawing on data generated in research undertaken in early childhood centres in the culturally diverse outer metropolitan region of Greater Western Sydney, Australia, the paper considers how economic discourse informs children's cultural knowledges, shaping the ‘techniques of the self’ through their engagement with commercially available images and products. The argument is made that children make strategic use of their knowledge of popular culture and its potential to locate them advantageously in material and symbolic economies, and that the deployment of symbolic and material goods that shapes children's dress, play, and conversation is an important means of rendering oneself intelligible within normative discourses of economic participation.     

Youth media and agency

This article addresses how capacity is conceived of and understood in youth media/civic education programming, and how beliefs about agency, development, relationality and youth manifests in the discourses, programmes, and practices of organizations operating youth media programmes. Through attention to a youth media and development programme in rural Nicaragua, the article addresses a key gap in theorizing how capacity operates within discourses and related practices that constitute ‘youth media’ and, in particular, it critically investigates how youth media discourse rests on an assumed foundation where capacity is defined as agency, empowerment or voice. This article situates youth media production within modernist discourses about education, development and ‘change’, in order to re-conceptualize agency through a mobilities framework that more fully attends to the complex and affective moments in youth media discourses.     

Forum: structure, agency, and the development of students’ identities as learners

In this forum, we discuss the ways in which the culture of science has become conflated with categorical groupings of students according to race, class, and gender – so as to better understand how Black female students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds may become alienated from dominant school discourses that emphasize college and non-college bound trajectories. In addition, we examine the power and limitations of creating spaces inside and outside of science classrooms that value student discourses, goals, and ways of being. Specifically, we debate whether cogenerative dialogues can allow for (a) conscious critical conversations that cut across student, teacher and administration levels, (b) expanded possibilities for local action, and (c) the building of solidarity and respect amongst stakeholders.     

Early intervention: parental involvement,child agency and participation in creative play

Early intervention activities for very young disabled children are frequently linked to developmental targets and goals. A key challenge for parents and practitioners involved in early intervention programmes is to encourage their child to play and develop creatively through enjoyable, everyday childhood experiences. This paper reports on a small-scale ethnographic study involving two young children identified with Down syndrome participating in early intervention programmes and whether and how their creative process was supported through their play and activities with parents and professionals. The ‘in-the-picture’ method used within this ethnographic study was developed from a listening to children paradigm. This article provides examples of the ways in which early intervention that recognises child agency can support children’s play and self-directing ‘little c’ of creativity.     

Issues and agency: postgraduate student and tutor experiences with written feedback

This paper examines the issues which postgraduate students and tutors experienced as they engaged in receiving, providing and requesting feedback, as well as the strategies which they adopted as they sought resolution of these issues. The study employed a case study approach, using data obtained from semi-structured and stimulated recall interviews with students and staff from three discipline areas at one university in the UK. The findings reinforce the conclusions that have been drawn in a number of previous studies in terms of the sources of dissatisfaction emerging from individual interactions and institutional practices. Additionally, however, the results expand on our current understanding of feedback and agency in higher education by illustrating how participants sought out imaginative solutions to the challenges they experienced, in order to enhance the effectiveness of the feedback process. The diversity of the strategies used provides evidence of student and tutor agency, and has implications for current feedback practices and future research in this area.     

Youth science expertise,environmental identity,and agency in climate action filmmaking

Abstract

The Green Ninja Film Academy (GENIE) is an interdisciplinary curriculum development project that examines the efficacy of combining climate science concepts and practices with digital storytelling for middle school youth. We present findings from iterative enactments of this design-based research project in 2017 (N?=?296) and 2018 (N?=?539). On average, youth increased scores on assessments of science content and practices while demonstrating competencies in filmmaking and science explanations. Further, an inverse correlation was seen between initial identification with the environment and change in environmental identification throughout the unit. Results suggest that integration of creative filmmaking into a climate science curriculum aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards can increase engagement and science proficiency particularly for youth who initially show less engagement in environmental science.     

Exploring the participation and agency of students with special education needs in a Macau-Chinese secondary school

The research explores the perceptions of five secondary school students with special education needs (SEN) about their participation in learning, group membership, and agency within an inclusive school in Macau SAR. This goal is achieved by using students' voices documented in open-ended interviews and is underpinned by the conceptual framework of heutagogy. The aim is to shed light on students' perceptions on school effectiveness in supporting their needs through successful participation and agentic possibilities. Findings showed that students were more prone to social rejection and being isolated or bullied than their peers. They were struggling to feel included or participate, their needs were only partially being met, and they had few opportunities to exert influence on their educational trajectories. Recommendations are provided to assist educators and schools in enhancing students with SEN to connect to the learning process and community, with the provision of appropriate learning adjustments and more active approaches to ensure their acceptance by mainstream students, including the formation of coaching peers to assist in developing social and academic skills under teacher's scaffolding practices. This study highlights the contribution of the heutagogical perspective to advance research on the participation and agency of students with SEN in mainstream schools.