Session Information
05 SES 11 A, Agency And Context: The Experiences Of Young People In Educational Settings.
Symposium
Contribution
Arguably a key purpose of education is to enable young people to develop the capability to engage with the world. Globally, curriculum policy has a new focus on competencies, capacities, attributes and core skills (Sinnema & Aitken, 2013). There is a trend towards emphasising students taking responsibility for self and their own learning, something that Davies (2006) terms ‘responsibilisation’ (Davies, 2006). This policy turn therefore suggests that the agency young people achieve is important and that education has a key role to play in fostering it. However, ecological perspectives on agency (Biesta & Tedder, 2006) would suggest that this is problematic. Whilst education can certainly develop individual capacity, this is not the same as agency, which is also shaped by the conditions of educational contexts such as schools.
This symposium is based on the concept of young people’s agency. All case studies here share an ecological perspective on this issue (e.g. Biesta & Tedder 2006; Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006), to interrogate the different environments by means of which young people act. Foregrounding the complex nature of these ecologies draws out how young people are able to achieve agency. The symposium features four studies. Two relate to school settings: one considers young people’s experiences in a Scottish secondary school and the other looks at the experiences of refugee and asylum-seeking young people in Ireland as they transition from secondary school. The third study considers an intervention offered to at-risk school-aged young people in Scotland in a less formal out-of school youth support setting. The final study considers an intervention in Spain where secondary school students become cyber-mentors to primary aged students as they learn to navigate the online world. The former two studies illustrate how the environment can actively hinder the achievement of agency by students, even where curricular aims would aim to achieve the opposite. The latter two focus on interventions which actively shape the environment to foster the achievement of agency. These case studies throw into sharp relief the importance of context for young people’s agency, and demonstrate how policy can actively foster agency through attention to context.
References
Biesta, G. and Tedder, M. (2006) How is agency possible? Towards an ecological understanding of agency-as achievement. Working Paper 5, Learning Lives. Available from: www.learninglives.org/.../Working_paper_5_Exeter_Feb_06.pdf [Accessed: March 1st 2013]. Bronfenbrenner, U., & Morris, P. A. (2006). The bioecological model of human development. In W. Damon & R. M. Lerner (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology, Vol 1: Theoretical models of human development (6th ed., pp. 793-828). New York: Wiley. Davies, B. (2006) Subjectification: the relevance of Butler’s analysis for education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 27 (4), pp. 425-438. Sinnema, C. and Aitken, G. (2013) Trends in international curriculum developments. In: Priestley, M. and Biesta, M. (eds.) Reinventing the curriculum: new trends in curriculum policy and practice. London: Bloomsbury.
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