Session Information
05 SES 11 A, Agency And Context: The Experiences Of Young People In Educational Settings.
Symposium
Contribution
Ball (2003) notes that, in the global context, educational reform is spreading, producing standardisation despite the political, social and historical diversity of countries. Countries such as Scotland have, in the last ten years, developed new national curricula, with a strong learner-centred focus on developing the capacity of the person for 21st century citizenship and employment (Sinnema, & Aitken, 2013). The Scottish Government (2007) recognise a strong association between under-achievement and unemployment, and have addressed this by giving schools permission to be flexible in their organisation in the senior phase of secondary education, to allow students more choice (Scottish Government, 2010). However, competing government policies regarding school performance and accountability (Reeves, 2008) act to counter this apparent permissiveness. This presentation discusses a study in a Scottish secondary school. The study used an approach with ethnographic intent (participant observation, interviewing, shadowing and field notes), and explored six students’ experiences in one secondary school in Scotland to address questions of participation and agency. The findings were interpreted using ecological understanding of agency, based on work by Emirbayer and Mische (1998) and Biesta and Tedder (2006). This interpretation suggests that agency does not reside within an individual, but instead is something achieved through the interplay of “individual efforts, available resources and contextual and structural factors as they come together in particular and, in a sense, always unique situations” (Biesta & Tedder, 2006: 137). This paper will discuss how, using this ecological framing of agency, three of these students, who through their lack of attendance at school in their early secondary school careers did not conform to the identity of an ideal pupil (Cremlin et al., 2011), might have achieved agency. As schooling shifted from being a compulsory aspect of their life to a voluntary one, their agency is diminished, as decisions about their educational trajectories came to be made to suit performative agendas of the school, rather than their educational needs.
References
Ball, S. (2003) The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Education Policy, 18 (2), 215-228. 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]. Cremlin, H., Mason, C. and Busher, H. (2011) Problematising pupil voice using visual methods: findings from a study of engaged and disaffected pupils in an urban secondary school. British Educational Research Journal, 37 (4), 585-603. Emirbayer, M. and Mische, A. (1998) What is agency? The American Journal of Sociology, 103 (4), 962-1023. Reeves, J. (2008) Between a rock and a hard place? Curriculum for Excellence and the Quality Initiative in Scottish schools. Scottish Educational Review, 40, 6-16 Scottish Government (2007) National Performance Framework [online]. Available from: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/About/Performance/scotPerforms/indicators/schoolLeavers. Scottish Government (2010) Curriculum for excellence, building the curriculum 3, a framework for learning and teaching, key ideas and priorities. Edinburgh: Crown copyright. 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.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.