Session Information
19 SES 11, Theoretical Perspectives on Agency
Symposium
Contribution
This symposium approaches the ECER’s topic of ‘education and cultural change’ from a bottom-up perspective on ‘agency’ of social actors within educational settings. It is interested in the relationship between the imposed structure of institutionally dominant discourses, and the social actors' interactive constitution of individual and collective agency when dealing with and transforming these discourses through the observed day-to-day educational practice. Using a Foucauldian epistemological perspective as a springboard for reflection, the papers of this symposium critically investigate agency as situated social action ‘in and with discourses’ in the sense of Judith Butler’s concept of ‘performativity’ or Hall/duGay's 'subjection/subjectification', and looks for concrete sociopolitical manifestations of socio-political struggle between competing discourses for power in a Postmarxist perspective.
The specific research questions the symposium tries to answer are situated at the intersection of school politics, classroom practice and home discourses the children bring into the classroom:
The papers of the first part of the symposium investigate children’s participation in reality and identity construction based on legitimating their multiple voices in learning, teaching and research practice: The Portante and Cairns papers analyse the observable social effects of different pedagogical practices that legitimate children’s voices in classroom. The Hutchison and Mick papers approach the children’s own critical view on educational and schooling practice through implying them in the research process. Dumenden’s paper gives insight into constraints of a student’s agency through social categorisation devices.
The perspective on discursive and social constrains will be further developed in the second part of the symposium, adopting different theoretical perspectives: Eggen and Hakala use critical ethnography to analyse the tensions arising from institutionalised school discourses and different aspects of classroom practice and interaction. The Ivancheva and Jeffrey papers use a Foucauldian framework of critique in order to investigate teachers’ agency in socialist and ‘Western’ sociopolitical contexts. The Bright paper questions and enlarges the theoretical perspective on agency of this symposium, focusing on a case of educational disaffection in a former coalfield area of England from a Postmarxist perspective.
The papers of this symposium share an ethnographic approach to data collection and use different qualitative research methodologies for analysis, like grounded theory, conversation and discourse analysis. A common aim of these papers is to investigate ways of educational empowerment of teachers and students towards a socio-culturally sensitive and critical participatory citizenship.
A provisional agreement for publishing the symposium papers as special issue of EERJ has been given by its editor.
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