NewStuff

Hmmm,the ‘Literacy Wars‘.

Since the eighteenth century there has been a conversation about the best way to teach reading. Perception and meaning-making is the long standing wisdom. Code making and atomising words is the other side of the reading wars coin. Brian Cambourne points out in his blog post, some of the history and hysteria surrounding the issues.

Let’s have a quiet word on the meaning of ‘words’. The agentive status of ‘words’ is a way of thinking about how words come to have meaning. Meaning inputed by those encoding a ‘word’ and meaning afforded by those attuned to those ‘words’. Okay – so that was not perspicuous at all. Let’s put it this way. There is little disagreement that the whole point of learning to read is to lift off meaning from the written text. It can be argued that authentic human agency is amplified through the skilful use of words.

Words, in this sense, bundle up disparate affordances and are signifiers. The ecology of a word is its etymology, morphology and phonology. The agency of a word is caught up in the contested space between the signifier and the perceiver. This space is contested because the perceiver must be or be able to be attuned to the intent of the signifier. For example:

A recent hot and blustery day found me at Federation Square in Melbourne Australia. Our leisurely summer lunch meandered its way into a late afternoon tea. I needed to find a toilet fast!

My eyes were darting about for one word. “MALE”. I knew that if I found that sign – I could take exactly the type of action that a pint of crisp apple cider demanded. Quickly glancing down the overly bright corridor I thought I’d found what I was looking for. Instead my eyes landed on the slightly confused and somewhat wrinkled face of an elderly man in search of the same sign.

The object of his confusion was the subject of his gaze. The sign. It didn’t say “MALE”. It was more nuanced and thoughtful so as to be authentically inclusive. It was in fact – a gender neutral toilet sign. It was directly opposite the “FEMALE” signposted toilets.

As it turns out, every house I’ve ever been in has a gender neutral toilet. I’ve never had to interpret a symbol or icon or an index to work out who can and can’t use it. The rules are implicit. Tumble out into the public sphere however, and there are all kinds of rules and regulations for the use and non use of public toilets.

The mute Gender Neutral toilet sign, in silence on the Federation Square wall was important. Whoever decided to put it there, and whoever designed the sign and whoever approved and paid for the sign – all of these people were using a worldwide cultural convention of public toilet signs to give people the power to take action. This stuffy afternoon at Federation Square – this intentional break from expected practice was a welcome relief. For some men, however, it constrained their bladders!

Those attuned to the affordances of gender neutral toilet sign iconography could take urgent action. For those not tuned into what the symbol meant, it involved an unbundling of the context, decoding other symbols, seeking reassurances and abducting a best guess before risking action. We call this learning.

Given the lack of puddles on the floor – I expect that most men learned what the symbol meant and which toilet to use and which one to avoid loitering around.

There are some parallels here with the ‘reading’ or ‘literacy’ wars.

Firstly – meaning making is not merely the product of attunement to affordances. Meaning is the sticky residue of bundled contexts, the locus of enmeshment between signifier and perceiver. Meaning involves people – not merely a change in brain state.

So for reading instruction, what comes first? Is it the whole word, broken into constituent graphemes and phonemes – or the parts first – which make the sum greater than its whole? In other words – is it the ‘code’ based pedagogy of part-to-whole word approach the correct way. Or is it the whole-to-part ‘meaning’ based methodology correct?

Five from Five website tells us that: “We get to meaning via our understanding of phonemes, hence phonemic awareness and phonic skills are essential foundational skills for reading.”

This claim that phonemic awareness alone, exclusively affords meaning seems counter intuitive. Clearly, people did learn to read using the so called ‘Three Cueing System’. Over human history, prelinguistic, non linguistic, dyslexic, non middle-class non-western cultures can recognise more than one path to meaning making that excludes phonemic awareness and skills. Whatever it is that curates our ‘ways-of-being’ (such as public toilet use) these ontological affordances residing in a language hold the key to the processes of collaboratively reflexive meaning making. This ontological turn in language is where the agency of the ‘word’ quietly abides.

The author then quotes David Kilpatrick: ‘Skilled word reading does not require context.’

Having conducted the BURT Word tests for many years I can attest that skilled word reading does not require context. Nor does it require meaning. Words, devoid of their enmeshed and bundled toilet doors are pointless – they have no agency – no purpose.

My suspicion and ongoing thinking will dance with the idea that this is really two separate categories.

Firstly – attunement . Attunement to the building blocks of word structure.

Secondly, the affordances of agentive words.

In terms of the ‘Big Five‘ of reading instruction it might look this way:

Phonics Awareness: Attunement to the parts of spoken words

Phonics Instruction: Attunement to the connection between parts of spoken words and parts of written words.

Vocabulary: Attunement to the orthography of words. Affordances with the use of words.

Comprehension: Attunement to the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of words. Affordances of ‘agentive words’.

Structured Literacy Inquiry may be a useful term to describe a pedagogical approach that can straddle the complex demands of understanding the agentive status of ‘words’.

I’ve been typing this for hours – and now I’m busting! A final thought. How can teachers best curate a learning ecology that is likely to draw students into doing the work of attunement and apprehend affordances such that they have the power to shape their world through the skilful use of language?

Hmmm, perhaps is gamification one way forward?

Funny question really – but thanks for asking. The problem is a bit strange. It comes from a provocation asking what role School Agency plays in Teacher and Learner Agency.

The power that schools have to make a difference in their community seems a given. It is at the very heart of the reason for being – the very concept of our Western model of schooling. The ‘School’ is an agent of the State, or the Church, or the ( insert name of agent with the most power here …..) corporation.

What if schools were conscious of their own agency? What if Foucault’s technologies of power, and self were obvious structures in a school culture that were curated to afford personal agency by those actors within the school?

This begs the question ‘What are schools for anyway?’ Tina Beasley, when taking about technologies / techniques of power / domination and technologies of the self mentions that

Schools are institutions that clearly involve such regulation and governance of the experience of their students. (Besley 2005)

In this sense, schools are sites where powerful actors impose their projects. The broader question that comes to mind is; ‘Is culture agentive?’ Can the rules and resources in a school culture be determined by the culture itself? This would seem to be at odds with Bandura’s notion of collective agency. The paragraph below rejects the notion that dualities are required to explain everything. By recognising the role of self efficacy believes, the reflexive co-constructive nature of social structures and the limitations of personal agency, Bandura excludes the notion that culture alone is determinative of the social actions of its agents.

Another disputable duality pits psychological theories of personal agency and sociostructural theories as rival conceptions of human behavior or as representing different levels and proximities of causation. In the social cognitive theory of self and society (Bandura, 1986; 2001) personal agency and social structure operate interdependently rather than as disembodied entities. Personal agency operates within a broad network of sociostructural influences. In these agentic transactions, people are producers as well as products of social systems. Social structures are created by human activity to organize, guide and regluate human affairs in given domains by authorized rules and sanctions (Giddens, 1984). The sociostructural practices implemented by social agents, in turn, impose constraints and provide resources and opportunity structures for personal development and functioning. Given this dynamic bidirectionality of influence, social cognitive theory rejects a dualism between personal agency and a disembodied social structure. (Bandura 2002)

So if social structures are embodied – who are they in a school? A more pragmatic way of speaking about school agency, may be to speak of school leadership agency.

In this way, we can discuss the types of constraints and affordances that the school culture curates in oder to attract the attunement of other actors in the learning ecology. In the same paper – Bandura eloquently apprehends the very purpose of school agency in the first place. That schools are the formwork into which the plasticity of intrinsic human nature is carefully poured and moulded. Constrains and affordances.

The plasticity, which is intrinsic to the nature of humans, depends upon specialized neurophysiological structures and mechanisms that have evolved over time. These advanced neural systems are specialized for channeling attention, detecting the causal structure of the world around one, transforming that information into abstract form, integrating it and using it for adaptive purposes. The evolved morphology and information processing systems provide the capacity for the very characteristics that are distinctly human — generative symbolization, forethought, evaluative self-regulation, reflective self-consciousness, and symbolic communication (Bandura, 2001).

So is there such a thing as school agency? Hell yeah there is. This agency is a moment by moment non linea co constructed phenomenon. The degree to which the cultural focus is on constraints or affordances is the product of the people, projects and technologies in that place at that time.

Can school agency afford self efficacy, perceptions of collective self efficacy and learner agency. Bandura quotes Gould reflecting on biology being deterministic or potentialist (think the ‘nature verses nurture’ argument). He goes on to say:

In this insightful analysis, the major explanatory battle is not between nature and nurture as commonly framed, but whether nature operates as a determinist that has culture on a “tight leash”, or as a potentialist that has culture on a “loose leash”.

True agentive power it would seem, is the power to ‘let go the leash’.

It seems that we all know how unmanageable a tangled bunch of spaghetti is. Just snip it off and don’t bother untangling it. There is a lot to be said for what that symbolises in peoples lives.

It turns out , that tangled spaghetti may also give us some insight into the nature of authentic learning (not learner) agency. By learning agency, I mean having the power to curate artefacts or become attuned to affordances of artefacts in a learning ecology.

Okay so we should start off with attunement theory. More common is the idea of attunement theory related to attachment theory. It is the idea that the brain states of infants and their carers synchronise neural activity. Is it possible that this phenomenon may continue and that learners become attuned to the affordances of their learning environment? Infant brains respond to the habitus of their carers. Can older children respond to the habitus of their learning environments? Do minds and brains become attuned to the rhythms and ways of being in their social settings?

Nicolaescu, when defining Bourdieu’s notion of habitus wrote of it as: ‘a structure characterized as a mind structure characterized by acquired schemes, sensitivities, dispositions and taste.’ 

So how do we curate learning ecologies such that minds actually do acquire schemes, sensitivities, dispositions and taste? The answer may lie in looking at the theory of affordances.

We are talking about the idea that actors can directly perceive the affordances of an object in their ecology. Affordance Theory is a James Gibson idea. It is important because is sets the groundwork (pun intended) for identifying the successful expression of agency by a primary school student in their school environment.

The notion of habitus allows for the acquisition, repetition and disruption of ways of being in a culture. When designing for agency, a learning ecology with values and structures that objectively afford subjective affordances, constitutes the phenomenological substrate. By being deliberate about the values, culture and structure in our learning community, we anticipate that the experiences learners have, will draw their attention, such that they might take new forms of consequential action.

Bandura, in his discussion on agency states that ‘To be an agent is to intentionally make things happen by one’s actions.’

In her discussion Agency for Learning, Code quotes Martin’s definition of agency as, ‘the capability of individuals to make choices and to act on those choices in ways that make a difference in their lives.’

Both of these definitions exclude the use of the word ‘power’. It is none the less implied.

Anthony Giddens defines power as having the ability to make rules and allocate resources: ‘By ‘power’ Giddens means ‘transformative capacity’; in other words, the ability to make a difference in the world.’ This sounds like agency as defined above.

So, self efficacy beliefs, self regulation and motivation are all strands of spaghetti. But what does it all signify? For that, we need to look at agency through the lens of C.S. Peirce and Kockelman’s Residential Agency.

Wot’s in a name, she sez,

A ‘school’ by any other name, would smell the same…

Well, it turns out that there is lots in a name. I’ve been given a paper to read. It is called ‘Agency the Relation between Meaning, Power, and Knowledge’ by Paul Kockelman.

By golly this is useful. I wish I could understand it better. I’m still in primary school and not a sociologist or cultural anthropologist. None the less – to be successful in my context, a hefty dose of cultural anthropology is the frame on which the front door is hung.

So in order to give kids the power to shape their world – we need to know what kids are – and what their world is and is likely to be. We can then curate a learning ecology with artefacts. Learners heed the affordances of these artefacts taking meaningful action. I’ve been calling this ‘learner agency’. The thing about this idea is that it is good enough to mean something, but not good enough to mean anything particular.

Enter stage left a Peircean theory of meaning for agency. All of a sudden (well – since it was written in 2006) we have a pragmatists view of agency, grounded in a theory that can account for the actions of teachers and learners alike. It is called semiotics.

Semiosis is one way of discussing the process of meaning making. As educators, I reckon it is an okay idea to have a theory of how meaning is made. After all, we spend most of our time coming up with plans and actions that engage kids in the process of making meaning out of the curriculum.

What we don’t do, is spend a lot of time giving kids the power to come up with ways to signify that meaning. Crucially this includes giving learners the power to test what they are signifying to see if people can pick up on what they are getting at.

This gives us another way to talk about learner agency – Having the power to determine correspondence.

In Semiosis, a sign is a sort of proxy for an object. It is not the object. A sign can never be the thing it is referring to. It is meaningless without its point of reference. Not only that, a sign is useless without an interpretant: ‘the disposition or readiness of the perceiver to respond to a sign.’ (LUKIANOVA).

So a ‘sign’ that successfully connects a perceiver with its ‘object’ has high correspondence. The sign has communicated meaningful action.

As I sit in my comfortable study, I’m confronted by a wall of IKEA like cube shelving things. They are stuffed full of books and folders and empty boxes full of guilt and ambition to tidy up and read more.

They are however, the product of a heap of signs in a booklet that were meant to carry meaning to my mind. The person who designed the signs and symbols anticipated that I would know what tools and bolts and bits they referred to in the box. The format assumed that I could take action to assemble the shelves. The author of the instructions was correct.

What about people who are pre-linguistic? It is no secret that our children train us well. When my boys were small helpless infants (in contrast to the towering gentleman they have become) they could communicate pleasure and displeasure.

When a dummy ‘fell’ out of their mouth – some crying or expression of displeasure signified that something was amiss. The object of this sign was of course their dummy. When I correctly interpreted this, I picked up their dummy (occasionally giving it a wipe), and popped it back in their mouth. This was rewarded with a delighted giggle or a smile to ensure I got the message and did the same thing next time.

Pierce calls this Residential Agency. ‘Residential agency describes the degree to which one (an actor or agent) may control the expression of a sign, compose the relation between a sign and an object, and commit to the interpretant of this sign-object relation’ (Kockelman 2007)

This ‘commit to the interpretant’ is action oriented. Once meaning is communicated – what action will be taken?

Kockelman puts it this way:

To control the expression of a sign means to determine its position in space and time. Loosely speaking, one determines where and when a sign is expressed. To compose the relation between a sign and an object means to determine what object is stood for by a sign and / or which sign stands for this object. Loosely speaking, one determines what meaning is expressed and / or how this meaning is expressed. And to commit to the interpretant of a sign-object relation … loosely speaking one determines why and / or to what effect a sign is expressed.

With all this determining going on we can say that learner agency is having the power to determine correspondence. By correspondence we mean that a student has the power over when and where their signification happens. They have power over what their signification looks / sounds / feels / tastes / smells like. The learner also has the power over what the intended response is to experiencing their signification.

The context, the content and the consequence of their signification all correspond with each other. Thus learner agency is the power to determine correspondence.

Of course, curating a learning ecology, inducting a network of actors in this meaning making process and designing a techne the affordance of which this kind of habits and culture – well, there is a word for that – school.

Anthony Giddens is a central contributor to the theory of learner agency. His theory of structuraton offers a third way through which to view the expression of human behaviour over time. His recent passing is even more solemn given the insight and certitude with which he wrote and communicated.

My interest in his theory is in using the lens of structuration as a means to afford the experience of learner agency in a micro setting – a school community. It is a significant part of answering the question ‘How do we give learners the power to shape their world?’

structuration theory, concept in sociology that offers perspectives on human behaviour based on a synthesis of structure and agency effects known as the “duality of structure.” Instead of describing the capacity of human action as being constrained by powerful stable societal structures (such as educational, religious, or political institutions) or as a function of the individual expression of will (i.e., agency), structuration theory acknowledges the interaction of meaning, standards and values, and power and posits a dynamic relationship between these different facets of society. (https://www.britannica.com/topic/structuration-theory)

In reading the introduction to his book – penned in 1990, a standout feature is the prescience of thought around modernity and it’s future. Most of this content would have been written during the 1980’s. I’m writing this in 2022. Right now, the fact of World War Three has begun, with all the terror of the threat of nuclear warfare. Alongside this is the insidious impact of climate change – the bastard product of what Giddens calls ‘the death of nature’. Both of these unprecedented threats to human kind were highlighted by Giddens three decades ago.

I’m not sure how best to reflect on my reading. So, with fingers poised at the keyboard, whatever strikes my mind will land on the page.

In what should not be a surprise at all, it was surprising to see Zygmunt Bauman listed in the acknowledgements. Any commentary on Modernity would do well to reference Bauman.

Bauman talks about a different duality – Power verses Political. He asserts that power (the ability to get stuff done) and politics (the ability to decide what stuff gets done) used to be perceived in a kind of geostatic relationship. In our post-structuralist world, the myth of this relationship has been exposed. It’s awkwardly confronting nakedness leaves us chewing apples, reaching for sheep skins, shooing snakes and terrified that no-one’s in control. Bauman gives us Liquid Modernity – a world in which nothing sticks.

The irony of Bauman’s metaphor about no-one in control is captured by Putin’s war on the people of Ukraine. This is where where, when abject fears around change and certainty are materialised, power and politics come together in a military response and (at the cost of human sacrifice) there is certainty about who is in control. People die anyway. Citizens have less agency, less ontological and physical security – yet clarity of purpose and authenticity. They do have power to shape their world – but the world they are shaping has transmogrified. As have they.

So many have slipped down Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs that the power to act is directed towards what were formally the trivial crumbs of daily activity – water, food, shelter, safety. Where hope was once trivial – the shape of hopes lost, and hopes realised are now amplified in neon flashing brightness.

In Melbourne, where I live, the role of ‘the worlds longest lockdown’ also had an impact on the people’s perception of their power to shape their world. The nascent space between power and politics was a hotly contested zone for the battle of ‘who is in control’. This is still being worked out in ever and ever more clear ‘lifestyle choices’ that are being made – like moving to Queensland.

Back to Giddens….

His notions of trust, of risk, of globalisation all feed into a narrative of self. Without mentioning Foucault, he refers to the identity of an individual being a consumer product. Something we put on. This is reminiscent of Focault’s Technologies of Self. In other words – we live in a world with a new meta narrative – ‘Don’t buy the brand, BE the brand’.

All of this is grounded in the project of colonising the future – apprehending tomorrow for today. This commodification of hope with its risks and hopes demands the reflexive repositioning of it’s agents as future proofing oneself proves to be as precarious as it was in the past.

So with these ideas in mind, I’m quite hopeful of enlightenment as I jump into the future as I read the past, in the days to come.

Today was a big day. Yep, learning was done, action was taken, questions were asked – even cold hard cash was put on the line. Well, digital cash was put online.

Point being that LearnAgency now has a place in the world of NFTs. It is a spot called Learneragency.

It turns that this has been a really complex highly involved yet somehow simplified and empowering process. There are so many moving parts, considerations, pitfalls and opportunities it is difficult to see how it all comes together.

That is why we need a theory. A theory for learner agency would suggest that we:

1. Populate a learning ecology with artefacts. In this case, the artefacts are NFTs relating to roles and recognition. ie: Robotics Coach token, Orthology Word Families token, I Sea I Care Ambassador and so on.
2. Position such that agents (learners) become attuned to the affordances of the token. ie: To gain recognition as a teacher here (think: induction package) you need these micro-credentials…. as the student representative council member you receive this token….
3. Production – as agents take action they are demonstrating the desired behaviours associated with the badge (micro credential).
4. Provision happens when the NFT is awarded to the individual. Each NFT is unique and an artefact in its own right.
5. Promotion – show off the micro credentials on a screen or webpage.

My big question is – who is going to go for all of this? Why would you bother? And really, I’m not sure of the answer.

Here is how some others have answered this question.

BloomBoard: What are Micro-Crendentials?

Forbes: Digital Credentialling

Credly: Badges

Greenlight : K-12 digital, distributed-ledger

BlockCert – This is where we are all heading I suspect.

So then – what next? The sticky problem of where to sew on your badges persists. The next task for me is to generate collections of tokens. These need to be made available.

In reality, a small fee per person could be tacked on to the cost of professional development sessions once the relevant competency has been demonstrated – such as with Bloomboard above. This $10 per person would cover the costs of setting up the tokens and being issued.

Of course all of this would be done using crypto currency.

Quite an uninspiring heading and yet – SO MUCH EXCITEMENT!

Well, a little bit at least. So, let’s flesh this out .

1. Do some awesome PD
2. Head back to your classroom and do stuff
3. Get caught up in all the hoopla of the huff and puff of life and the PD suffers fatal transmogrify.
4. Forget you ever did the PD

So imagine if you could accumulate your PD into credentials that add value to your offering as a teacher.

Think about the Primary Years Program (PYP). You do heaps of training. That qualifies you to teach in certain contexts. Imagine if you had a transcript of your courses that was always connected to you.

In my school we have a proto ‘Teacher Profile’. It captures what it means to be a teacher in our setting. This is defined by our values, habits and skills. These are represented by tokens that are awarded as a micro-credential.

Just like scouts, you collect badges / tokens. You don’t have to collect all of them. The catalogue of tokens is curated by the school / network/ specialist body. As a teacher you demonstrate skills in our signature pedagogies (we use Walkthru’s) and gain recognition for your area of expertise.

We all know who the ‘Arty Person’ or the ‘Tech Person’ is in our schools. They may not even be the people formally in the role. (Who is it at your school who knows how to make the photocopier unjam just because…)

As an act of authentic teacher agency, we can curate micro-credential opportunities that cluster around a theme or subject. The ‘enviro teacher’ can then do all this PD, and be seen to have become the ‘goto’ person in our learning community. Hmmm….. This could work equally as well for kids.

So – from a Theory of Learner Agency perspective:

1. The learning ecology (for adults) has artefacts embedded – a catalogue of possible micro credentials available.
2. The learner (adult) is attuned to the affordances of a micro credential (using Orthography to teach spelling for example).
3. The learner takes action / uses agency to complete the professional development and use it in their school context.
4. They become the owner of a new artefact – an Non Fungible Token (Non Transferable) in the form of a Micro-Credential.

These MicroCredentials accumulate over time and are visible on LinkedIn or other platforms. This is how teachers support and develop a reputation for being a leader in their field.

Teachers / Support / Admin Staff will need to have a ‘wallet’ and access to the marketplace through which these NFTs are created, bought and sold. The blockchain technology means that the owner of the micro-credential NFT is secure and can’t be sold off.

Over time, organisations like ALEA or MAV will or school networks or universities will award these tokens and have a robust process for evaluation in place.

The affordances of the token are more than recognition for the credential. For example, if I own a Foundation for Learning and Literacy Non Fungible Token (NFT)

Saturday morning crashed out of the barrier and whilst my head was racing from the night before, I was off to a slow start.

This is when the text came through: Bike ride 9am?

Some traditions die hard – COVID isolation can do its best to kill off some good habits, but not this time. The problem was, I was on a boat and no way near my bike. I was alerted to this affordance in my ecology – but unable to take action. I didn’t have the agency to take action. I did not have the power to get home in time for the bike ride. There was an exception to my ability to go riding.

The more I play with this theory, the more sense it makes. It is like a theory of gravity – like, derrr, of course gravity sux, or that the world is round, or that trauma has an adverse affect on the brain in early childhood or that little atoms make up everything, or that bias exists as part of human nature.

However, just because the bleeding obvious is bleeding well obvious, it does not mean that we accept or except it without reason or theory.

So recap – Affordance Theory – a theory of learner agency.

1. Teachers curate a learning ecology populated with artefacts. (after Gibson and Gibson)
2. Learners are attuned to the affordances of these artefacts. (Gibson and Gibson)
3. Learners take action with the affordances to create new artefacts. (after Giddens and Bandura)

Of course, in a learning ecology it is not just the kids who are learners – adults are as well.

Example 1:

1. The school adult learning culture is defined by a common language and practices around what it means to be a teacher here. ie: the Language and the Practices are the artefacts.
2. Teachers identify that belonging to this group is beneficial and can be attained through using the language and practices. ie: The Aglile Schools processes and Micro Credentialing through Walkthroughs structure.
3. Teachers develop a portfolio of recognised micro-credentials that improve learning for children and add to the culture of the learning ecology.

Remember that this is a theory of learner agency – how it comes to be that people MIGHT (after Rom Harre and Positioning Theory) act in a particular way.

Example 2

1. The class have been learning about Australian currency. Our teacher puts a ‘shop’ in the corner of the classroom complete with stuff to buy and ‘money’ to pay for it.
2. Some children see the shop, complete with coins and notes and items to sell. They start play acting ‘shops’. Mimicking the language and practices demonstrated in the lesson and in every day life.
3. The children rehearse this with other students – making their own shop front and a bank and internalise the language and learning that has happened. They demonstrated the desired language and concepts that the teacher was intending for the students to learn. ( and some didn’t, therefore demonstrating the what these students need for their learning).

Example 3

1. Students work with a child centred disaster risk reduction university researcher to learn about bushfire risk.
2. They recognise the absence of student voice in policy formation and safety messaging
3. They co-construct a manifesto that policy writers and emergency services can use to develop future artefacts.

These are three really diverse ways through which we can view what has afforded the agency students and teachers have taken.

We curate artefacts in the learning ecology.

Learners perceive / are attuned to the affordances of the artefacts.

Learners use their agency to activate those affordances

New artefacts are the product of this action.

Of course, this is not rocket science. It is significantly more complex that that. Oh the variables!

Anyway, to wrap this up. We need to accept that this is not a learning theory, not an explanation of why people do what they do. It is a theory about how structure and agency and artefacts in a learning ecology can harvest all sorts of exceptional actions.

CJ Dennis captured this thought perfectly – ‘A rose by any other name would smell the same.’

The name I’m thinking of here is not Julier or Juliet. It is Ecological Psychology or Computationalism. Both of these are trying to explain the phenomena of an ‘inner life’. It turns out that the way we perceive things is a big deal.

So when talking about a theory of learner agency we need to start off by finding our ‘agents’ right where they are at. Educational Psychology would suggest that learners perceive things directly in their learning ecology. That is, they have a way of being that informs their actions through their experience of the physicality of being in their learning environment.

Young people can move around objects, politely knock on doors and do spectacular ‘speckies’ by virtue of their experience of being in the space. They perceive the relationship between things in their lived environment as they move through. In this sense the need for material reductionism or the rejection of an ontological dualism is not so important. Or maybe it is?

Computationism would suggest that the brain responds to the stimulus received and then adds value to the information by processing it in some way – cognition. You can think of this as a student learning to decode an unfamiliar text purely by internal means.

Educational Psychology would suggest that the stimulus is rich and loaded with perceivable contextual information ‘explanations must appeal to laws of interaction between entities and not to intrinsic/ inner features of those entities as the realisers of the target explanandum (Raja et al. 2017)’

If the concept of ‘pirate’ exists for a child, then decoding the word ‘pirate’ without reference to the context in which it occurs is a poverty of stimulus. With a picture of an iconic pirate, and the letter ‘p’ the child can perceive the word as ‘pirate’ without cogitating through non-sylabice-final-e’s and the like!

Cognitive Load Theory talks about biologically primary learning and biologically secondary learning. It might be argued that biologically primary learning relates to hearing words and speaking words. Biologically secondary learning may relate to writing words.

At face value it could appear that the primary learning relates to perception and the secondary learning relates to computationalism.

I would like to argue that all learning is ecological (Just ‘fessing up to my bias here, which I’m not clever enough to elucidate yet) and, after Gibson and Chemero and others, that Computationalism is not sufficient to explain the process of learning and causing learning to happen.

Fundamentally, it seems that computationalism is a material reductionist form of behaviourism – kicking the homunculus problem down the road. How does information about information processing get processed – the notion of some epiphenomoligical projection of self consistent over space and time is just another form of a homunculus running the show. The dualism you have without having dualism.

The same might be said for ecological psychology – except the homunculus is obvious for all to see. Patterns of relationships, and habits of building those patterns and the strategic placement of those things in relationship lead to new knowledge ie: ‘p’ plus pirate picture = the written word ‘pirate’.

I’m not even close to understanding either of these concepts at the 101 level yet. I am tempted to favour the notion of ecological psychology as it relates to learner agency by virtue of the fact that it is about agents actively making connections between external artifacts in their lived world. Yes, those connections are realised internally, but characterised through perception.

Computationalism demands the work of meaning making all be done in the brain behind closed doors and busy mouse wheels.

What’s in a word you ask? The raw materials for the very fabric by which we clothe our identity I say, – they do not all smell the same!

This whole COVID-19 caper is a bit dogey I reckon. Whilst we are all locked away in our homes away from each other in our own private spaces we might seem to be disconnected and out of reach. Yet – Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon is pulsing with ecstasy.

He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.

Ironically Facoult’s Plague Town characterised the relationship between the self and the other-more-powerful-than-me. He picked up on the idea of the physicality of the lived urban space as taking on the role of the Panopticon’s tower.

We are being shown that we are knowing what we know now, that is, we’ve reacted to the plague in the way that we’ve always reacted to the plague (Albert Camus gives another great example). The plague uses information, in the hands of those positioned with more power such that their power increases at the expense of a largely self-regulating, self positioning populace giving up its agency to those with ever greater agency.

COVID clarifiers are all around us. The work of done by the ever present threat of ‘terrorism’ after 2001 has been eclipsed by the opportunity afforded by COVID-19. The result is the amplification of binary position taking by people at large and the power to position ‘others’ concentrated in fewer and fewer people / positions.

The point of this piece though is to look at how learners are positioned in their learning ecology such that they might acquire the power to shape their world.

In a recent chapter on Reimagining Education in a Pandemic: Children and Young People as Powerful Educations (not yet in print), the authors point to a couple of examples of children taking up positions for themselves. They were in fact, afforded these positions.

In the case of the Bushfire Manifesto, students make a claim that they should be listened to. Of note is the conclusion that says ‘… we can position CYP (children and young people) as experts… ‘ (emphasis my own).

This notion is at the heart of curating a learning ecology that reflects the values of a critical pedagogy of place. In the case of bushfire education, children are asking – ‘What happened here?’, all the way through to ‘What should happen here?’

So, will you position our kids as irrelevant novices unworthy of agentive engagement – or will you let them position you as an expert who can help apprentice them into skilful ways of being in the world. Or perhaps – there are many other positions to take up, to reject or be repositioned.