Draft:
Tomorrow, my whole school will be off to eperience the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra perform.
How did this come to happen.
So, the term ‘Agency’ is finally in vogue. It is just not fancy though. Schools pick it up and run with it not knowing the shape of the thing they are running with. But it is part of our ecosystem to have a narrative on hand about how our kids ‘do agency’.
Bugger! I was really hoping that we’d use the discourse around agency as a pathway to critical pedagogy and giving learners real power to make rules and allocate resources.
So, instead of agency, I’ve become more focused on the idea of ‘affordances’.
So – James Gibson talks about the complimentary nature of agents in ecosystems.
Anthony Giddens talks about sturcturation,
Rom Harre leads to positioning theory
and Albert Bandura gives us social cognitive theory.
Throw in a healthy dash of the American pragmatists, along with Heidegger and we have a very fertile patchwork of theories to lay the ground of a big idea.
The idea is this : The Good school Affords Agency. One way of saying this is that schools lead students to learn how to be trustworthy with their learning.
Let’s put this another way.
Right now I’m in the middle of a school review pre review review thingy. One of the bits of language that come up over and again is this notion of enablers and blockers.
Enablers is great – it really catches an element of what an affordance is. That is – an artifact in the learning ecology that enables an agent to take action.
This being the case – there can be no such thing as a blocker – at best a ‘blocker’ is the absence of an affordance.
The point here is that schools are sites where affordances are curated such that learners develop the skillful use of agency. The strategic crafting of affordances may allow for their exploitation – by students and learners – not by administrators and theorists.
The minute we say that there are enablers and barriers – we position students as being acted upon – not as authentic actors themselves. We are the ones extracting value for our agenda. We are determining the structure according to our own narrative – this constrains the learning narrative of the student whose learning needs we are serving. The second and third order positioning (Harre 97) excludes children from the process of developing voice and agency.
A better option is to design structures that allow for students to engage in curiosity, become skilled in the uptake of personal agency and empower students to work collaboratively to produce evidence that they have the power to act.
So – buy a second hand mixing desk and challenge students to learn how to use it – then teach you!
Source a robot kit – part of a international competition and seek volunteers for a team.
Turn the water off so kids have to carry water to the toilets for half a day.
Celebrate the most complex and solid ‘bases’ in the playground made from fallen sticks and foliage.
Stick a data logger on the water tanks.
Rescue some old notebook PCs from recycling.
Say ‘Yes’ to nearly every idea the kids bring to you.
Say ‘Yes … and / as well as” to nearly every idea the kids bring to you.
Put up a ‘green screen and challenge the students to learn its uses.
Teach students industry standard methodologies – ie agile design / Scrum / Elgato
Explicitly teach kids how to ask questions – to be an author – not merely write amazing stories / how democracy works / how to write a petition.
The above ideas are all real live examples in my school over the last year. Of course, they are the product of students identifying an artifact in their ecology and layering affordances on it. Their direct experience of the artifact is as a tool in the hand to achieve their agenda.
Modern teachers understand that authentic teaching is grounded in knowing how to position an affordance in the path of an empowered learner in just the right way at just the right time so as to inspire learning in action in ever greater ripples.
That is really just a fancy way of saying that we teach kids how to do stuff so that they can do stuff that sets them up to do even more complex stuff – and so on. We want them to be confident experts at shaping their ever changing worlds.
We can beat Artificial Intelligence at its own game by teaching kids how to identify the parts of their building blocks for learning in action.