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.