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.