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’.