Making (electrical) connections: Exploring student agency in a school in India

Abstract

Students studying in government-run schools in rural India possess much experiential knowledge of the world around them. This paper presents a narrative account of an ethnographic exploration of such students as they attempted to learn about electricity in an eighth-grade classroom in a government-run schools in a village in India. The paper shows how students having a rich experience with household electric circuits attempt, in a contingent and situated manner, to negotiate their role as students and participate in the school science discourse. The students' actions expressed agency that was contingent, situated, and aimed at selective appropriation of school science discourse for their own purposes. Such expressions of student agency indicate rich possibilities for meaningful learning of science in rural schools in India provided school science is made relevant for their lives and concerns.

Preservice teacher agency concerning education for sustainability (EfS): A discursive psychological approach

“…Under this approach, the practice of stating an intention needs to be understood as the function achieved in its stating, including the actor's positioning that influences his or her right to claim responsibility or to label an outcome as the result of his or her intentional action (Davies, ). This differentiates our work from some of the previous studies in science education that looked to students' stated intentions (Basu, ) or the attribution of intention to individual students (Barton & Tan, 2010; Sharma, ) as central to the operationalization of agency. Rather than explaining participants' social action in terms of inner mental states or dispositions, we analyze the function of participants' action, including written and spoken action, namely their positioning in relation to others in a local moral order.…”

Adaptive teaching: reflective practice of two elementary teachers’ visions and adaptations during literacy instruction

“…Appropriately, adaptive teaching is associated with thoughtful, meaningful instruction that fits the particular needs of students. As Sharma (2008) states, 'The [adaptive] teacher can be seen as a bricoleur in-action who creatively translates and hybridizes circulating discourses in the in-between spaces…to produce improvised bricolage performances' (p. 816). Undoubtedly, much like a 'bricoleur,' or one who assembles, adaptive teachers assemble from available resources and knowledge of effective pedagogy to create meaningful instructional opportunities (Reilly, 2009).…”

Critical science agency and power hierarchies: Restructuring power within groups to address injustice beyond them

“…While enacting agency has shown to be a promising social practice and outcome of learning, few studies have explicitly investigated agency in science education (Arnold & Clarke, 2014). However, a focus on agency is compelling because it potentially addresses long‐standing justice‐related challenges in science education, including how or why individuals may find utility in science toward the issues that matter in their lives (Sharma, 2007). As Arnold and Clarke (2014) note, “the contemporary interest in researching student agency in science also reflects a shift in science education toward understanding science learning as a complex social activity” (p. 736).…”

“…The structures of those contexts shape opportunities to act in‐the‐moment and across time. Of importance here is that agency is not something that individuals possess, but rather it is only ever enacted in‐practice, through “socioculturally mediated and contingently creative dialogue with the world” (Sharma, 2007, p. 300).…”