Abstract:

Student agency is a capacity to act in ways that reveal their own choices in their learning and enrich the whole learning process - students influence their own lives and the world around them. Moreover, students manage better their life if they are able to practice agency at school, however teachers are lacking pedagogical practices through which to support student agency (Charteris & Smardon, 2018; Vaughn et al., 2020). In other words, involving students´ life-worlds in the learning process could support the development of agency. The concept of life-world is part of an ecological theory of knowing that prioritizes engaged participation in real-life and rich contexts (Barab & Roth, 2006). Life-world describes students' material world and social surroundings in which they find themselves (Barab & Roth, 2006). In our research, the focus was on students' personal interests, hobbies, after-school activities and parents' professional life and interests. Our aim was to understand how primary teachers have involved students life-worlds in the learning process and what impact they have noticed on the students' learning. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 primary school teachers to collect rich and thorough data. The preliminary results of the study indicated that teachers have involved students' life-world experiences for the purpose of enriching school life by examples of new and exciting activities. Also supporting relations with broader social context is evident. Nevertheless, the possibility to enrich the learning content is not in the focus. Still, it could be concluded that by implementing life-world activities, the teachers have recognised the possibility to support the students’ agency.

References:
[1] Barab, S., & Roth, M. (2006). Curriculum-Based Ecosystems: Supporting Knowing from an Ecological Perspective. Educational Researcher, 35(5), 3–13.
[2] Charteris, J., & Smardon, D. (2018). A typology of agency in new generation learning environments: Emerging relational, ecological and new material considerations. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 26(1), 51–68.
[3] Vaughn, M., Premo, J., Sotirovska, V. V., & Erickson, D. (2020). Evaluating Agency in Literacy Using the Student Agency Profile. The Reading Teacher, 73(4), 427–441.

Keywords:

Student agency, students’ life-world, ecological theory of knowing, primary school teachers.