Conceptions of Student Agency
Dewey’s exploration of agency cited earlier in this chapter explores the concept
mainly as a distinction of interest v. noninterest. The agent is interested in influencing a
course of action in such a way that the environment suits his needs. Dewey does not see
the agent as a solitary figure influencing this environment, however. As noted earlier, he
writes, “our doings are tied up with the doings of things and person about us” (137).
Attending to these ties is a valuable part of the educational process, Dewey says, but
“personal advantage or disadvantage, success or failure” is not the goal of education
(138). Rather, the student’s development of an engaged inquiry process and attention to
the impact of his/her actions on others is an integral part of learning, he suggests (142).
Dewey suggests that development of reflective practice is key for how this conception of
one’s impact on others is developed. Other definitions and explorations of student agency
in Composition examine means other pedagogical imperatives for this development of
agency. In this section, I will explore conceptions of student agency outlined in
Composition (Wallace and Ewald, Flower) and will trace how these definitions point us
to a need to examine student agency in light of discussions of ecological impact, heading
toward suggestions for developing a “pedagogy of responsibility,” as called for by
Cooper.
In exploring the implementation of alternative pedagogies in the writing
classroom, Wallace and Ewald argue that “resistance to the dominant culture [should not
be] the only option open to students” in their work in the classroom (5). Their look at
student agency is couched in this pedagogical imperative: “Specifically, we think it is
crucial that student agency operate in a middle space between students’ own experiences
and the expectations of the discourse communities in which they will have to achieve
voice” (5). The “mutuality” between student and discourse community expectations
(represented by the teacher in the writing classroom) is described by Wallace and Ewald
as working in the following ways:
“…it entails a contingent perspective on knowledge and emphasizes the socially
constructed nature of meaning, self, and social roles, including those of teacher
and student. In the classroom, mutuality is tied to the realization that (1)
knowledge is constituted in the classroom rather than simply brought as
disciplinary constructs and (2) the type of language used to generate this
knowledge needs to be transactive in nature. We still see mutuality as potentially
transformative, but we don’t believe that the nature of that transformation can be
designated in advance. Transformation emerges from the ongoing interaction of
teachers and students in particular classroom situations” (5-6).
In this description, Wallace and Ewald point to the reflexive nature of these classroom
relationships, in a similar way to Postman and Weingartner’s description of the classroom
ecology. They identify the learner (student) and the teacher as part of this process of
“transformation,” and also point to the need for “transactive” language, or dialogue,
which I have suggested is integral to the inquiry-based classroom. Such transformative
practice is achieved through three strategies, they suggest: “(1) reconstituting classroom
speech genres, (2) redesigning the architecture of rhetoric and writing courses, and (3)
valuing students’ interpretive agency in classroom discourse” (6).
In Chapter Four, I will examine how these reflexive relationships are developed
through the strategies for learning implemented in the inquiry-based composition
classroom. In Chapter Five, I will examine the “architecture” of this classroom. Here,
though, I will take up Wallace and Ewald’s exploration of “interpretive agency,” pairing
it with other definitions of student agency, in order to explore a concept of student agency
that is relevant in the inquiry-based classroom and in light of Marilyn Cooper’s call for a
“pedagogy of responsibility.”
Wallace and Ewald define “interpretive agency” as distinctly different from, but
related to, “agency”:
“Agency is the ability to influence class tasks and topics as well as the ability to
influence the choices that individual writers (including oneself) make. Interpretive
agency involved bringing one’s prior experience to bear in the construction of
knowledge. An individual’s interpretive agency depends on his or her unique
perspective, which, in turn, is based on the set of life experiences that each person
brings to classroom discourse or other communicative events. Although the
concepts of agency and interpretive agency are clearly related in practice, the
distinction is important in sorting out how differences in individuals’ unique
subjectivities affect the kinds of agency that can take place in school settings”
(16).
Both conceptions of student agency apply clearly to theoretical conception of the inquirybased composition classroom. First, in terms of “interpretive agency,” in accessing prior
knowledge in order to frame and pursue relevant questions, students articulate this prior
knowledge and experience, and it becomes part of the classroom discourse. Second,
through classroom discourse, students exhibit “agency” in their influencing of the
strategies-for-learning and the to-be-learned. As Wallace and Ewald note, however, these
“unique subjectivities” are often consolidated, reduced, “to a common set of traits, skills
or pieces of knowledge that all students are expected to master” (17). That is, the to-belearned is often pre-determined. However, “alternative pedagogies assume learning
begins at the intersection of students’ knowledge and experiences and the teachers’
representation of disciplinary knowledge” (17). That is, as is suggested in Postman and
Weingartner’s theory of the inquiry-based learning environment, knowledge is
constructed based on the questions pursued and the interactions that take place in the
classroom. Wallace and Ewald write, “Valuing students’ interpretive agency shifts the
focus of instruction. Instead of concentrating on students’ mastery of discrete units of
received knowledge, instruction constitutes and reflects the knowledge being made at the
intersection of students’ varied experiences and disciplinary knowledge” (17). This does
not only reshape the traditional constructs of teacher authority in the classroom; it also
reshapes conceptions of agency as “self-fulfillment”:
“Valuing interpretive agency in the classroom means that individual authority is
not autonomous but is informed by participants’ divergent perspectives. As
participants in knowledge making, students must engage perspectives that are
different from their own, whether those perspectives are expressed by a teacher or
by a peer. Given this context, a romantic sense of agency is problematic in that it
downplays the intimate role others play in personal achievements, the role
interaction plays in learning, and, indeed, the role society plays in the very
construction of self” (19).
This “romantic sense of agency” might reference the student agent described in Linda
Flower’s social cognitive process theory. Flower argues that the cognitive process theory
(developed earlier by Flower and Hayes) does not account for the influence of social
context. She does not abandon cognition as integral to writing process theory, however.
In exploring this conjunction, Flower writes,
“The strong case for cognition lies, I believe, in the fact that the agent in even a
socially extended process of meaning making is not society, community, or a
discourse; that is, meanings are not made by an abstract, theoretical construct but
by individual writers, readers, speakers, and listeners who are interpreting inferred
meanings around them, constructing their own, and attempting to share those
meanings with or impose them on other members of their social or cultural
collective. Individual meaning is not sui generis, but it is nonetheless a cognitive
construction, created out of prior knowledge in response to the multiple layers of
a writer’s social, rhetorical, and cultural context” (89).
This conception of the writer’s process and agency accounts for the writer negotiating
meaning individually in order to write, but suggests that the influences others play on the
writer are implicit, that the writer must “infer” these meanings, working to construct
meaning on her own. While Wallace and Ewald lean toward a more explicit exploration
of these influences in suggesting that exploring “the role interaction plays in learning” is
key for interpretive agency, both theories highlight the value of accessing prior
knowledge in this interpretive process. Further, Flower notes that the writer must try to
“share those meanings with or impose them on other members of their social or cultural
collective,” but does not go so far as to suggest, as Cooper does, that writing has a real
impact on a real audience.
Of course, most explorations of student agency focus this kind of attention on the
student himself/herself, rather than on how this agency operates within a real classroom
ecology. The notion of student subjectivity and agency is thus limited to the development
of that individual subject or agent, accounting for what influences that student writer, but
not necessarily how that student writer operates as agent within the classroom (or
beyond). This is where explorations of ecology become important. The definitions of
agency described above point to the need to consider these classroom relationships in
light of the conceptions of ecology pedagogy by Cooper, Owens, and Newcomb
described earlier and in terms of Cooper’s call for a “pedagogy of responsibility”. I have
explored my definition of “responsible agency” as including students’ attention to their
prior knowledge, beliefs, and emotions, to their responses to the rhetorical situation, to
their awareness of being influenced by and influencing others, and to how each of these
things contributes to the rhetorical decisions students make. In Wallace and Ewald’s
description of the value of interpretive agency, we see this need for students to attend to
how others’ are influencing their learning. What I have suggested is that, in developing
responsible agency, students also need to attend to how they are influencing the learning
of others.
*I need to take another look at Flower’s use of “rhetorical agency” in
Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement.