DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-1461-0.ch009
ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the theoretical ideas educators should explore and understand in relationship to developing student agency as a pedagogy. It also examines how using it can potentially inspire digital critical pedagogy. The process by which certified teachers engaged in to become more aware of their own critical pedagogy and skill to implement student agency is discussed throughout the chapter. Their perceptions of what student agency is and should be is explored alongside ideas for instituting creative digital pedagogy and student agency in a practical fashion in a focal point of the chapter.
INTRODUCTION
Teachers have not been prepared adequately to integrating technology in their teaching some of this is caused by the philosophy of education imparted to them by teacher education programs. Many teacher education programs employ strategies that are geared towards the learner of yesterday not the learner of tomorrow. Public and private P-12 schools also structure their learning environments based on “old school” methods of teaching and learning. For the betterment of society and the full engagement of students, teachers need the training and resources to fully implement instructional practices that will support thinking that promotes 21st Century skills and leads our students into the future. One aspect of 21st Century skills is the concept of self-directed learning that is inclusive of self-efficacy or agency.
This notion of agency is one that has been largely neglected by instructional structures at all levels of education, but none so prevalent as in our P-12 schools. In fact, in recent years a standards-focused assessment craze has hijacked sound instructional practices in favor of instructional practices that test
Student Agency:
A Creatively-Focused Digital Critical Pedagogy
Shawn Robertson
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8900-9604 St. Joseph’s College, USA
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specific ways of thinking, but creativity has been left out of this new focus. Technology Thought Leader Will Richardson (2019) clarifies this point further by stating:
That creative freedom, or “agency,” is a key aspect of almost every deep learning experience that we have in life. Our ability to decide on our own terms what, when and how to learn leads to learning that
“sticks” far more than when we are given little or no choice. (p.14).
In every way we can think of choice matters. Empowering students with that opportunity is the key to unlocking a new future that is yet to be created. Technology has enhanced and accelerated the op- portunities for such learning to take place for students. However, without changes in structure and phi- losophy students are being developed as thinkers who are devoid of the opportunity to think creatively for themselves within the framework of agency.
TEACHING AND LEARNING IN CREATIVE FASHION
This chapter will explore current learning structures in school systems and present theoretical recom- mendations for changes in learning practices that will support student agency and promote critical digital independence with and for students. Critical independence related to one’s own creativity is the most powerful tool we can give to students. This notion of critical creative pedagogy has its roots in Project Based Learning (PBL) and other creative products. Author Patti Drapeau author of Sparking Student Creativity (2014) states “Creative thinking lessons build on critical thinking and go beyond simple recall to consider “what if” possibilities and incorporate real-life problem solving; they require students to use both divergent and convergent thinking.(p.2)” In diving in deeper into the topic, Nodoushan and Deeson (2015) explain that there must be deep conceptual understandings of content before true creative thinking can take place. The intricacies that exist in such frameworks are deep and complex. Teachers often shy away from engaging in such instructional strategies because of logistical issues or lack of a perceived linear structure for learning. What educators fail to recognize as a result, is that activities like PBL can lead to what Savin-Baden (2016) refers to as Transdisciplinary Threshold Concepts. Transdisciplinary Threshold Concepts (TTC) are:
...concepts which transcend disciplines and subject boundaries but which are challenging and complex to understand, but once understood, the student experiences a transformed way of understanding, without which the they would struggle to progress through the curriculum (Savin-Baden, 2016).
Providing students with opportunities for TTC is one of the benefits of creative critical pedagogy.
Such a pedagogy recognizes the intersectionality of learning within varied contexts, content areas and peoples. Creatively engaging in such instructional deconstruction of teaching and learning is at the core of this chapter’s purpose. This chapter also seeks to provide practical and thoughtful instructional goals for teachers to consider while building unique learning structures for their students. Finally, it will also share teacher perspectives on the nuances of aspects of becoming a more critical teacher in relation to instructional risk, pedagogy and student agency.
Student Agency
STUDENT AGENCY
Unpacking agency within the context of learning within a digital framework is a critical activity. This section explores the concepts that are necessary components to connect agency with regard to teaching and learning in relationship to critical pedagogy. One key question explored in this section is: How can we begin to connect the intersectionalities that exist within the paradigm of creative learning?
Teaching and learning are as much about culture as they are about process, and teachers learn to process but often neglect the cultural connections that link to those processes. Most teachers, especially new ones, simply are not aware of their digital cultural beliefs on any actionable self-reflective level.
Digital cultural beliefs are the ways in which an individual thinks and acts in relation to the technical world. For instance, some believe that technology is central to how we live and learn and thus it should be a major part of how we “do” schooling. Others believe that technology should not be a central aspect to our lives at work, school or play. The reality is that whether it is embraced or rejected, technology is here to stay. Our deconstruction of that reality and how we can understand it in relation to our pedagogy is key to developing new, innovative common sense frameworks for teaching and learning. Examples of frameworks that bridge the divide between what exists and what could exist within a digital critical pedagogy are digital frameworks such as TPACK (Mishner and Koehler) and the SAMR model (Reu- ben Puentedura). Each of these frameworks offer teachers a structure by which to begin to assess where they are individually in varied areas and build new instructional beliefs, thoughts, practices and student centered tasks. TPACK offers teachers the opportunity to assess their Technological Knowledge and understand how that knowledge links to their Pedagogical Knowledge as well as their Content Knowl- edge. It provides a view to see the connections of our teaching. When used reflectively, TPACK can provide teachers with strong guidance on how to improve the connectedness of their knowledge compe- tencies in the aforementioned areas. The SAMR model is useful in a more specific way in that it shows teachers specifically where their designed activities fall in terms of the quality of their technological instruction. Allowing teachers to measure whether their activities are at the “Enhancement” level or at the “Transformation” level by giving them clear guidelines for those concepts is a useful transition tool to help teachers make their thinking about digital pedagogy clear and visible. What these conceptual frameworks have in common is that they aid in the creativity development of teachers by forcing them to think differently about their pedagogy. The challenge for such models of instruction is that they often fail to address the need for “Agency” in an explicitly transparent and clear fashion. Agency should be a part of the context(s) that such models are based on. While the aforementioned models move the bar higher in terms of what teachers should be engaged in understanding theoretically as well as practically to benefit their students and themselves, agency is still amiss.
Deconstructing Purposeful Student Agency
For the purposes of this chapter, Agency is conceptualized as the opportunity to demonstrate creative, critical, self-directed and actualized learning activity and thought within a digital learning environment.
Generally, student agency or the concept of Agency is one that educators have defined as self-directed learning. The difference between the two may be significant depending on the implementation of the concept. Self-directed learning usually takes place within the confines of a learning context that has been largely developed and designed by the teacher or instructor. This sort of learning opportunity is laden with value-based judgments about what is important for the student to learn about. Such a peda-
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gogy operates within the confines of the teacher’s mind and desires for, what, when and how to teach her students. When put into practice it does not give way to the student in any significant way. What the student is left with is a version of teaching and learning that is dominated and limited by the perspectives of that teacher, be they critical perspectives or biased ones, the student is forced to operate within that teacher’s world. Her world typically relies on the status quo to direct her in terms of what a student is allowed to learn about and when. All too often teachers complain and then explain what it is that they can and cannot teach and how they can or cannot teach that content. They usually reference the desire to remain employed and thus they believe that they have no power to change their circumstances, or the position of their students in their classrooms. Thus, teachers are teaching as they have been taught and following the rules of engagement for teaching and learning that were established long ago as a means to re-create socially constructed elements of society. These strategies are ways of teaching that perpetu- ate and re-create existing structures of power and oppression. Such teaching is an artifact and social construct of the banking system of education as coined by Paulo Freire (1968).
Freire helps us deconstruct this insidious process through the following passage from his text Peda- gogy of the Oppressed:
This solution is not (nor can it be) found in the banking concept. On the contrary, banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole: (a) the teacher teaches and the students are taught; (b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; (c) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about; (d) the teacher talks and the students listen — meekly; (e) the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined; (f) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply; (g) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher; (h) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it; (i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students; (j) the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects. (Friere, 1968, p.22)
Through this deconstruction of the teaching process within the banking concept, Freire helps us break down the interplay between teaching and learning. All of the aforementioned sub-points (a-j) speak to the subversive nature of the banking model in which the teacher is at the center of all supposed learning.
These sub-points impact the opportunities for students to discover and enjoy “Agency”. In particular, the notion that “...the teacher chooses and enforces his choice…”(p.22) shows how arbitrary pedagogy can be as it is dependent upon the teacher, and the learner is simply the object. Freire also states “...the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it…(p.22).
This closed-loop perpetuates the silencing of students and destroys any opportunity for self-efficacy to be nurtured through the educational process in a purposeful manner. With the teacher enforcing his or her own way as well as choosing the content, the students are effectively silenced and don’t have an opportunity to develop a voice as they sink deeper into the banking education model. Freire writes:
It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable be- ings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The
Student Agency
more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. (1968, p.22)
The idea that the students develop less critical consciousness is one that is central to the notion of student agency. Agency cannot be developed in such an intellectually isolated model. Agency requires that students are able to foster their own critical consciousness in order to have a direct hand in trans- forming their own world and society-at-large. This also impacts on the students’ ability and opportunity to tap into their own creative power. Freire (1968) posits
The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their “humanitarianism” to preserve a profitable situation.
(pp. 22-23)
Unearthing and exposing the fact that students don’t have the opportunity to express their creative power underscores how they are oppressed by the banking system of education.
Focusing on mundane facts and nominal teachings keep students from realizing their true potential to learn, grow and be free. Therefore, it is necessary to train teachers in the principles of critical pedagogy to help free their minds and thus open the floodgates of possibility for all students.
Digital Practical Pedagogy Practiced
Within the framework of digital pedagogy, students are more free to recognize their potential, but the challenge is that they are of course operating within the banking system of education unless they are liberated, or liberate themselves. Teachers are learning that technology is a great leveler of opportunity for many students. In order to practice digital critical pedagogy we must understand that the object to be known is the self. That is, that the individual must come to understand their place in society through the lens of critical pedagogy. This is done through the deconstruction of the traditional pedagogy and the embracing of digital pedagogy. Such a pedagogical shift allows students and teachers to acknowledge the power structures that impact their daily learning opportunities.
Conceptual models for digital pedagogy are limited in that they don’t challenge the biases and assump- tions made in the process of teaching or the aspirations of creating an educated person. Many teacher preparation programs simply aim to provide their preservice teachers and in some cases inservice teach- ers what is considered to be the best pedagogical frames available. For example, previously I developed digital pedagogically focused assignments for graduate students. In previous work I challenged my stu- dents to create new projects for their students by transforming what used to be done using paper and pen to a completely digital activity. My students happily engaged in such work. They moved from creating graphic organizers to digital ones, they created blogs that took the place of classroom discussions and other so-called new pedagogically focused practices. However, in reflecting upon what I provided for my students my critical consciousness did not go far enough because it stopped short of problem posing.
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Problem Posing
In my previous teaching, what was not addressed was the mode itself, that is power relationship between the teacher and the student. I took into account the fact that students needed to be taught 21st Century Skills, but I didn’t address why those skills were necessary beyond the fact that they were promoted by educational institutions and think tanks. Some of those skills such as, creativity and innovation, criti- cal thinking, problem-solving, communication and collaboration hint toward a critical disposition, but when placed within the banking model they fall short of providing students the framework for student agency. From a practical standpoint, I think it’s necessary to regard student agency as a concept to be understood and fused with one’s pedagogy as it is being implemented. This implementation may occur in an imperfect fashion, but it’s more important that it occurs in the first place. Rather than continuing the process of learning being more about the teacher than the students, it is supposed to support and emancipate the learner through the process. In order to support and develop student agency I embarked on a digitally focused pedagogy that centered around the fact that students ought to have control of their own learning. In fact, if they don’t have control over their own learning then one would say that it is not their own, but the learning that the educational culture desires to input into them. Though this is part of the real goal of learning, the emancipation of the mind where one can see fully and experience life without the shackles that hold one down and assist in helping the teacher pull the student down a pre- scribed path that the teacher and government have devised- without the student. The struggle to first help teachers “see” what they are doing to students is the first aspect of this process, followed subsequently by teaching them how to “let go” of the reigns while continuing to support students in their personal development and growth. They had to learn how to problem pose for themselves to see the value that it could have for their students.
COURSE DESCRIPTION AND PARTICIPANTS
This critical work took place in a graduate course for special education teachers. Each participant had generally 1-7 years of teaching, and there was a wide range of grade levels that the participants taught on. The levels ranged from pre-k to 12th grade. The focus of the course was the usage of technology and other issues of diversity.
Critical Consciousness
The concept of unlearning was a key tool for helping the teachers move through the process of enhancing their own critical pedagogy in order to develop a process for student agency. Robertson (2019) states:
Unlearning can best be defined as the process of examining one’s beliefs about a particular topic, concept, idea or thought and deconstructing it to the core in order to re-establish a new be- lief. Teachers must see that they may have limited pedagogy and should always be open to questioning themselves and their instructional choices.