scispace - formally typeset
Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

Agency and learning in the lifecourse: Towards an ecological perspective

Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
In this paper, a particular notion of agency is used that enables agency to be conceived as something that is achieved, rather than possessed, through the active engagement of individuals with aspects of their contexts-for-action.
Abstract
This paper is a contribution to understanding the relationship between agency and learning in the lifecourse. The contribution is mainly of a theoretical and a conceptual nature in that a particular notion of agency is used that enables agency to be conceived as something that is achieved, rather than possessed, through the active engagement of individuals with aspects of their contexts-for-action. We refer to this as an ecological understanding of agency. On the part of the actor, such engagements are characterised by particular configurations of routine, purpose and judgement. The argument is made that learning about the particular composition of one's agentic orientations and how they play out in one's life can play an important role in the achievement of agency, and that life-narratives, stories about one's life, can be an important vehicle for such learning. We explore the potential of this approach through a discussion of aspects of the learning (auto-) biographies of two participants in the...

read more

Content maybe subject to copyright    Report

Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

The Role of Beliefs in Teacher Agency.

TL;DR: In this article, a two-year study into teacher agency against the backdrop of large-scale educational reform is presented, focusing on teachers' beliefs in order to understand the dynamics of teacher agency and factors that contribute to its promotion and enhancement.
Journal ArticleDOI

What is agency? Conceptualizing professional agency at work

TL;DR: The concept of agency has become widely used in learning research, especially in studies addressing professional and workplace learning, but also in policy discussion on how to promote individually meaningful careers and life-courses amid rapid changes in working life as discussed by the authors.
Journal ArticleDOI

Teacher Agency in Curriculum Making: Agents of Change and Spaces for Manoeuvre

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the extent to which teachers are able to achieve agency varies from context to context based upon certain environmental conditions of possibility and constraint, and that an important factor in this lies in the beliefs, values and attributes that teachers mobilise in relation to particular sit
Book ChapterDOI

Teacher Agency : What Is It and Why Does It Matter?

TL;DR: Biesta and Robinson as discussed by the authors propose an alternative view of teacher agency, developing an ecological conceptualisation of agency that emphasises the importance of both agentic capacity and agentic spaces in shaping agency, and moreover views the achievement of agency as a temporal process.
Journal ArticleDOI

Acting as Accountable Authors: Creating Interactional Spaces for Agency Work in Teacher Education.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors report on the results of an ethnographically-grounded investigation of agency work among nine pre-service teachers: the main objective is to determine how agency emerges and is constructed in situated discourse practices within the context of a teacher education program embedded in the collective inquiry approach.
References
More filters
Book

The consequences of modernity

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a Phenomonology of modernity and post-modernity in the context of trust in abstract systems and the transformation of intimacy in the modern world.
Book

Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity

Ulrich Beck, +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, Scott Lash and Brian Wynne describe living on the VOLCANO of CIVILIZATION -the Contours of the RISK SOCIETY and the Politics of Knowledge in the Risk Society.
Journal ArticleDOI

Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age

Mary Gluck
- 01 May 1993 - 
TL;DR: In this paper, the self: ontological security and existential anxiety are discussed, as well as the trajectory of the self, risk, and security in high modernity, and the emergence of life politics.
Book

Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age

TL;DR: In the context of a post-traditional order, the self becomes a reflexive project as mentioned in this paper, which is not a term which has much applicability to traditional cultures, because it implies choice within plurality of possible options, and is 'adopted' rather than 'handed down'.
Book

The Sociological Imagination

TL;DR: The sociological imagination is a sociological vision, a way of looking at the world that can see links between the apparently private problems of the individual and important social issues as discussed by the authors.