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What is ‘Agency’? Perspectives inScience Education ResearchJenny Arnold a & David John Clarke ba Faculty of Education , Australian Catholic University , Fitzroy ,Australiab Graduate School of Education , The University of Melbourne ,Carlton , AustraliaPublished online: 09 Aug 2013.

To cite this article: International Journal of Science Education (2013): What is ‘Agency’?Perspectives in Science Education Research, International Journal of Science Education, DOI:10.1080/09500693.2013.825066

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What is ‘Agency’? Perspectives in

Science Education Research

Jenny Arnolda∗ and David John Clarkeb

aFaculty of Education, Australian Catholic University, Fitzroy, Australia; bGraduate

School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Carlton, Australia

The contemporary interest in researching student agency in science education reflects concerns

about the relevance of schooling and a shift in science education towards understanding learning

in science as a complex social activity. The purpose of this article is to identify problems

confronting the science education community in the development of this new research agenda

and to argue that there is a need for research in science education that attends to agency as a

social practice. Despite increasing interest in student agency in educational research, the term

‘agency’ has lacked explicit operationalisation and, across the varied approaches, such as critical

ethnography, ethnographies of communication, discourse analysis and symbolic interactionism,

there has been a lack of coherence in its research usage. There has also been argument

concerning the validity of the use of the term ‘agency’ in science education research. This article

attempts to structure the variety of definitions of ‘student agency’ in science education research,

identifies problems in the research related to assigning intentionality to research participants and

argues that agency is a kind of discursive practice. The article also draws attention to the need for

researchers to be explicit in the assumptions they rely upon in their interpretations of social

worlds. Drawing upon the discursive turn in the social sciences, a definition of agency is

provided, that accommodates the discursive practices of both individuals and the various

functional social groups from whose activities classroom practice is constituted. The article

contributes to building a focused research agenda concerned with understanding and promoting

student agency in science.

Keywords: Student agency; Science classrooms; Discursive psychology

1. Introduction

There has been increasing interest in student agency in educational research (Basu,

2008; Biddulph, 2011; Brown, 2009; Davies, 1990; Goulart & Roth, 2010; Lanas

& Corbett, 2011; Mapes, 2011; Pinnow, 2011; Reeve & Tseng, 2011; Sharma,

International Journal of Science Education, 2013

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2013.825066

∗Corresponding author: Faculty of Education, Australian Catholic University, 115 Victoria Pde.,

Fitzroy 3084, Australia. Email: jenny.arnold@acu.edu.au

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

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2007; Siry & Lang, 2010). In science education, researchers’ growing interest in

‘student agency’ reflects the long-standing problems that school science can be experi-

enced as irrelevant to students’ lives and as an inequitable process (Aikenhead, 1998;

Barton, 2005; Carlone, 2003; Goodrum, Hackling, & Rennie, 2001; Lemke, 2001;

Osborne, Simon, & Collins, 2003; Tytler, Osborne, Williams, Tytler, & Clarke,

2008). The study of student agency creates new understanding of these long-standing

issues, enabling a shift in emphasis from shortcomings of the child (e.g. lack of

engagement, interest or poor attitude) to addressing the balance of agency in

science learning contexts (Arnold, 2012b, p. 266). Science education researchers

have claimed that learning can be conceptualised ‘as agency’ (Barton & Tan,

2010), that ‘students’ agency constitutes the core of the driving force of children’s

engagement’ (Goulart & Roth, 2010) and that student agency has ‘the potential to

influence large-scale social change’ (Basu, 2008). The contemporary interest in

researching student agency in science also reflects a shift in science education

towards understanding science learning as a complex social activity (Arnold, 2012a;

Brickhouse, 2001; Lemke, 2001; Mercer, 2008; Roth & McGinn, 1997; Tytler &

Prain, 2010; Wickman, 2004; Zembylas, 2005). We suggest that research into the

classroom performance of student agency could provide the key to address both

concerns.

The term ‘agency’ has lacked explicit operationalisation in science education

research. Across the varied approaches, including critical ethnography, ethnography

of communication, discourse analysis and symbolic interactionism, the degree of

coherence or overlap in the use of ‘student agency’ cannot be reliably gauged.

Science education researchers have also engaged in argument concerning the validity

of the use of the term ‘agency’ (Basu, Barton, Clairmont, & Locke, 2008; Brown,

2009). Variability in the theorisation of ‘agency’ is reflected in phrases such as, ‘cur-

riculum agency’ (Biddulph, 2011), ‘relational agency’ (Edwards, 2005), ‘critical

science agency’ (Barton & Tan, 2010; Basu et al., 2008), ‘critical mathematical

agency’ (Turner & Font, 2007) and ‘agentic engagement’ (Siry & Lang, 2010).

This variability is not unusual. Sociologists, Emirbayer and Mische (1998), have high-

lighted ‘agency’ as a source of increasing strain and confusion in social thought

despite, or perhaps because of, the long list of terms with which it has been associated:

self-hood, motivation, will, purposiveness, intentionality, choice, initiative, freedom

and creativity, the term ‘agency’ has maintained an elusive vagueness (p. 962).

There is debate in the social sciences regarding the theorisation of agency in relation

to structural contingencies of social worlds (see Harvey, 2002, for example). Science

education researchers who have taken a position in this debate have favoured the con-

temporary view that ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ are a dialectic (Barton & Tan, 2010;

Goulart & Roth, 2010; Roth, 2007; Sharma, 2007; Siry & Lang, 2010). Despite

this, an individual’s state of mind is often resorted to as explanatory of students’

actions in these research accounts. It is our contention that the assumptions underpin-

ning definitions of ‘agency’ used by researchers need to be made explicit. If we theo-

rise agency and structure as a dialectic, then the indissolubility of the human mind and

the social world should be reflected in the operationalisation of ‘agency’ for research

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and in our explanations of why students say and do what they do. Discourses need to

be developed in science education that does not rely upon cognitive psychological

assumptions. This article contributes to the development of alternative discourses,

a contribution that would be of interest to social scientists in general, but one that

we feel is particularly pertinent to the science education community due to the preva-

lent use of cognitive psychological theory in science education.

Being a relatively new focus, there have only been a handful of studies of student

agency in science education. Available databases (such as Educational Research Infor-

mation Clearinghouse and Web of Science) from the year 2000 using descriptors such

as ‘student agency’ and ‘science classrooms’ yielded the papers reviewed in the next

two sections. This review of the few studies conducted on student agency in science

education highlights variety in the theorisation of ‘agency’ and a lack of explicit oper-

ationalisation of the term ‘agency’. We distinguish between studies relying upon cog-

nitive psychology in their accounts of student agency (Section 2) and a study that

employed discursive psychology (Section 3). Those relying on cognitive psychology

in their interpretations or explanations include, Sharma’s (2007) ethnography of com-

munication, Basu’s (2008), Barton and Tan’s (2010) and Siry and Lang’s (2010) criti-

cal ethnographies and Goulart and Roth’s (2010) cultural historical analysis of agency

in a science classroom. Arnold’s (2012b) study was informed by the discursive turn in

the social sciences and ontological constructionism (Corcoran, 2009) in discursive

psychology. Our review supports Davies (1990) premise that agency is a kind of a dis-

cursive practice and shows how responsibility and volition can be assigned through

language choice.

We advocate the explicit operationalisation of ‘agency’ and reflection by researchers

on how their choices affect their portrayals of student agency. We show how Erim-

bayer and Mische’s (1998) dimensions of agency could provide a heuristic to assist

in the explicit operationalisation of agency in future studies grounded in cognitive psy-

chology. We suggest that Arnold’s operationalisation of agency in discursive psycho-

logical terms could also be utilised in future studies. Arnold’s study was an

instrumental case, designed to inform science educators interested in providing

opportunities for all students to engage meaningfully in science learning and to

show the potential of discursive psychology for researching student agency. As

shown in Section 3, Arnold operationalised the theoretical construct of ‘agency’

into a framework for analysing discourse in science classrooms. Her instrumental

case was limited in its focus to a small group of three female students in a middle

school science classroom, who were successful according to local assessment prac-

tices. Opportunities for the development of agency in the case study were found to

be limited. However, the importance of the participating students’ small group as a

forum for the validation or denial of their personal and collective agency was clearly

shown. Similarly, we contend that any social context, whether it be interview dialogue,

classroom dialogue or text constructed as part of an ongoing research dialogue, needs

to be understood as a site within which student agency can be validated or denied.

The relatively new research agenda to understand and promote student agency in

science is important as it builds upon our continuing efforts to address the problem

Student Agency 3

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of student disengagement in school science, problems of inclusion and equity in

science classrooms and to ensure all of our students experience science learning as

meaningful and relevant (Kozoll & Osborne, 2004; Lemke, 2001). This article con-

tributes to a much needed synthesis of the research and to the operationalisation of

‘agency’ for future work in this area.

2. The Legacy of Cognitive Psychology

Lemke (2001) stated that science education has adopted cognitive psychology with

‘unseeming haste’. This legacy is also evident in the studies of student agency in

science education. Whilst this review is not a critique of cognitive psychological

approaches per se, the authors draw attention to the need for researchers to be explicit

about the assumptions they rely upon in their interpretations of action in social

worlds.

Within science education, there has been a variety of approaches to researching

student agency. Using a critical ethnographic perspective, science education research-

ers have defined ‘critical science agency’ in terms of a person’s intentions to cause

change in their own life or the lives of others utilising scientific knowledge (Barton

& Tan, 2010; Basu, 2008; Basu et al., 2008). ‘Student agency’ was defined for an eth-

nography of communication in terms of students taking initiative to influence the

direction and outcome of science classroom dialogue (Sharma, 2007). In both

types of ethnography, the researchers relied upon ethnographic evidence to detect

change and, in the case of the critical ethnographer, to also determine the student’s

intentions. Drawing upon cultural historical activity theory, science education

researchers have defined ‘student agency’ in terms of students’ use of language and

other cultural resources (Goulart & Roth, 2010; Roth, 1999, 2007). Any action by

students in these studies employing cultural historical activity theory was equated

with students exercising their agency. Across these different approaches, students’

actions described as the ‘expression of agency’ have ranged from students’ actions

aligned with their expressed goals (Basu, 2008) and including student inaction inter-

preted by researchers as deliberate (Sharma, 2007), classroom procedures that align

with students’ expressed desires (Siry & Lang, 2010) and students’ actions that can be

observed as changing classroom discourse patterns (Sharma, 2007) to any action by

students in the classroom (Goulart & Roth, 2010).

In this section, the various methodological approaches that science education

researchers have taken are examined and the cognitive psychological assumptions

underlying these approaches are brought to the fore. It is shown that the different

researchers’ use of language in assigning responsibility to students is similar and

can be thought of in terms of a ‘grammar of agency’. The discursive practice of assign-

ing agency is shown to involve the use of indexical features of the English language

that allow responsibility to be allocated or claimed. In research reports, researchers

have constructed research participants as responsible for action and, in this way,

attributed agency, but the constitutive force of language in social interaction has

not been acknowledged, and the meaning of participants’ language in use has not

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been adequately taken into account. In many of these reports, translations have been

made from un-explicated student discourse to un-explicated researcher discourse.

This problem is shown to be due to the unexamined assumptions of cognitive psychol-

ogy underlying these studies, supporting our call for more explicit operationalisation

of student agency by science education researchers.

We draw upon Arnold’s (2012b, pp. 24–39) discursive analysis of research reports

on student agency in science and show how language was used by researchers to attri-

bute agency to research participants. The excerpts in the following section have been

chosen as representative of the variety of ways that agency can be attributed gramma-

tically. In summary, agency was attributed through grammatical devices for assigning

responsibility to persons. The superscripts, 1, 2, 3 and 4 (added for this article), mark

this grammar in the excerpts and a description of each device is listed below:

(1) Sentence structure: particular persons can be constructed as the agent, respon-

sible for the action reported, by the way in which the sentence is constructed,

explicitly by naming a person or persons as active in the sentence or implicitly

by naming objects or actions for which the person or persons can be taken as

responsible. Sentences reporting action employ the indicative mood.

(2) Names and pronouns: individuals’ names and pronouns can be used to assign

responsibility to those named or indexed.

(3) Description: description can be used to imply responsibility and volition. A

person can be explicitly described as ‘active’ or ‘passive’. A person’s actions

can be described as ‘strategic’, ‘planned’, ‘goal-driven’, ‘intentional’, ‘deliberate’,

‘innovative’, etc. A person can be described as ‘a leader’ or ‘a follower’.

(4) Quotation: using quotation marks indexes responsibility for the reported speech-

action to the person quoted.

The analysis has been divided into sub-sections according to how agency has been

theorised in the research reviewed. In each section, we, first, explain how agency was

defined in the studies and, second, illustrate how these researchers used language to

assign agency. Concurrently, we point out a lack of adequate theorisation of social

contexts within which student agency was rendered viable in some of the reports

and a lack of warrant for assigning psychological states to research participants in

others. We suggest that these problems are due to unexamined cognitive psychological

assumptions. Finally, we call for the operationalisation of ‘agency’ as an imperative in

research accounts.

2.1 Cultural Anthropology and Cultural Sociology

The studies grounded in cultural anthropology (Barton, 2005; Barton & Tan, 2010;

Basu, 2008; Basu & Barton, 2007; Tan & Barton, 2010) defined student agency in

terms of students’ purposeful action oriented towards future goals, either for their per-

sonal development (e.g. along the lines of career trajectories or gaining respect from

peers and teachers) or for the pursuit and realisation of ultimate values (e.g. social

justice). This is illustrated in the following quotes:

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I describe agency as purposefully considering and enacting both small- and large-scale

change in personal and community domains, based on one’s beliefs and goals. (Basu,

2008, p. 891)

Agency is at once the possibility of imagining and asserting a new self in a figured world at

the same time as it is about using one’s identity to imagine a new and different world.

(Barton & Tan, 2010, p. 192)

The capacity to act in accordance with one’s goals and values has been called

‘projectivity’ (Erimbayer & Mische, 1998). In these studies, researching student

agency in science entailed interviewing and observing participating students. The

research reports were constructed as narrative vignettes of the participants’ action

directed towards the fulfilment of their goals. Action consistent with the student’s

goals and aspirations were taken as the ‘expressing’ or ‘enacting’ agency (Barton

& Tan, 2010, p. 225; Basu, 2008, p. 894). The social meaning of the teacher/

researchers’ and the students’ conversations was not theorised in these studies.

Instead, students’ speech-action was interpreted as evidence of inner mental

states, as shown in the following excerpts. In Basu’s (2008) study, participating stu-

dents were members of her own physics classroom who were given the opportunity

to design and enact a lesson. Case studies of five participating students were con-

structed by the researcher as narrative accounts, an excerpt from such an account

is included below as Excerpt 1.

Excerpt 1 Darlene said1 that she2 chose to make the lesson a court-trial because she2

wanted to practice being a lawyer. . . In enacting1 her2 lesson plan, Darlene was a

leader3—she2 took on the role of a judge who had1 control over what happened in the

classroom and made1 the final decision about which group was most convincing in the

debate. In designing1 the debate, Darlene1 organized1 her2 27 person class as a court

room might function and evaluated1 students based on whether they made a convincing

argument. Through these choices3 she2 was able to build her2 interest3 in law into her2

classroom. (Basu, 2008, p. 889)

As can be noted in Excerpt 1, Basu attributed intentionality to students using refer-

ences to internal states such as wanting. Basu assigned responsibility for action to stu-

dents by grammatically constructing the student as the agent in sentences. In the

example above, Darlene was attributed responsibility for saying, enacting, taking on

a role, making the final decision, designing, organising, evaluating, choosing and

building. The social practices making the realisation of Darlene’s personal agency

possible in this study, including the power of the teacher/researcher to position

Darlene as responsible or not, were not a feature of this study and to some extent

the reader is left wondering about the special nature of those social practices and

the process of Darlene’s development of agency in conversation with her teacher

and peers.

In Barton and Tan’s (2010) study, participating youth were involved in an innova-

tive, community-based science club that engaged the youth in energy issues and

advanced information technology (p. 197). The research account was constructed

as narrative vignettes from the point of view of the teacher/researchers. An excerpt

from Barton and Tan’s research account is included in Excerpt 2.

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Excerpt 2 We1 decided3 to listen to the students’ pleas and engaged1 them in dialogue

around what they would do . . . . (Barton & Tan, 2010, p. 213)

In Excerpt 2, the grammatical devices, corresponding to points 1 and 3 above, were

used to assign agency to the teacher/researchers. Intentionality was indexed to the

researchers using descriptions of their actions as ‘deciding’, and the researchers

were indexed as responsible for ‘engaging students in dialogue’. The assumption

inherent in the grammar of ‘deciding’ is of inner mental processes, which are reflected

in action.

Excerpt 2 illustrates how the researchers’ language choices can influence how

agency is portrayed. The students were not the focus in Excerpt 2, but it would

have been possible to construct a parallel account in which the students’ agency

was of central interest, for example: ‘The students pleaded with us and responded

to our attempts to engage them in dialogue about what they wanted to do’. Researcher

choice in constructing persons as responsible or not in sentences suggests that more

rigour is required in researching agency to provide warrants for researcher discourses.

The choices made in representing the findings of these studies suggest that partici-

pants’ discourse was accorded a low ontological status. Rather than representing

participants’ conversations as they unfolded as social acts involving first- and

second-order positioning (Harre & van Langenhove, 1999b, pp. 20–21), they were

represented as narrative accounts involving the third-order positioning of participants

in the social act of reporting to the reader. Ontological questions addressed by such a

research approach could not be concerned with the conversational ‘reality’ (Harre,

1992a) of participants’ social worlds.

Siry and Lang (2010) grounded their research in cultural sociology and utilised

conversation analysis as well as critical ethnography. These researchers also fore-

grounded ‘projectivity’ in their definition of ‘agency’. Conversations between

teacher/researchers and students were theorised and purposefully structured as

social spaces within which students could put forward their ideas, goals and prefer-

ences related to teaching and learning in science using the framework of ‘cogenerative

dialogue’ (Tobin & Roth, 2006). At the outset, in Siry and Lang’s study, cogenerative

dialogue was utilised to ‘expand the agency of all participants’ (p. 150), with the

purpose of improving teaching and learning in the particular setting. The cogenerative

dialogues ‘revealed the children’s desires’ (p. 156) and supported children in the selec-

tive reactivation of cognitive schema to ‘reveal their ways of interpreting science’,

‘reveal understandings’, ‘express their ways of knowing’ and ‘verbalize experiences’

(p. 158). The children’s stated desires, understandings and ways of knowing were sub-

sequently incorporated by teachers into the classroom practice as instances of ‘chil-

dren exhibiting expanded agency’ (p. 155). Whilst the conversational space created

between teachers/researchers and students was accorded greater ontological status

than in the studies mentioned above, Siry and Lang also interpreted students’

speech-action as evidence of inner mental states and processes.

Like the cultural anthropological studies reviewed above, Siry and Lang defined

agency in terms of participants’ capacity to act towards the realisation of personal

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goals, aspirations and values and relied upon the cognitive psychological assumption of

inner mental states as explanatory. Theorising agency, according to participants’ inner

worlds and not in terms of social practices, leaves the context within which students took

responsibility and acted with volition under-theorised. Importantly, in the studies

reviewed, the social practices of mentoring of students to design and conduct physics

lessons (Basu, 2008), engaging of students in dialogue about what they want to do

(Barton & Tan, 2010) and facilitating cogenerative dialogue with students (Siry &

Lang, 2010) did not feature in discussions about student agency by these researchers.

The reliance upon cognitive psychological explanations, as shown here, can mask the

importanceof the social context for promoting and enhancing student agency, including

the inspiring work done by each of these researchers in the realisation of social acts in

which students were accorded the right to make decisions and express their opinions.

2.2 Sociocultural Approaches

The study employing sociocultural theory and utilising ‘ethnography of communi-

cation’ defined agency in terms of the transformative iteration of routinised practices

(Sharma, 2007). In Sharma’s study, ‘student agency’ was defined in terms of a stu-

dent’s capacity to change established patterns of classroom communication. Sharma

defined agency as, ‘. . .a contingently emergent feature of situated local action. . .’; ‘a

socioculturally mediated and contingently creative dialogue with the world—a dialo-

gue that not only shapes the [en]counters and direction of the dialogue but also influ-

ences its outcome’, emphasising that, ‘an individual does not have agency, but under

opportune circumstances, she enacts or exercises agency’ (p. 300). An individual’s

capacity to transform dialogue by appropriating and utilising discourse has been

called ‘iteration’ (Erimbayer & Mische, 1998).

Researching student agency in a science classroom within these terms entailed the

ethnographic study of students’ lives in school science and out of school. Transcripts

of science classroom talk were analysed to identify interactive patterns. Observational

and interview data were used to characterise students’ out-of-school discourses.

Actions by students that initiated a change in routine classroom interactive patterns

were taken as ‘enactments of agency’. In this study, interactive patterns were identified

and intentions were attributed to the students by the researcher. Rather than case

studies or vignettes, Sharma’s account was based upon the discursive analysis of class-

room dialogue. However, Sharma’s analysis, like those reviewed in 2.1 above, relied

upon cognitive psychological assumptions in assigning intentions. Excerpts 3 and 4

are reproduced from Sharma’s research account, illustrating his approach and

language use.

Excerpt 3 Finding the discussion was proceeding in a direction not very relevant to the

lives of the students, Narendra took1 corrective3 action, by asking Mr. Raghuvanshi,

‘Sir what if someone has a direct connection’4. (Sharma, 2007, p. 311)

In Excerpt 3, the researcher constructed the student as responsible through choices in

language use. The sense that Narendra in this excerpt and the students collectively in

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other sections of Sharma’s (2007) report were acting with volition is achieved by attri-

buting motives through narrative devices. The motives for action in Excerpt 3 have

been assumed. The researcher connected Narendra’s question to out-of-school dis-

courses and, based upon this, suggested that Narendra was motivated to connect

the in-class conversation with his out-of-school experiences. It is important to note

that Narendra’s account of his own actions was not a feature of the research. The

researcher has relied upon cognitive psychological assumptions that a person’s

actions reflect universally understood, inner psychological processes. For arguments’

sake, Narendra’s action could equally as likely be explained by attributing other

motives, for example, wanting to develop a social identity as a thoughtful student

or wanting to contribute to the co-construction of knowledge.

Excerpt 4 Students2 often chose3 to accomplish1 the social work required of them2 as stu-

dents by being passive3, conformal3 bodies. (Sharma, 2007, p. 309)

Description can be arbitrary and in Excerpt 3 the researcher’s description of students

has led to the apparent conundrum that a person can be described as ‘passive’, yet be

constructed, as in the account, as having chosen this course of action and therefore

responsible. In the research account of student agency in Excerpt 3, Sharma has

based his description of the students upon the assumption that the students’

actions reflect inner mental states or processes that can be taken as generally represen-

tative. The problem identified here, that descriptions of the students (‘passive’) and

their actions (‘chose’) provide an ambiguous account of student agency, is a result

of this unexamined cognitive psychological assumption whereby mental state is

encrypted as social action. Greater attention needs to be paid by researchers to the

discursive construction of agency. The legitimacy of the researcher’s decoding of

mental state from social action must be interrogated and any claims subjected to

expectations of corroborative data (e.g. the students’ own accounts).

2.3 Cultural Historical Activity Theory

Goulart and Roth’s (2010) study of student agency was grounded in cultural historical

activity theory. They defined ‘agency’ in terms of a structure/agency dialectic:

human beings live in a world already (socially and culturally) structured and do not only

react to the contingencies posed by the surrounding world but also have the power to

transform this world, which implies their agency to promote changes all the while

being passive with respect to a world that predates their own existence. (Goulart &

Roth, 2010, p. 542)

The theoretical position elaborated by Goulart and Roth had earlier been fore-

grounded (1999) and described (2007) by Roth. Like Roth’s earlier articles, human

agency was taken as the embodied capacity of an individual to respond to contingen-

cies of situations. An individual’s capacity to make judgements about appropriate

action for a given situation, utilising available resources, has been called ‘practical

evaluation’ (Erimbayer & Mische, 1998). Resources, such as language and other

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symbols or cultural artefacts, provide cues to an actor evaluating what to do next in

interaction. Accordingly, Goulart and Roth stated that the main purpose of the

science curriculum in early childhood education was ‘to give young children a new

perspective of/on their surroundings by following the lead of their questions, support-

ing their own investigations and making available resources that allow them to

mobilise their agency’, which in turn ‘allows children to gain confidence in their

ability of right-correct-valuable judgement of the environment that they inhabit as

much as they themselves make it habitable’ (p. 535). Participants’ use of resources

in interaction were an integral part of Goulart and Roth’s analysis, which relied

upon classroom videotapes and illustrated how a teacher promoted student partici-

pation in curriculum development. Action contributing to the joint activity was inter-

preted in this study as the expression of agency.

Goulart and Roth, more so than Sharma, attended to the function of participants’

actions in ongoing whole-class conversations. Goulart and Roth recognised action,

including speech-action, as constitutive of social reality in the classroom, and dialogue

was accorded greater ontological status than in the other studies. However, their

analysis relied upon cognitive psychological assumptions of inner mental schemata

reflected in social action. There was also a lack of recognition of the constitutive

force of their own language in the construction of participants as agentic, as apparent

in Excerpts 5 and 6.

Excerpt 5 In displaying1 the subsequent cards, one by one on the poster board Denise2

[the teacher] makes1 this resource available for the children. . . This focal point2 makes

for a strong engagement among students in the sense that whenever the teacher2 adds1

a new card to the poster board, the children look at it. . . Denise2 displays1 the cards in

front of the children as if they could read them. . . These embodied actions2 (reading

the cards aloud, spreading them on the poster board, gazing to the children and being

together around it) are an invitation to participate. In this scenario the teacher is actively

passive3 in relation to the outcome of her own action whereas the children are passively

active3 in relation to the disposition to participate in the activity. (Goulart & Roth,

2010, p. 547)

Excerpt 6 The schemas2, generated in the course of this transaction, the consciousness of

the emergent order, make1 the resources come forth as salient figures against a more

diffuse ground as the students2 are now enabled1 to use the cards in designing their cur-

riculum together with the teacher. (Goulart & Roth, 2010, p. 550)

Goulart and Roth’s analysis included explicit categorisation of the students and

teacher in terms of their agency as ‘active’ or ‘passive’ (Excerpt 5). These descriptions

were related to a theorisation of action provided within cultural historical activity

theory. Also in Goulart and Roth’s report, theoretical entities such as ‘schema’

(Excerpt 6) were constructed as agents in sentences, facilitating the agency of the stu-

dents (and the teacher), whose agency is expressed more readily with the support of

the publicly articulated schemas. Even though Goulart and Roth grounded their

analysis in dialogue between the teacher and her students, their warrant for indexing

responsibility, explicitly (by naming the person) or implicitly (by naming the things

they produced), was not a feature of their report. In fact, the agency of those whose

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agency is enabled must be secondary to the agency of the enabler (the teacher), who,

by implication, had the authority to choose whether to enable student agency.

2.4 A Call for the Operationalisation of ‘Agency’

The studies in science education research that relied upon cognitive psychology

cannot be simply synthesised because each study operationalised agency differently,

foregrounding agency as either ‘projective’, ‘iterative’ or ‘practical evaluative’ (Erim-

bayer & Mische, 1998). Further to this, the separate studies do not make their differ-

ently conceived operationalisation explicit. However, the way agency was

operationalised was reflected in the chosen methods for research. For example, reflec-

tive interviews were incorporated into the critical studies as a window into the partici-

pants’ aspirations and desires (projectivity), but not in the studies whose definitions

aligned most closely to agency as the capacity for iteration and practical evaluation.

In the study defining agency as the capacity for practical evaluation (Goulart &

Roth, 2010), records of participants’ ongoing interaction with each other were the

preferred data source. In the study more aligned with participants’ iterative capacities,

observation or recording of students’ routine practices both in and out of school was a

necessary data source (Sharma, 2007). Due to the theorisation of agency according to

different ontological commitments, this research on student agency in science cannot

be synthesised simply. The contingencies affecting the synthesis of theoretically dis-

tinct accounts have been discussed elsewhere (Clarke et al., 2012).

The discursive analysis of the different researchers’ use of language in assigning

agency to research participants reported in this section illustrates that the discursive

practice of assigning agency involves the use of grammar to index responsibility and

assign volition. In the excerpts from the research reports, researchers have constructed

participants as personally responsible in the research accounts, but the constitutive

force of language in social interaction has not been acknowledged, and the specific

meanings of participants’ language in use has not been taken adequately into

account. In many of these reports, translations have been made from un-explicated

student discourse to un-explicated researcher discourse. This methodological

problem is due to unexamined assumptions of cognitive psychology underlying the

research. Such assumptions absolve the researcher of any responsibility for the vali-

dation of researcher interpretations of individual’s utterances in support of a given

interpretation.

3. Researching Social Positioning as Responsible: A Discursive

Psychological Approach

The assumptions of cognitive psychology have been subjected to convincing review by

social scientists inspired by Wittgenstein and others in what has become known as the

‘discursive turn’ (Kroger & Wood, 1998) or the ‘second cognitive revolution’ (Harre,

1992b). In light of these arguments, discursive psychology was chosen to theoretically

frame the study of student agency in a science classroom reported by Arnold (2012b).

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Building upon Davies’ (1990) work, she operationalised agency as a discursive prac-

tice. This approach is less usual in educational research and, particularly in science

education, where the dominant paradigm has been cognitive psychology (Lemke,

2001). According to Davies, the pertinent questions are not related to whether the

students have or ‘express agency’ conceived in terms of individual intentions, but

are related to whether students are given ‘access to discursive practices through

which they can take themselves up as agentic (responsible) beings’ (p. 358). In discur-

sive psychological terms, a person’s agency has been defined as his or her positioning

in a conversation as responsible (Arnold, 2012b).

In conversation, a person is positioned relative to others in jointly realised social

acts. A ‘position’ is used in discursive psychology to refer to a person’s social–psycho-

logical location in a conversation (Davies & Harre, 1990; Harre & van Langenhove,

1999b). It is a discursive phenomenon developed to replace the static notion of a

‘role’ and must be distinguished from the use of the word ‘position’ by other edu-

cational researchers to describe predetermined roles within social groups (Barton &

Tan, 2010; Leander & Osborne, 2007; Shanahan, 2009; Yerrick & Gilbert, 2011).

A role is a bundle of activities, which defines the social function of the person,

while tending to ignore their agency. Positions are locations from which persons act

in a conversation and, together with conversational storylines, make the meaning of

action relatively determinate. In positioning theory, a storyline is the discursive ana-

logue of an established social ‘role’. Whereas a role brings with it presumptions of

responsibility and expectation regarding the social function of the individual, in posi-

tioning theory, a storyline is discursively performed when participants accept the

affordances and constraints conferred on their speech acts by the conventions of

the particular storyline. In other words, social meaning is made at the nexus of ‘pos-

itions’, ‘storylines’ and ‘acts/action’ (The ‘Positioning Triad’, Harre & van Langen-

hove, 1999a). Storylines can remain uncontested (first-order positioning), and

unfold according to a history of joint activity, or actors can reposition themselves

(second-order positioning), opening up possibilities for different storylines. In discur-

sive psychology, any action is understood as intentional in the sense that it is a prac-

tical response to one’s environment and presupposes a response from other. In

interpreting social meaning, the actor draws upon a repertoire of language games

(his or her Umwelt) at the moment of participation and exercises choice.

Discursive psychology was used in Arnold’s study to define agency as a person’s

positioning in a conversation as responsible for social action. She developed a

coding system to mark participating students’ agentic positioning in their science

classroom conversations. The coding system, referred to as ‘the grammar of

agency’ (Arnold, 2012b) included indexical features of the English language that

can be used to claim or assign this responsibility, condensed into three coding

items: ‘pronouns’, ‘modality’ and ‘tense’ (see Table 1). The social meaning of partici-

pants’ action, and, in particular, whether or not their positioning as responsible was

conventionalised in the conversations, was then analysed using ‘the positioning

triad’ of acts, positions and storylines (Harre & van Langenhove, 1999a). The empha-

sis in researching agency in this study was on the social meaning of participants’

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discourse, rather than on the interpretation of participants’ action as evidence of indi-

vidual goals, intentions, mental states or cognitive schemata.

In Arnold’s study, the grammar of agency was used to select conversational episodes

that exemplified variability in participants’ capacity for agentic positioning. The

report consisted of the phonological transcripts of these episodes juxtaposed with

the researcher’s discursive psychological analysis of the social meaning of the partici-

pants’ actions. This dialogical approach reflected the high ontological status accorded

to participants’ social acts (Arnold, 2012b, p. 41). Findings from this study were that

the participating students’ agentic self-positioning corresponded with student-

initiated inquiry but that their inquiries remained unpublished beyond their small

group. The students’ personal agency was supported by the participating students’

Table 1. The grammar of agency

The grammar of agency

Pronouns

Use of the singular first person pronoun locates personal responsibility for the content of the

utterance to the speaker or marks the speaker’s sense of personal responsibility for the utterance

itself. Use of the first person is a culturally embedded practice, performatively realising the speaker’s

location amongst others as an individual imbued with personal agency. Use of the first person plural

can signal an attempt to recruit the audience to the speaker’s position or align the speaker with a

position attributed to the audience. The use of the first person plural can invoke a collective entity

and thereby diffuse personal responsibility and signal a shared sense of responsibility with members

of a group or collective agency. The use of the second person can often be used to deflect personal

responsibility from the speaker and index it to public personae

Pronouns and epistemic verbs provide an indexical progression of the varying degree that a

speaker can take responsibility for utterances (Muhlhausler & Harre, 1990, p. 94), ranging from

statements not explicitly indexed to the speaker by way of the ‘unmarked first person’ where there is

only weak speaker commitment to the reliability of a remark, to the use of the first person and

epistemic verbs such as ‘believe’, ‘think’, ‘know’ and ‘understand’, where varying degrees of

commitment to the content can be made by a speaker

Modality

The grammatical mood of a sentence (reflected as the verb in the sentence) indexes responsibility

to the speaker in the sense that it indicates the way the speaker is conceiving of the sentence subject.

There are three moods in English: the indicative, subjunctive and imperative. The indicative mood is

used by a speaker to represent something as a fact, and it includes questions, opinions and

observations. The subjunctive mood is used by a speaker to represent something as a possibility or

something that is conceived of in the mind, including an idea. The imperative mood is used by a

speaker to represent something as a command or request

Modal verbs such as ‘have to’ and ‘want to’ can index responsibility to the speaker to varying

degrees. The use of ‘have to’ can deflect responsibility from the speaker and the use of ‘want to’ can

strongly index responsibility to the speaker

Tense

Speakers choice of tense can mark their sense of responsibility either as a person relative to other

persons in the present conversation (usually the present tense) or as a character in a biographical

story (usually the past tense), see Harre and van Langenhove (1999c)

Source: Adapted from Arnold (2012b).

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discursive practices only when it aligned with the official (teacher’s) discourses. The

students’ sense of collective agency was evident in their small group discourse but

was not given voice in official discourses. It is our contention that contemporary ped-

agogies of science education create conditions for the realisation of collective agency,

such as the orchestration of practical tasks in small groups, but frequently fail to give

that collective agency voice and authority in public, teacher-sanctioned, classroom

discourse (Arnold, 2012b, pp. 250–251).

Excerpt 7 provides an example of the analysis using discursive psychology (adapted

from Arnold, 2012b, pp. 185–186) and shows student-initiated inquiry into the func-

tion of a tissue during a set task performed by the girls in their small group.

Excerpt 7 The participating students, Tasha and Kesar, had just observed that a tissue in a

cup stayed dry when the cup was upturned and submerged into water. The dry tissue

(more specifically, the absence of water in the cup) was intended by the teacher to

provide an observable phenomenon as evidence that gases take up space. This activity

is commonly used for exploring the properties of matter. The instructions on Kesar

and Tasha’s handout (provided by their teacher) included, ‘Write an inference to

explain your observation’. Their dialogue took place when Tasha paused from writing.

Tasha: Yeah (.) so how does it wo:rk (.) the air goes into the cup and (.) what?

Kesar: ,Um.¼

Tasha: ¼.and the tissue somehow stops it, heh

Kesar: And let’s—I want to do that again just to observe it I—[Picks up the cup and places it

upside down in the tub of water.]

Tasha: Can we do that again? Please. [Looks around the room, locating the box of tissues.]

Kesar: [Picks up cup]. Do we need—[pushes the cup upside down into the tub of water

without the tissue] ah yeah (.) we probably didn’t.1

Tasha’s use of the indicative mood in framing a question and providing a hypothesis as to

why the tissue stayed dry marked her first two turns as agentic positioning because the

indicative mood indexes responsibility to the speaker. By flagging her hypothesis as

incomplete (‘somehow’) and laughing, she reduced the reliability of her hypothesis and

positioned the other group members as responsible for evaluating it, or for participating

in co-constructing an explanation, introducing the possible storyline: ‘Students Respon-

sible for Providing Explanations in Collaborative Dialogue’. Kesar responded to Tasha’s

appeal, her actions revealing that she was unable to provide a satisfactory explanation.

However, instead of commenting upon Tasha’s hypothesis and engaging in collaborative

dialogue, she indexed her sense of personal agency using the first person and by describ-

ing her psychological state as ‘wanting’. She acted according to her expression of desire by

immediately picking up the cup and placing it into the water without the tissue. She did

this without waiting for approval from Tasha or the other group members. Her use of the

first person in saying, ‘I want to do that again’ was marked because it was not in alignment

with the sense of shared obligation to perform the experiment usually expressed by the

group members, for example, Tasha’s appeal to the group, ‘Can we do that again?

Please’. Kesar’s sense of personal responsibility aligns with a storyline identified as domi-

nant in the girls’ discourse: ‘Students as Individually Responsible for Written Assessment

Tasks’.

In the last turn, Kesar spoke quietly, her utterances were incomplete and were not

directed to an audience. In individually realised acts, she repositioned herself as

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responsible by forming her question and resolving her own inquiry. Kesar’s question, ‘Do

we need—[the tissue]’, was a different question from Tasha’s initial question about the

role of the tissue. Kesar’s talk revealed the sense she was making of her observations

including her evaluation that the tissue was probably not necessary. Her actions, from

expressing her desire to resolving her inquiry, align with Dewey’s theory of inquiry as a

creative need-desire-inquiry-satisfaction cycle that result in learning. (Garrison, 1996)

Collaborative dialogue regarding Tasha’s hypothesis did not eventuate and, in her written

report, Tasha wrote, ‘The air goes into the cup and rebounds off the tissue’. In her written

report, Kesar wrote, ‘The air pushed the water out of the way’. The episode illustrates a

lack of social resources for students’ agentic positioning. Tasha’s hypothesis was not

voiced beyond the group of three girls and not available to be taken up by anyone in

the classroom and Kesar’s agentic self-positioning was published as private, individually

realised acts and not in a public, collective space within the classroom.

In the discursive approach illustrated in Excerpt 7, the analysis of meaning was

achieved in a simultaneous analysis of ‘acts’, ‘positioning’ and evolving ‘storylines’

(the positioning triad). The analysis of social meaning conducted in this way is analo-

gous to the process of meaning making by participants in a conversation (Harre & van

Langenhove, 1999a). In this sense, any action in the social world is intentional, used

by actors in the process of active meaning making for a co-constructed purpose and

presupposing a response from an ‘other’ (Coulter, 1999, after Bakhtin). The phrase

‘practical intentionality’ (Shotter, 1995) captures this idea of relational sense-

making. Kesar’s acts of inquiry emerged from the conversational context. However,

rather than performing according to preconceived goals, aspirations or intentions,

such as those that could be articulated in an interview context, Kesar acted with ‘prac-

tical intentionality’ into the lived situation. Kesar’s agentic self-positioning, ‘I want to

do that again’, indexed by her use of the first person and the modal verb ‘to want’, was

called forth by the circumstances, and not because of a pre-existing plan of action.

The dialogical approach, shown in Excerpt 7, of reporting analyses together with

the phonological representation of participants’ discourse enables a reader to relate

the data to the researcher’s interpretations, a requirement for satisfying the criterion

of ‘trustworthiness’ for studies in discourse (Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Wood &

Kroger, 2000). Likewise, the account of the moment-by-moment negotiation of

meaning between the participants, in which the researcher’s interpretations can be

explicitly indexed to the relevant data, was intended to heighten the readers’ accep-

tance of the researcher accounts as ‘trustworthy’. This approach maintains the

sense of participants’ acts as relatively determinate, while avoiding any un-explicated

translation of participants’discourse into researcher discourse. The polyphonic device

of pointing to participants’ social acts (meaning-making) as co-constructed with

others through their conversations was used in the research account in the pursuit

of the integrity of the research, and transparency in the interpretation of participant

discourse.

Arnold’s account of the agentic positioning of science students was constructed to

provide an instrumental case exploring the potential of discursive psychology for

researching student agency in classroom episodes. The participating students were

girls, successful students according to local assessment practices, accustomed to

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working together in science and part of a stable friendship group. The curriculum

enacted in their classroom could be described as ‘pipeline science’ (Aikenhead,

2005) and the pedagogical style of the teacher could be described as ‘student-

centred’ (Kalantzis & Cope, 2008). The classroom was in a large, government sec-

ondary college in Victoria, Australia, serving a predominantly middle class population

with a high percentage of first- and second-generation migrant families. Further

research is clearly needed to understand how opportunities for agentic positioning

arise or could be conventionalised in different contexts, for example, how a ‘discourse

of inquiry’ (Jennings & Mills, 2009) could impact upon students’ meaning making

and capacity for positioning as personally and collectively agentic in science.

4. Discussion and Implications

This article has shown that there is variety in the way agency has been defined for

research in science education. The varied definitions have methodological impli-

cations and, whilst this is not seen as problematic, clear operationalisation of

‘agency’ has been overlooked in the majority of the research reports. A synthesis of

the review conducted in this article is provided in Table 2.

It is recommended that researchers in the future clearly define and operationalise

agency in research accounts, and Erimbayer and Mische’s (1998) analytical dimen-

sions of agency (‘projectivity’, ‘iteration’ and ‘practical evaluation’), including combi-

nations of these dimensions, could be considered for this purpose.

The discursive psychological approach to researching agency described in Section 3

of this article provided an alternative means for addressing the problem that agency

can be defined in researcher discourse in a variety of ways. In the discursive psycho-

logical approach, there is a shift in focus from assigning intentionality to participants

(researcher discourse) to understanding participants’ discourse. The discursive

psychological perspective suggests that action cannot be explained by referring to

individual intentions. Instead, the practice of stating an intention needs to be under-

stood in terms of the social meaning achieved in the stating and in terms of social prac-

tices in which particular persons have the right to claim responsibility for their actions

or to label an outcome as the result of their intended action (Davies, 1990). All actions

are dialogically or responsively linked to the previous, already performed acts and to

anticipated next possible actions that can only be understood in the context of the

culture at large (Shotter, 1995, p. 65). Drawing upon Bakhtin (1986), Shotter

(among others) has called for a shift away from cognitive psychological explanations

to a more holistic conceptualisation of action that can account for the rhetorical-

responsive nature of action in the social world:

Something is going on here that cannot be understood by being separated out into auton-

omously behaving parts simply in interaction with each other; something is happening

that makes us—or ought to make us—question the adequacy of our current analytic

forms of descriptions, that confronts us with the necessity for a more holistic form of

talk. (Shotter, 1995, p. 53)

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Relational concepts of personhood and responsibility such as ‘joint action’ and

‘positioning’, ‘practical intentionality’ and conversational ‘storylines’ and a prag-

matic view of language are provided in discursive psychology and were used by

Arnold (2012a, 2012b) as an example of a more holistic approach to researching

agency. Arnold (2012b) marked participants’ sense of responsibility in everyday dis-

course using the ‘grammar of agency’, an approach that renders the different dimen-

sions of agency, as theorised by Erimbayer and Mische, as salient according to

participants’ discourse, rather than according to a researcher’s analytic choice. Con-

sideration of agency as discursively performed, without the obligation for attribution

to individuals’ mental states, enables the consideration of collective agency as poten-

tially explanatory of schisms between individual and aggregated agencies of whole-

class practice. Such collective agency may serve more than the researchers’ explana-

tory purposes and offer, as well, a key pedagogical strategy, whose optimisation

might contribute to contemporary aspirations to engage and affirm students as lear-

ners of science.

Table 2. Synthesising research on student agency in science

Author(s) What is agency?

Analytical

dimensions

foregrounded Contribution

Student age agency in science education

Sharma

(2007)

The selective iteration of

discursive practices

Iteration Students’ out-of-school

discourse can be used as

resources for enacting

student agency in the science

classroom

Basu (2008),

Barton and Tan

(2010)

The capacity to act

towards the realisation of

personal goals aspirations

and values

Projectivity Students’ knowledge of

science can equip them with

the capacity to meet their

personal goals, aspirations

and values

Siry and

Lang (2010)

The capacity to effect

change in social practice in

alignment with one’s goals,

aspirations and values

Projectivity Cogenerative dialogue can

support the enactment of

student agency

Goulart and

Roth (2010)

The capacity to take action

in a social context

Practical evaluative Teacher’s can support the

enactment of student agency

by providing students with

access to cultural resources

Arnold

(2012a, 2012b)

The discursive practice of

positioning oneself or

being positioned as

responsible

Any dimension as it

arises in

participants’

discourse

Student agency in science

can be constituted through

the small group and

supported when teachers

draw upon the personal and

collective responsibility of

the members of this group

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The article showed that, regardless of whether a cognitive or discursive approach

was adopted, accounts of student agency need to be constructed in ways that are

mindful of the constitutive force of language. In every research account, the discursive

practice of positioning is drawn upon to construct participants and researchers as

more or less responsible for social action. Acknowledging this implies that theories

used in any translation of participant discourse to researcher discourse should be

made explicit, and that research designed to understand and promote student

agency in science education should attend to the social context of a research site as

integral to any account.

Note

1. Phonological transcription conventions follow those endorsed by Wood and Kroger (2000):

,words. spoken slowly; .words, spoken quickly; (.) pause for less than a second; wo:rd

elongated sound; [descriptions] description of nonverbal action; ¼ ¼ latched speech; word-

cut off speech; words quiet speech.

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