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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: [email protected]
# 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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