Research about Learner Agency
The result of phenomenographic research is an outcome space of different categories of description. This reseach yielded four qualitatively different categories of description about how students perceived their learner agency.
Each interview transcript was assigned a different color font in order to support the researcher's memory in keeping the snippets in the original context while placing them into the outcome space. Reading different sentences in each comlumn it is easy to see how the theme emerged, as students are talking about similar things with different words and examples. The four categories of description describe students’ perceptions of their learner agency as it was seen to emerge from the interviews when the narratives of learning experiences were compared to analyze the differences and similarities found in the data.
From left to right the descriptive categories are:
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Detachment from learning
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Belonging to the school community
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Synergy of learning ownership
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Unbound ubiquitous learning
In the detachment category there is very little learner agency used in the classroom engagement, as students are trying to pass the exams, instead of really learning the content. In the belonging category students appear to have more of learner agency, as they experience the respect while engaging in the classroom and going through the motions of compliant learning activities. In the category of synergy students are more aware of their own learning needs, and emphasize the importance of life-long learning, still being guided by the structure of formal learning institution. In the final category of unbound learning students exert their autonomous learning habits both inside and outside of the formal education system, and exhibit strong learner agency and the ability to understand the interplay of the structure and agency in formal education.
Learner agency is considered to increase from left to right. In detachment category learning is reduced to memorizing and pssing tests, and in belonging category compliance is emphasized. One way to express this could be saying that it is 9-5 learning, whereas the two other categories reflect more of the ongoing 24/7 learning. Synergy of learning ownership seems to support students' own learning and the learning experiences in the rightmost category reflected deeply self-directed and self-regulated learning.
Considering how subjective students’ perceptions about their learning experiences are, it is important to try to understand how we could improve the learning experiences each individual student has at school. One way of improving school well-being is engaging in student-centered and learning-centered practices (APA, 2015).
American Psychological Association, Coalition for Psychology in Schools and Education. (2015). Top 20 principles from psychology for pre K–12 teaching and learning. Retrieved from http:// www.apa.org/ed/schools/cpse/top-twenty-principles.pdf