Fostering Student Learning Agency and Autonomy

Abstract

In this chapter we focus more directly on how AfL practices can provide opportunities for students to develop identities as capable and independent learners who are aware of and able to employ the accountability systems for knowledge generation and legit-imation in a discipline. To do this we step back to consider how the classroom culture for learning provides opportunities for students to exercise agency and authority. Specifically, we illustrate how the InSiTE teachers' fostered student learning and learning autonomy through patterns of participation that construed learning as a social practice and shared responsibility. We detail the ways the teachers sought to ensure students had access to a range of opportunities for feedback and to manage the distribution of authority in ways that supported student affiliation with science/ technology. The reader will have already encountered some of the telling examples we use to illustrate these ideas. This is deliberate. We have revisited examples from earlier chapters as a way of creating a sense of continuity and connection for readers. Revisiting also highlights the extent to which different aspects of AfL overlap and merge to contribute to individual and collective student learning capacity, agency and affiliation with science and technology. The chapter features student commentary on their learning and the learning process. Throughout the examples we consider what it is about science and technology classrooms that can provide a productive context for students to exercise agency within a system of accountabilities. WHAT IS INVOLVED WITH STUDENT LEARNING AGENCY AND AUTONOMY? Royce Sadler (1989) has argued that the indispensible conditions for improvement are that students move from being consumers to active participants in their own learning and assessment. Put another way, students need to move from being the recipients of feedback to someone who takes an active role in monitoring and progressing their own learning. As Margaret Carr (2001) explains it, learner agency of this kind involves students being ready, willing and able to monitor and progress their own learning. As autonomous and agentic learners students are attuned to opportunities to learn, to making deeper sense of their own learning and they know-ing when and how to take strategic action to progress their learning. They have what Guy Claxton (1995) has evocatively described as 'a nose for quality' along with the means and inclination to pursue this. As Kathryn Ecclestone (2004) reminds us, autonomy is both a goal and a set of processes for realising that goal.