From Interpsychological to Intrapsychological: Developing Students' Agency

Abstract

This paper starts from the contradictions that permeate the Latin American democratic context to discuss how psychology can contribute to expanding students' agency in public schools located in vulnerable contexts marked by poverty and social exclusion. The contributions of Cultural-Historical Psychology and German Critical Psychology are articulated to substantiate the importance of building participatory spaces for human development. The authors were inserted in a public school from the year 2015 to the year 2017, holding class assemblies with primary school students. The content discussed in these meetings was recorded in field diaries, from which three narratives were selected for analysis. The first narrative deals with a discussion of physical education activities; the second presents a student sharing his suffering in the face of bullying as he cries in class; the third reports a discussion about the theft of a pencil. It is concluded that guided by critical perspective, psychology can contribute to the strengthening of subjects, collaborating to the expansion of their agency.