Reconsidering Teacher Presence and Community Building in an Online ESOL College Composition Course During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The pandemic of 2019 exposed considerable weaknesses in how teachers were present and communities were built in asynchronous, international, online ESOL composition classrooms. Although teachers put more time into their courses, students still felt disconnected from their educational experience. This study, through student surveys and teacher reflections, followed two teachers who devised innovative solutions to actively do “being present” as teachers and to thereby more compellingly draw students into the community-building process despite the limitations of the online space amidst an international crisis. Included are recommendations about specific ways to challenge traditional online instructional methods, to allow and promote student agency through unstructured and semi-structured activities, to create connections via strategic vulnerability, and more. Also discussed are key concepts for future research and general conclusions about the need for such teacher adaptability and the lessons from it, both for during the pandemic and beyond it.

Teaching Safety, Compliance, and Critical Thinking in Special Education Classrooms

Special educators are tasked with teaching students with disabilities to understand and adhere to social norms for their own safety and acceptance in society. This chapter explores ways special educators can teach critical thinking alongside these social and cultural norms in order to support student agency. One special educator shares her experiences working with students with disabilities in urban public schools as she grapples with teaching her students what they need to know to be safe, while also teaching to challenge oppressive social and behavioral expectations.

Death Reminders

Discussing school shootings as current or historical events in social studies classrooms can be a difficult endeavour, as it requires confronting death and making sense of violent human behaviour. This chapter asserts that existential anxiety plays a role in helping us better understand these tragedies. Terror management theory (TMT) accounts for existential anxiety as a driver of human behaviour and can be a powerful conceptual tool to help students and teachers unpack the difficult subject matter of school shootings, as well as provide insight for behavioural responses that may emerge in the classroom in response to these discussions. As a result, TMT contributes a classroom of care that fosters a sense of student agency for which to imagine a preferable future.

Crafting to Code

Critter Code is an innovative informal arts-integrated computer science experience created to provide a unique opportunity to reach students from underserved urban populations. Designed to make the connections between physical making and coding, learning to program becomes the bridge between a crafted “Critter” and its digital version starring in a student-created video game. This chapter offers a rich analysis of the impact of Critter Code on participants, families, and instructors through the framework of the self-determination theory of motivation. The chapter then describes Critter Code's application of collaborative problem-solving and student agency to create personal connections to the content to positively affect students' computer science self-identity and interest. Finally, potential classroom applications and future research directions are explored.

A Lecture-Based Instructional System to Promote Student Agency

This research study was conducted in 2018 and resulted in an instructional system designed to support university instructors that seek to promote student agency in lecture-based learning environments. The objective of the study was to design and test an instructional system that supplements the traditional lecture and provides opportunities for the development of agentic engagement. In support of the instructional system design, the study examined ways in which university undergraduates used a digital backchannel, determined if using a digital backchannel affected agentic engagement, and identified the features of a digital backchannel that influenced student agency. The study employed a mixed methodology design using a questionnaire to collect quantitative student profile data and phenomenography to conduct a qualitative inquiry into participants’ experience. The population for this study consisted of undergraduates at a private, international university located outside of Bangkok, Thailand. A total of 171 participants took part in this study, with ten students selected for a focus group through a non-probability, purposive sampling. Overall, the study found that a lecturing system that employs the strategic use of a digital backchannel can promote student agentic engagement. Student agency and instructor effectiveness were both positively influenced through the employment of an instructional system.

Campus Food Provision as Radical Pedagogy? Following Students on the Path to Equitable Food Systems

On campuses across North America, students are actively prefiguring alternatives to the fundamental inequities and unsustainability of the capital-intensive, industrialized food system. While rarely recognized as such, these Campus Food System Alternatives (CFSA) are intensely pedagogical spaces, and often—importantly—are student led and directed. We make the case that CFSA are sites for a “pedagogy of radical hope” that (a) centre student agency, (b) through informal and prefigurative learning. So far these spaces have received scant scholarly attention, though inasmuch as they constitute pathways toward more equitable and sustainable food systems, while informing liberatory pedagogical practice, we argue that it is high time for CFSA to be taken seriously.

Student agency in Non-Traditional Learning Spaces: Life in-between and on the fringes

Non-Traditional Learning Spaces (NTLS) boasting innovative building designs that embody an array of modern technology, visually and functionally sever schooling practices from the factory model, suggesting a reconceptualisation of what it is to ‘do school’ at the level of research and practice. This process of reconceptualisation includes reconceptualised pedagogical practice, and the development by students of spatial competency. In this regard, ‘student agency’ plays a significant role. For some years now, student agency has been prioritised by education policymakers and reformers alike, and it is a concept that has become central to questions relating to teacher practice and student life in NTLS. In this article, agency is construed as a contestable, politically domesticated construct that is reduced to student engagement with prescribed, mainstream and ‘official’ educational processes. We argue, instead, that the notion of student agency be taken beyond this sanitised usage, so that the broader complexity of agentic practices be understood. Understanding student agentic practice in NTLS is a critical dimension of the overall aim of more rigorously theorising spatiality, and in this article, we begin the task of considering how student agentic practices can be included in achieving that aim. Therefore, we discuss and explore the complexities of agentic student behaviour, considering where it is located in the complex relationship between the development of student spatial competence and mere compliance in NTLS.