Fighting disadvantage: (dis)empowerment, learning and school.
Working in a low socio-economic setting, teachers are surrounded by stories of hardship and challenge that at times can be difficult to believe, much less know how to support. We are acutely aware of the immediate physical or even psychological challenges these students face, through the myriad frameworks and explanations from eminently qualified experts and their data. However, I think even our modern teaching practices often miss a crucial element required to understand the true impact of these circumstances. This element is the loss of personal agency and power.
All students need to feel agency in their lives, an agency that school can often deny. They are provided with paint-by-numbers, pitched to the middle teaching experiences. These traditional school and program structures can actively undermine a student’s ability to be and feel empowered. These structures are often disconnected from the real world and provide little to no way for students to apply their knowledge, let alone to take action in their world or their wider community.
Poverty takes you out of your power
Disadvantage and poverty actively disempower you. As a young, economically disadvantaged kid, you can feel powerless, like the system is stacked against you. And honestly, in my own lived experience, it often is. It can create a sense of learned helplessness, like nothing that you do will make any difference to your circumstances. At this stage, I’m not even talking about how the supposedly meritocratic systems of life and work are actively weighted towards those with wealth and privilege. I’m talking about how you can take steps to improve your own situation: get a few more hours at work or start a new course to get a higher paying or more fulfilling job in the future, and what is often the consequence? Your support payments are reduced or you get cut off altogether, often leaving you with a less stable or financially secure position than when you began. Where is the incentive to take action?
When I was in my final year of high school, my mum, a 49 year-old who had struggled as a single parent for well over a decade, balancing part-time work and raising my brother and I, decided to go back to study a Masters degree in information management. Her hope was to create a better, more financially stable situation for herself, as well as my 16 year-old brother and I. She made a decision that those in government, especially those on the right, should have championed: she took active steps to get away from needing government supports. Yet the system forced her to jump through multiple, increasingly ridiculous hoops just to try to maintain some income during this transition and during the period she was studying our family income was drastically reduced. She was forced onto what was effectively the dole, ineligible for any kind of study allowance, despite studying full-time. We came dangerously close to having nothing.
Mum passed away suddenly later that year and never finished her studies, but her experience has left an indelible mark on my understanding of the challenges of working in a system from a socially disempowered position. The system not only doesn’t support empowerment, it can actively undermine the agency of the disenfranchised. It takes away your ability to have your own identity beyond that defined for you by your position in relation to the system.
This sense of helplessness and loss of agency can follow you throughout your life, unless you have other experiences that actively serve to fight back, to reassert a sense of identity and agency. Life experiences teach us our value and our ability, or even right, to act to change our circumstances. This is true for both the positive and the negative.
So what can we do about this? What can we do about a seemingly intractable system-wide problem with no easy reactive fixes? We focus on the powerful, proactive system that we do have at our disposal: education.
Because of the ways in which systems can disempower the marginalised, students from low socioeconomic settings need to feel more empowered and that they can have an impact on their world, a necessity perhaps more urgent than for any other group. Schools have an incredible opportunity and responsibility to engage with this challenge. Yet how often can we say that our programs at school actually meet these lofty ambitions?
Traditional, teacher-centred methods of instruction serve to reinforce the idea that students do not know or do not have any meaningful or purposeful perspectives to contribute. This is a theft of power that compounds the disempowerment of poverty. It also undermines many of the principles of modern educational visions that most teachers would say they support or use.
Documents are necessary, but not sufficient
Teachers in Victoria, where I work, have no shortage of documents that are meant to place students and their empowerment at the centre of everything, high among these being the Practice Principles for excellence in teaching and learning. These outline the foundational requirements for high-level teaching and learning in the state. Principle number three, placed above curriculum, assessment and parent partnerships, is Student voice, agency and leadership empower students and build school pride.
“…empower students…”
It’s right there, in a document that all schools and teachers are meant to work by every day. You can add Amplify, the document that elaborates on the importance of student voice and agency specifically, as another tool that is meant to centre the work of student agency for all teachers. In practice it does not. These documents are undoubtably well-intentioned but they can cause us to fall into the all-too-easy trap of assuming that because a document exists, the work is done. We can convince ourselves that knowing these documents and implementing some superficial feedback mechanisms or workshops meets our requirements.
But the work of empowering students cannot be a box that is simply and quickly ticked. It is an ongoing, iterative process that becomes embedded in the day-to-day business of learning for both students and teachers. That is a substantially more difficult and complicated exercise, requiring a vastly greater level of commitment from all teachers. It also requires a total rethink of how teaching and learning are delivered for our students.
Agency as empowerment and identity
The central tenet for empowering students is putting at the core of instruction the opportunity for students to take action in their communities. The scale of this action is less important than the fact that it is purposeful for them. Empowered students can see that their actions matter and that they can make change. This has the potential to reshape their identities, not only as successful learners, but also as people with the ability to influence their own lives and the lives of others for the better.
Individual agency is a shifting, ephemeral entity and one that is difficult to define and pin down. It emerges out of our past and current experiences, as well as our perceptions and beliefs about the future. It can be modelled as the opposite of hopelessness, linked to positive psychology principles via the work of Seligman et al. and it can also been seen as an ecology, emerging as the sum total of all the relationships that have an impact on us. For better or worse, school is a huge part of that ecosystem and we need to actively find new ways to give students power in their learning and in their lives.
New learning requires new pillars
Truly empowering students will involve a total rethink of how teaching and learning is structured. This needs to be new learning for students in a new paradigm. It will be built on a different set of foundations to those we may be accustomed to in traditional teaching, but at its core are elements of the best practices of modern teaching. There are five pillars that can be used to create the foundation to this new approach to learning.
1. Students take action in their community through a series of projects
The heart of this new approach to learning is students taking action and making change for themselves and their communities. This action can be on as small a scale as for themselves, their peer group or their class or as large as their town and city, right up to global issues of significance. The key prerequisite in all situations is that these issues and problems are identified and pursued by the students themselves, empowering them to find solutions and use their learning in meaningful ways. The process of developing agency then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy with each iterative cycle of action.
2. Capabilities form the core of learning outcomes
Almost all curriculum frameworks across Australia and around the world now contain either ‘cross-disciplinary’ or stand alone capabilities. These are usually what could be summarised as key skills that are agreed that modern students will need to be successful in the 21st century. In Victoria, we have four, stand-alone Capabilities: Critical and Creative Thinking, Ethical Capability, Intercultural Capability and Personal and Social Capability. These are misunderstood and underutilised in teaching and learning across our programs and systems. By making one of these capabilities the core focus of a term or project, it starts the work of adapting curriculum to match the 21st century. There exists no longstanding best practice as is the case for literacy and numeracy. This presents an opportunity to be at the forefront of developing that practice and creating a truly modern curriculum.
3. Learner agency is embedded through the program
The idea of learner agency is deeply complex and multi-faceted, making a genuine and effective incorporation into teaching and learning challenging. Much like the challenges around the capabilities, the pedagogy of learner agency is still emerging. This means that the approaches schools draw on are often experimental at best or based on flimsy understandings about what agency is or how it can develop. We need to start with developing an understanding of how agency emerges, in both students and teachers. Using this knowledge and capacity-building, we create a process along the way that embeds students in decision-making, analysis and planning. This principle is listed third, but it is inextricably linked to the first two: as students are able to take action about issues important to them, their agency further develops (and vice versa), while developing student capabilities gives them a wider skillset to use, further building their agentic potential.
These first three pillars form the core of teaching and learning, while the final two principles detailed below help put structure around these foundational concepts.
4. Projects incorporate cross-curriculum learning and literacy/numeracy skills
5. Student progress is assessed through rubrics, tracking transferable skill development
Given that much of the learning in this proposed new model will likely utilise inquiry learning, the learning outcomes for any such program need to be clearly defined and rigorously tracked for all students. Critics of student-led learning or inquiry models always point to flaws in ‘covering curriculum’ or in defining what students learned from the mandated frameworks. Often this criticism is well-deserved. Many inquiry programs have poorly-defined or non-aligned learning outcomes for students. But it is a mistake to assume that this is a necessary condition of this kind of learning. Clearly defining the outcomes from the relevant learning progression of the curriculum allows content and skills from across the framework to be integrated into each project. This creates the conditions for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary learning, breaking down silos of content and helping students to work in ways that better approach real-world expectations of employers. Literacy and numeracy skills are included in these outcomes, drawing on system-level learning progressions, assessment tools and an understanding by both students and teachers of what is needed for students to be successful in their projects.
The second aspect, once you have clear goals and outcomes, is the need to track progress towards the achievement of those goals. The focus on interdisciplinary work, not restricted to a single learning area or subject, allows teachers and students to focus on skill development within and across projects/units. The use of developmental practices must be a cornerstone of the new model. It is a truism in education to say that we value what we assess and therefore we have to find a way to assess what we value. Mixed-methods assessment, paired with rubrics that combine cognitive frameworks and curriculum-aligned learning progressions, provides a methodology to authentically monitor the skills and dispositions we want to help our students develop. The development of knowledge of key content is still important, and can be assessed alongside, but it is no longer the only thing that is valued in our assessment strategy.
By drawing on these five principles as the foundation for a new approach to teaching and learning, we will not only improve learning outcomes for our students. We will also provide an opportunity for marginalised and disempowered young people to take back their power and to see themselves as agents for change. These are outcomes that we will no doubt love to see, but we will still be beholden to a system that demands results on standardised tests and end of school rankings. Can the principles proposed above allow us to be accountable to these expectations as well?
Where’s the accountability?
In short, yes. Those students who are most poorly served by our current systems are our most marginalised, disenfranchised and disempowered. If we continue to hammer them with standard, supposedly “tried and tested” methods that have consistently not worked for them, then we cannot expect them to be successful. This leads to poor results for students and schools, as measured by the ‘conventional’ approaches. Disengaged students are not able to find success in conventional structures and we therefore have to find another, evidence-based approach, not only for their benefit, but also for that of the school and its community.
What is being proposed here is not as far out on a limb as you may think. Joanne McEachen and her Learner First approach, and the related Deep Learning, has shown time and again that a focus on student action, agency and the “big picture” leads to improved results on system outcomes. Students who develop agency are more engaged and more able to see the utility of their learning. This allows them to become more motivated to attend and learn, which in turn leads to better achievement (so long as the instruction they receive is up to the required standard). The dichotomy between engagement and rigour or accountability is a false one, provided you’re clear about what students are meant to achieve and the structures to track and monitor their progress are in place. People who are empowered are people who can achieve.
Education needs to reimagine how it works to better create the conditions for student agency and success. If we really want to address the disempowering and disenfranchising effect of poverty and traumatic life events, it takes more than superficial nods to student voice or cosmetic changes to curriculum. To give young people from all backgrounds the chance to fulfil their basic right to pursue a life of meaning and purpose, it will require a whole of system rethink of what is important in learning. This work needs commitment at all levels of education and a willingness to centre the capabilities and thinking needed to be successful in school and life. Anything less is a disservice to all students, but especially for the cohorts that can least afford it. We have the opportunity to put students ‘in their power’ and build their agentic potential. They have the potential and it is our responsibility to bring it to reality.
