Browsing by Subject "mahdollistaminen"

Aim. During the last decade, there has been a lot of discussion about agency as a part of children’s lives in and out of school. Agency has even become one of the priorities of Finnish education in the National Core Curriculum for Basic Education. Still, the definition of agency remains ambiguous, even contradictory; there is no univocal way to define the phenomenon. One way to conceptualise agency is to view it as an individual’s (or group’s) ability to influence on their life circumstances and practices in which they are involved (Rainio, 2010). Rainio has identified dialectical contradictions in supporting students’ agentive participation in education. One such contradictory dimension is between agency and control in educational relationships. It is important that teachers find ways to balance with this dialectics to enable pupils to practice their agency in the pressures of school’s structure, rules and other educational aims. The aim of this study is to find and specify the ways in which the teacher can, by employing certain interaction and pedagogical techniques, give pupils’ agency an opportunity to be realised in the context of phenomenon based learning in special education (see also Lipponen & Kumpulainen, 2011; Rainio, 2010). Methodology. Qualitative video research was utilised as the method of research in this study. The data of this research was collected by videotaping phenomenon based learning in class of special education. At the time of taping there were eight pupils and one special education teacher present. In this study 7 h 54 min of videotape was analysed using interaction analysis. The aim of the analysis was to identify all the episodes in which the teachers was enabling pupil agency. These episodes were then compared with each other to identify the common interactional patterns employed by the teacher. Results and conclusion. Five different ways of enabling student agency were identified in this study: making pupils accountable authors, active positioning, recognising and appreciating ideas and contributions, sharing authority and transferring authority. The results were parallel to what Lipponen and Kumpulainen (2011) have reported as empowering agency of pre-service teachers. The results indicate that it is important to enable every pupil to participate in the teaching event in a way that supports the empowerment of their agency by taking into account their own level of development as well. By doing so the teacher is developing pupils’ agency and empowering their ability to make a difference in their own life. This is a particularly significant observation in terms of integrated pupils with special needs. The explicated examples in this study give teachers practical tools to enable and empower pupils’ agency in everyday life at schools.