I’ve become quite obsessed with the idea of learner agency lately. It seems to be cropping up all over the place in big and small ways. I have been actively following an agency experiment in a PYP school in Ho Chi Minh called Studio 5 (documented by their PYP coordinator, Taryn BondClegg in her blog, ‘ Making Good Humans ‘). Her recent post, ‘ Student Planned UOIs ‘ is absolutely fascinating and incredibly inspiring. I’ve been following their journey to be 100% authentic in creating an environment for learn
I also just found a blog post from Bud Hunt titled “ I’m not in love with the word empowerment “. He talks about how by its nature, empowering implies that there is a power structure in place and that there is power to be redistributed. He’d rather we get out of the empowerment business and into the “helping folks realize they can do things they didn’t think they could” business. Enabling students (not in the negative ‘enabler’ connotation–but the making room, making way for learning to happen way). Just ge
Power doesn’t work that way, at least, it shouldn’t. Not in the classroom. Plenty of stuff that I have the ability to allow you to do wasn’t necessarily my thing to keep you from doing it in the first place. And you came to my classroom knowing things that I don’t know, and won’t know, unless you tell me about them. But that doesn’t mean that I was necessarily in the place of knowing what was worth knowing, doing, or being. I didn’t have all the answers. Still don’t. –Bud Hunt