Comunidad MIPE-DIPE

En el marco de las actividades formativas organizadas por las comisiones académicas de los programas de postgrado MIPE y DIPE, el Dr. Antti Rajala, de la Universidad de Helsinki, impartirá el seminario:

“Agency in changing educational contexts”

• Fecha: viernes 4 de mayo y lunes 7 de mayo 2018
• Hora: de 11.30h a 13.30h
• Lugar: Aula 2209 de la Facultad de Psicología (Edificio Ponent), Campus Mundet, UB.
• Formulario de inscripción

Antti Rajala, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Helsinki. He received his PhD in 2016. In his award-winning doctoral dissertation he studied agency-centered pedagogy and how learning can be connected between in and out-of-school contexts. Rajala has conducted video-based research in schools and science centers on the topics of dialogic pedagogy, educational change, and agency in education. Rajala is author of more than 30 articles. Currently, he is working in the project Constituting Cultures of Compassion in Early Childhood Education (funded by Academy of Finland, 2016-2020). Rajala is one of the editors in Outlines: Critical Practice Studies.

This set of seminars gives an introduction to the concept of agency in educational research. It also discusses the meaning and transformative power of teacher and student agency in changing educational contexts. During the last decade, agency has gained popularity in educational research, when discussing practice and in policy discourse. Whereas researching structure-agency dialectic in education is not new, less attention has been given to the expansive approach in making sense of how agency also frames opportunities for new structures of being, learning and becoming among teachers and students in situ and over time. The expansive approach opposes deterministic accounts that position individuals as constrained by external factors beyond their control. Instead, agency refers to the opportunity, will and skill to act upon and transform activities and circumstances. Agency is hence closely related to authority, equity and power relations in human activity and learning.

The first seminar on May 4 focuses on student agency and how it can be fostered through pedagogical actions and arrangements. The second seminar on May 7 focuses on teacher agency. The seminars will both discuss foundational texts around agency and recent empirical research on agency conducted in Finnish schools.

Lecturas recomendadas:

Rajala, A., Martin, J., & Kumpulainen, K. (2016). Agency and learning: Researching agency in educational interactions. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, (10), 1-3.

Rajala, A., Kumpulainen, K., Rainio, A. P., Hilppö, J., & Lipponen, L. (2016). Dealing with the contradiction of agency and control during dialogic teaching. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 10, 17-26.

Rajala, A., & Kumpulainen, K. (2017). Teacher agency in educational change: Researching Finnish teachers’ agentic orientations to the implementation of a new learning environment. To appear in M. Goller, & S. Paloniemi (Eds.), Agency at work: An agentic perspective on professional learning and development. Springer International Publishing AG, Cham, Switzerland.

Rajala, A., Hilppö, J., Lipponen, L., & Kumpulainen, K. (2013). Expanding the Chronotopes of Schooling for Promotion of Students’ Agency. In O. Erstad & J. Sefton-Green (Eds.), Learning Lives: Transactions, technologies, and learner identity. Cambridge University Press.