When writer Liz Lochhead was growing up (she was born in 1947) there might have been less awareness of the inextricable links between education and agency, but nowadays agency is a commonly used term in education and it features in much educational literature and policy. For example, agency is implied throughout
GIRFEC and the four Curriculum for Excellence capacities (successful learners,
confident individuals, responsible citizens, effective contributors), as I discuss fully in Chapter 4. Developing agency is an important goal for young people because it ‘potentially enables us to imagine and act toward new ways of being’ (Walker and Unterhalter, 2007: 6). In twenty-first century Scotland, young people’s educational achievements ‘should not be dictated by the wealth of their parents, their gender, their race or their ethnicity’ (Watkins, 2012: 1-2), and imagining new ways of thinking and being is extremely important if young people are to choose how they want to live instead of simply following already established patterns (which I discuss in more detail later in this chapter). However, I suggest that there is variability in practitioners’ understanding of what agency actually means and how to develop it in young people. A definition of agency is provided on the Journey to
Excellence32 website:
the degree of self-belief or self-confidence. It is the belief that one has the capacity and ability to learn and achieve. Young people who believe that they can learn and achieve their goals through effort and technique, are
32 The Journey to Excellence is a five part professional development resource created by school inspectors.
55 much more likely to succeed. By contrast, the belief that ability is fixed is a major cause of underachievement in schools33.
Although I understand that self-belief or self-confidence can affect agency, I suggest it is more about making and enacting choice. A clearer definition, in my opinion, is provided by Sen who describes agency as ‘all the goals that a person has reason to adopt’ (Sen, 2009: 287). The process of exercising agency (acting on goals) is one of Sen’s two main purposes of education - the other purpose being education as a form of functioning and wellbeing achievement34. Education should
lead to a life of ‘genuine choices with serious options’ (Sen, 1992: 41), and Sen promotes the notion of the capability of the individual agent ‘to critically reflect and make worthwhile life choices from the alternatives available to her’ (cited in Walker and Unterhalter, 2007: 15). However, the development of agency requires equal educational opportunity: ‘If a person has equal educational opportunity, the person’s practical skills and human agency can be shaped in a fair way’35. Without
equality of educational opportunity, agency can be undermined and young
people’s choices limited. It could be said that lack of or restricted agency equates to a disadvantage.
Both Mary and Liz seem to have decisions made for them - ‘the choices...we don’t remember making’36 – and therefore to lack agency. The girls, like some young
people I meet in my daily practice, appear not to shape their lives ‘in the light of goals that matter’; instead, they appear to be ‘shaped or instructed how to think’ (Walker and Unterhalter, 2007: 5) by their family background. Rather than being active participants in their own development, they appear to be passive spectators (Walker and Unterhalter, 2007: 5). Non-ideal contexts (Walker and Unterhalter, 2007: 9), such as home background and lack of parental support, can diminish agency thus lessening the chances of young people making informed choices about
33The Journey to Excellence, Research Summary – Building Self Motivation (2006) is available from the Education Scotland website.
34 Flores-Crespo, cited in Walker and Unterhalter (2007: 49) 35 Flores-Crespo, cited in Walker and Unterhalter (2007: 50) 36 Lochhead, L. (1972) ‘The Choosing’
56 how they want to live. Each person’s agency goals are affected by their previous circumstances (Burchardt, 2009: 7), and this seems to be the case with Mary’s father who sees so little value in education, especially for girls - and consequently this has an impact on Mary. Since constructing agency goals can be influenced by ‘pre-existing inequality’ (Burchardt, 2009: 11), young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely than those from advantaged backgrounds to have the resources to formulate agency goals. An obvious example of this is the choice and ability to apply to university and, having gained a place, possessing the
wherewithal to know what to read, where to gain support and so on. Many schools take on very supportive roles here and show that educational practices that
embrace agency can ‘open the possibility to interrupt a pervasive relationship in education that tends to link learners’ origins and outcomes’ (Walker and
Unterhalter, 2007: 6). Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence seems to recognise the importance of agency in opening up new possibilities – as will be discussed in
Chapter 4.
Agency is less explicitly stated in Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach than in Sen’s approach, but it seems to permeate all of Nussbaum’s listed capabilities especially practical reason which advocates ‘being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life’ (Nussbaum, 2012: 120). Nussbaum sees people as ‘sources of agency and worthy in their own right, with their own plans to make and their own lives to live’ (Nussbaum, 2000: 58), which links back to Sen’s points about selecting important goals. Both Nussbaum and Sen recognise that external circumstances ‘affect the inner lives of people: what they hope for, what they love, what they fear, as well as what they are able to do’ (Nussbaum, 2000: 31). Two people could have the same capability set (like Liz and Mary) but choose to follow different paths, not because of different interests and goals, but because of inequality and deprivation limiting or
restricting their agency and aspirations. In other words, social conditioning can lead to adaptive functioning which might mean that parents’ past experiences render them unable to provide their children with the requisite social and/or cultural capital to make agency creating decisions.
57 Bourdieu’s various forms of capital (1986) are highly relevant here. The concept of cultural capital refers to a whole array of symbolic elements such as tastes,
speech, credentials and so on that people acquire from belonging to a certain social class. Sharing similar forms of capital with others, such as speaking in a similar way or sharing the same taste in leisure activities, creates a sense of collective identity and group position (‘people like us’). However, Bourdieu highlights that cultural capital can be a major source of social inequality, ‘an instrument of reproduction capable of disguising its own function’ (Bourdieu, 1986: online source), because certain forms are valued above others and can help or hinder social mobility just as much as income or wealth. Cultural capital takes three forms: embodied, objectified and institutionalised. Accent or dialect is an example of embodied cultural capital, while possession of material goods (such as an expensive house or additional educational resources) is cultural capital in its objectified state. Institutionalised cultural capital refers to credentials and qualifications such as degrees or titles that symbolise cultural competence and authority. The cultural capital of working class, disadvantaged or marginalised people in society is not generally valued (for example, certain ways of dressing – such as ‘the hoodie’ - and speaking are scorned). Some young people do not possess much of any form of capital and are, therefore, further disadvantaged in the education system. Clearly the effects on agency will be significant.
In judging if people are truly agentic there is a need to recognise the
interdependency and inseparability of agency and societal structures, ‘to tackle and to combine agency and structure rather than conflating them’ (Archer, 1979: ix). Because ‘Unequal social and political circumstances lead to unequal chances to choose’ (Walker, 2003: 172), and individual agency depends on social and
economic arrangements, it is difficult to evaluate what people have genuine access to. In sociological terms, ‘unequal chances to choose’ can be due to lack of cultural or social capital, as described above, and the education system is judged to be one of the most efficient ways of reproducing inequality – but also,
paradoxically, in acquiring the necessary social, cultural and linguistic capital (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990). In my daily practice I find it challenging to judge if agency has been respected and encouraged in schools (Ibrahim and Tiwari, 2014), and to discern if young people are truly making decisions about what they value or
58 if the decisions are based on parental, community or peer pressure. So, if I had been Mary’s teacher, how could I know if she chose to leave school and get
married when she did, or if she simply did so because it was expected of her? It is difficult to know if a young person is opting for goals that are less ambitious (Burchardt, 2009: 8) purely because that is what is expected by peers and family members. In other words, working out if subjective aspirations are low - and, indeed, judging what is ambitious and what is not – is complex. The challenge of discerning if young people are really making their own choices can be just as true of young people who go from school to university as it is of those who go straight into paid employment or ‘choose’ to stay at home – and in schools we must be wary of promoting further or higher education as ‘the be all and end all’. As teachers we have to accept that there are ‘different conceptions of the good life’ (Walker, 2003: 178), and we should try not to foist our own views on young people. What we can and should do, I think, is to respect young people’s choices and
support their agency by enabling them to exercise practical reason with regards to political and economic opportunities - for example, to engage in reflection in planning their lives and enter into ‘meaningful relationships with people like and unlike themselves’ (Walker, 2003: 179). How young people function or act cannot be predetermined (Walker, 2003: 177) but, if unchecked, the possession of various forms of capital might influence what young people choose. This is why education is so important in enabling people to exercise agency and to develop their
capabilities.
It has been claimed that the Capabilities Approach does not fully acknowledge that agency can be impeded by power structures, such as teachers, parents,
governments and their policies (Jackson, 2005; Zimmerman, 2006). However, I suggest that the point is that Nussbaum’s evaluative framework allows us to assess the extent to which a person has developed capabilities and can realise these as functionings. It allows us to ask important questions about flourishing and
opportunities for flourishing and is not prescriptive about precisely what should be done – except that dignity should be preserved and opportunities provided.
Nussbaum’s illustration of women in developing countries makes it clear that she understands that structures are so designed and that they can disable, quite
59 severely, women’s capabilities. Often sociologists highlight the importance of agency ‘as a way of indicating the capacity for people to bring about change rather than simply to be subject to the determining effects of social structure’ (Gewirtz and Cribb, 2009: 50). However, as stated, previous circumstances can influence a person’s agency goals – either positively or negatively - and people’s upbringing and possession of capital affects the choices that are open to them. Research shows that children from less advantaged backgrounds can feel less in control in educational situations and have reduced agency because they are often under pressure to perform tasks in which they lack confidence (Hirsch, 2007). In my experience of teaching English, for example, many young people are reticent to talk out to the whole class, either to answer questions or to deliver prepared talks (an assessable element of English courses). Work has to be done to convince some young people that the best solo talk is not about ‘talking posh’, but about the content, structure and audience awareness demonstrated in their talk. However, these too could be construed as forms of capital (embodied cultural capital or linguistic capital - Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977) in which many working class young people lack confidence.
Language is not neutral and rather than unifying (Bourdieu, 1992), it can be divisive. It carries symbolic power and the traces of social structures: words, as Cookson (1994: 116) argues, ‘do not exist in a disembodied form; they have
meaning within a social context that is class bound, conflictual and power driven’. We do not always use language benevolently. Sometimes we use language to exert power or authority, to coerce, intimidate or disparage – and teachers often use it for these purposes in order to control young people. The way in which we speak (our accent, dialect and word choice) denotes our class and social position, and this seems to be intuitively understood by young people – hence, perhaps, the reticence of some to perform solo talks in class. Linguistic capital is a
manifestation of the socially structured character of habitus, as well as a complex set of social, historical and political conditions. Passeron’s empirical research (1965) revealed that the main factor underlying inequalities in the academic attainment of children from different backgrounds was related to their levels of linguistic capital. Young people who cannot comprehend, define or utilise more complex language or who have not been exposed to quality literature, are at a
60 disadvantage. Lack of linguistic capital can have an impact on every area of
education and by the time young people reach secondary school this can be difficult to remedy and there has to be great willingness on the part of the young person to do so.
From a sociological perspective, the existence of these structural impediments points towards the notion of agency having some limitations. Unless agency is constructed as ‘essentially illusory... merely a product of some or other social force’ then there has to be acceptance that ‘one part of what goes on in the social world is people’s choices’ (Gewirtz and Cribb, 2009: 106). Not surprisingly since schools are microcosms of the social structure, this view seems to be espoused by some teachers who contend that if all young people would simply choose to follow instructions and complete their homework, then educational success and a life of human flourishing would be theirs. Assuming that all that goes on in the social world is people’s choices can risk ‘individualising success and failure, and the social consequences that flow from personal choices’ (Walker, 2003: 178) – and this is related to the deficit ideology which I introduce in the next chapter. I am not convinced that all young people are free agents who are able to choose their own fate ‘through transcendence of structural constraints imposed upon
individuals from birth’ (Kingsley, 2012: 5), for example, class, gender, race, disability, geography. However, I see that personal or individual agency is
important and that agency as a worthwhile goal should not be dismissed, difficult as it might be for some to attain. Understanding the relationship between social structures and the individual and how to overcome the constraints on agency is paramount. First of all practitioners need to acknowledge that structural
impediments such as class divisions and transgenerational disadvantages (more of which will be discussed later) actually exist; then, we need to work out how these might be transcended (if, indeed, young people actually wish to do so).
An enabling curriculum like Curriculum for Excellence coupled with a focus on the Capabilities Approach could help to endow a young person with agency. Curriculum
for Excellence, I think, sets out to promote what Walker and Unterhalter (2007:
32) describe as ‘achievement of important levels and skills acquisition, which play a vital role in agency and well-being freedom’ – I discuss whether or not it actually
61 achieves this in the next chapter. The same applies to GIRFEC with outcomes and wellbeing indicators that, if achieved, could enhance agency. Both policies seem to further socially just outcomes for all pupils. What can be said now is that
Scottish educational policies and initiatives emanate from the Scottish government – an important source of power - and that attempts to promote inclusion,
wellbeing, social justice and equal opportunity are ongoing. From a sociological perspective, there needs to be recognition that societal structures can limit agency and it is not easy to determine ‘how far it is possible for things to be different from the way they are’ (Gewirtz and Cribb, 2009: 50). Another relevant factor to equality of educational opportunity is young people’s out of school activities which I discuss next.