Student Agency in Education
Jessica Chretien
Summer 2019
This summer I spent a lot of time working in the Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative, as well as participating in the Cluster Pedagogy Learning Community with 70+ members of faculty and staff, plus me, the only student.
Being involved with the CoLab and the CPLC has given me so many things, but what has felt most valuable about the CPLC is the way it allows me to ask questions about/ test the limits of/ challenge the traditional roles and hierarchies of/ between teachers and students and to explore what kind of genuine partnerships and possibilities might open up when we do that work with one another.
A big part of exploring this has been getting to be in a community with faculty and staff and talking about learning and teaching. I’ve loved getting to interact in groups with faculty and staff as we talked about what we value in education, what we know about and how we might implement non-traditional teaching and assessment methods, such as ungrading. I loved hearing everyone’s experiences with these methods, their questions, critiques, doubts, and fears; as well as adding my own. It felt important to be a part of these conversations as a student and to have the chance to be listened to and s e e n, by faculty and staff. I sometimes wonder about how we expect to have so many conversations about empowering students without ever having students in the room for these conversations, and this was such an important opportunity to begin approaching that issue.
I found so many faculty and staff that were interested in student perspectives, and had so many chances to talk one on one or in smaller groups with faculty who wanted to chat/ get feedback on some new approach they were thinking of doing in their course. Not only did this make the sense of genuine partnership more apparent, but I was so excited to hear about the things that faculty were working on, new things they were trying, the risks they were willing to take w i t h their students in order to really enact the values they believed in–values of agency, self-regulated learning, emergence, access, inclusion, etc.
Having been involved in Open Pedagogy communities and getting the chance to learn more about radical kinds of pedagogy on Twitter (and in person) with people from other institutions for sometime, the chance to engage in these kinds of conversations with the actual teachers at PSU was so exciting for me. I’ve long felt a deep sense of passion and community with these distant people, but within the CPLC, I found myself deeply inspired by all of the people who were so directly around me. I felt so grateful for how willing so many of the members of the CPLC were to step outside their comfort zones and learn something new, to ask questions of themselves, and to ask the “whys” of their teaching practice and of our educational orientation institutionally. I loved getting to know some of the other members more personally, to get to und