Big Idea: Learning Design – Honouring Student Agency and Autonomy
Unfortunately, I was online for this class, which may have inhibited my learning from the presentation. Regardless, agency and autonomy for students are an incredibly important topic that this program has prepared us to speak on.
Student agency and autonomy emerged across the board in our classes this term. Students are people too and forgetting that they deserve an equal standing within the classroom would be a cardinal sin of teaching. In 401 with Cindy, we broached a topic around classroom management that speaks to this topic imperatively. Classroom rules/guidelines, or whatever else a class may call them are vital to sustaining an effective teaching environment. The most important thing is to work with students to develop these guidelines.
Throwing rules directly at students may work but it is not a fair system. I would liken it to a dictatorship. The expectations within a classroom are far more likely to be followed if the students have input and a chance to make rules for you (the teacher). In an example, Cindy showed the students created a rule for the teacher to “not be a dictator.” This kind of rule is incredibly important for students as it gives them a way to speak on equal terms with their teacher and gives them an avenue to voice concerns they may have otherwise never spoken on. It is also of comedic value and adds to the classroom culture overall.
In my experience with our link2practice program, I have had the opportunity to speak with a good number of art teachers and interview them on how to engage students. One strategy that came up again and again was allowing for student choice. A great example of this type of student agency would be a project I had the privilege of working on with a grade 9/10 art class. This project had the option of pursuing a silkscreen process for creating a paint board work or a grid drawing process. Both resulted in a similar work but the methods of art-making were completely different. Both allowed students the agency to work from whatever subject they wished (some working from anime characters, their dogs, rappers, and much more) but required different technical skills. One side built silkscreens and worked with light reactive substances and the other explored technical drawing through the use of a grid to increase accuracy. This combination of student agency through both the subject matter and the medium engaged students far more than a single-pronged approach which may have alienated students uninterested in technical drawing (or vice versa).
If you want a responsive and engaged classroom student autonomy and agency are key. Throwing away tenets of democracy within your classroom just creates a miniature of the societies we study the faults of in our history classes. So what if your trains run on time?