Praxis Final Thesis

Abstract
This project explores understandings and protocols of student agency in the after-school program The Guild of St Agnes- Quinsigamond (GOSA). This praxis project attempted to identify existing opportunities for student-driven agentic behavior and prevailing feelings of ownership and autonomy within programming through gathering two-months of observational field notes followed by interviews with the students.. Results from this process revealed a widespread disillusionment and skepticism regarding curriculum that students did not perceive as authentic to their realities. After interrogating the extant state of agentic pedagogy, students met weekly with me as a community and utilized Freire’s notions of Conscientization (critical consciousness) to interrogate existing conditions of schooling structures and develop conceptions of agentic student behavior. The design portion of this project evolved to grapple with learner malaise and disengagement, encourage the development of critical consciousness in educational settings, and reframe mechanisms at GOSA to embed opportunity for student voice. The findings from this exploration on critical consciousness reveal that while “student voice” may be offered to students as the opportunity to select curricular materials and methods of knowledge representation, epistemological agency, that offers students the tools to critique pedagogies of knowledge production, is less present. As ideologies of agency and student choice become increasingly relevant in the pedagogical canon, it is critical to examine how choice is implemented in educational spaces, and to investigate the capacity of epistemological agency to challenge conventional educational hierarchical ontologies that stratify students across hierarchies by equipping learners with tools of agentic discourse as it includes practices of critique, meaning-making, and autonomous advocacy.