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Chapter 4 - A Relational View of a Future-Orientated Pedagogy

Sustaining the Agency of Learners and Teachers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2023

By
Anne Edwards
Edited by
Nick Hopwood  and
Annalisa Sannino
Nick Hopwood
Affiliation:
University of Technology, Sydney
Annalisa Sannino
Affiliation:
Tampere University, Finland
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Summary

This chapter focusses on how insights from Vygotsky’s work on child and adolescent development can be employed to create a relational pedagogy that nurtures the agency of students as learners, enabling them to be creative makers of their and their communities’ futures. These insights are augmented by more recent contributions to his legacy. Consequently, the role of motive orientation, imagination and agency in taking forward learners’ trajectories is discussed in relation to playworlds in early education settings, makerspaces in schools, the careful use of moral imagining in creating new futures for disengaged adolescents and responsive relational teaching in mainstream schooling. The four approaches all employ pedagogies which aim at the unfolding of student agency and which can be explained by the concepts: relational expertise, common knowledge and relational agency. The need for school systems to create environments where teachers can support student agency is recognised.

Keywords

agentic learnersrelational pedagogyrelational expertisecommon knowledgerelational agencymotive orientationimagination
Type
Chapter
Information
Agency and Transformation
Motives, Mediation, and Motion
 , pp. 84 - 106
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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