Agential Schooling: From Outcome to Agent

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Critical, Decolonial, and Queer Theories (Table 4)

Abstract

This posthumanist analysis of schooling, agential schooling, puts forward a complex accounting that acknowledging those agents – schooling discourses, clipboards, policies, handouts, etc. – that often go unacknowledged in purely humanist framings. This shift repositions educational phenomena as entanglements of multiplicities, situatedness, becomings, and the more-than-human world. This work positions schooling as an agent rather than solely as an outcome or effect. Ethnographic entanglements, interviews, and diffraction, were mobilized to better understand the intra-actions. This work illustrating complex entanglements of youth reproducing hierarchical schooling, and intra-action between school administration, clipboards, and classroom observations demonstrate how various apparatuses – policy, curriculum, hierarchical relations, adultism, prescriptive entanglements, discipline, and punishment – support the violence of agential schooling.

Author

• Thomas Albright, Georgia State University