Collective Transformative Agency: Advancing the Voice of Ordinary People to Drive Educational Decision Making

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 7:45 am - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Learning in Community: New Perspectives on Agency and Change

Abstract

We examined how members of a school-family-community-research partnership developed their collective transformative agency to center the voices of students and families while co-designing education policy. In collaboration with a U.S. school district, we employed [Systemic Change Lab] (SCL), a formative intervention, to guide the co-design process of a district-level Protocol for Addressing Discrimination and Harassment. During data analysis, we utilized the lens of transformative agency (Kajaamaa & Kumpulainen, 2019) to foreground how SCL members deviated, switched, and transfigured historical norms about who is qualified to design education policy. We argue that these seemingly small expressions of resistance paved the way for larger transformation within their school culture.

Authors

• Elizabeth Schrader, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Dian Mawene, University of Wisconsin - Madison