Evaluating students' agency and development of ownership in a collaborative playmaking project

1. IntroductionDevelopment of students' agency has been one of the central themes in educational research. In traditional schooling contradictions between students' agency and teacher's need to control have seemed to be unsolvable as the teacher needs to give up control in the classroom, otherwise students can't develop active agency. (McNeil, 1986; Jackson, 1990; Rainio, 2008). Because agency is relational and reciprocal, students need to be treated as active subjects in order to broaden their agency. This demands widening the students' position, giving ownership of practice to the students and adjustment of the teacher's role (Edwards, 2005; Rainio 2008; Kumpulainen, Krokfors, Lipponen, Tissari, Hilppo & Rajala, 2010).Agency has been defined various ways, depending on the theoretical frame through which it has been investigated. Agency is a central concept in the sociocultural theory of learning based on Vygotski (1978). Agency is defined i.e. as a will to act, to experience and to exist (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). It means an individual's or a group's feeling that we are doing things, which make a difference, that things do not just happen to us. Agency is often associated with creativity, questioning and opposing matters considered as self-evident and looking for unconventional ways of action. (Kumpulainen et al., 2010.)Agency is a complex and contradictory process of interaction with material resources, social institutions and the collective efforts of individuals (Rainio, 2010, 60). Therefore in order to capture this process it is important to analyse agency related both to the individual and to the collective activity the individuals are part of (Rainio 2010, 60; Edwards & Mackenzie, 2008).Ownership is a core concept of student-centred learning. The concept of ownership illustrates, how the experiences of learning become personally meaningful. Ownership evolves in questions of autonomy: who owns learning (Rainer & Matthews, 2002). Personal investment, engagement, responsibility, and empowerment constitute criteria of the presence of ownership in individual students or an entire class when working with drama (Swick, 1999).Anna Pauliina Rainio (2010) conducted an ethnographic research project of student agency in play-world activity in early education settings and developed methodological framework based on sociocultural theory for video-based narrative interaction analysis for studying student agency. This frame and classification of student agency (Rainio, 2008, 2010) is applied in this research. The research (Rainio, 2008, 2010) indicate that play- and drama- based pedagogies offer great potential for developing educational spaces that help teachers and children dealing with contradictory requirements of schooling. However the engaging in the unconventional activity of play-world and enacting student agency was very challenging. (Rainio, 2010.)The object of this study is to apply and assess Rainio's (2008, 2010) classification of student agency in a practice based research (Smith & Dean, 2009) setting: teacher-researcher's analyses of collective/individual participation processes of a Devised performance-making project. The article considers the development of the students' agency and ownership in the performance-making project experienced by and looked through the lenses of a teacher/researcher.Devising is a thematic approach to theatre, based on improvisation and experimenting. It is a process for creating performance from scratch by the group without a pre-existing script (Heddon & Milling, 2006). Besides using the concept of devising, playmaking, play-building and collective creation have also been used in research, when writing about performance projects and drama/theatre techniques to develop original performance work in collaboration with students (Lang, 2002; Nelson, 2011).The case presented in this article consists of one environmental performance project about climate change, which was carried out in 2010 with 13 to 14 year-old students at an international school in Belgium (N=14). …