Explorations of the structure-agency dialectic as a tool for framing equity in science education

Abstract

Science education researchers have progressively engaged in questions that seek to understand relationships between: (a) accessing, learning, and engaging in science and (b) the processes of being and becoming in the sociocultural milieu of classrooms, schools, free-choice learning environments, work settings, and everyday life relative to science. By moving beyond the treatment of learning as improving knowledge of science content, practices, and paradigms, science education scholars have been investigating the to-and-fro by which various actors (e.g., learners, teachers, administrators, parents, institutions, and communities) position themselves and are positioned by others in the context of science education. Within such research, investigators employ various psychological, sociological, and anthropological perspectives. Quite often, such work emphasizes the junctures of structure and agency. Those constructs are also deeply implicated in considerations about equity and social justice within science education. Structures are considered to be the cultural rules, or schemas, that shape and are shaped by social practices in a domain, and are in a dialectical relationship with resources, the sources of power within the domain and its social interactions (Sewell, 1992). Agency is seen as a person's capacity to engage with cultural schemas and mobilize resources in ways that did not exist before, creating new contexts and practices. Agency involves “semiotic mediation…[so that] one modifies one's environment with the aim, but not the certainty, of affecting one's own behavior” (Holland, Skinner, William, & Cain, 1998, p. 38). Science education research in this realm considers the ways in which structures (physical, material, symbolic, discursive, social, curricular, etc.) influence the learning and teaching of science and often contribute to inequities. Moreover much of this research highlights how learners, teachers, administrators, and community members exercise agency in various contexts that lead to empowering individuals and collectives to function, make sense, and thrive. However, the dialectical nature of structure and agency is complex and muddled, and necessitates systematic exploration. This is what this special issue aims to facilitate and promote. In what ways do structure and agency interact? What is their constitutive relationship like? And how does the structure–agency dialectic shape science education in and out of classrooms? The structure–agency dialectic offers one tool to better understand complexities of social systems across multiple levels of activity, from micro to macro levels (Bronfenbrenner, 1976). In turn, exploring the structure–agency dialectic may enhance efforts to theorize about pedagogical practices, curricular approaches, and educational policies based on a more enriched understanding of structural affordances and hindrances vis-à-vis actors' agency, choices, thoughts, and actions. Such endeavors are crucial to afford science opportunities to learners from historically marginalized communities (based on race, ethnicity, language, immigration status, gender, class, sexuality, or combinations of these markers) who are often positioned as “deficient.” A focus on the structure–agency dialectic exposes forces that may stifle access, participation, learning, and achievement, but also celebrates the agentic ways in which students, communities, institutions, and educators develop and use in particular contexts. In this special issue, we highlight scholarship that is based upon empirical data and offers insights in the interplay of structural (in)equities and the agentic ways that people (students, teachers, administrators, parents, and communities) develop to interact with science, make sense of the natural world, contribute to knowledge production, and position themselves relative to science. The nine studies span topics, contexts, conceptual frameworks, and methodological approaches, and engage with members of historically marginalized communities, revealing the multiplicity of both structures and agency and their intersections as related to classroom teaching and learning, teacher education, science curriculum, school leadership, out-of-school science engagement and learning, and indigenous knowledge systems. This special issue also provided an opportunity for JRST to explore the feasibility of shorter manuscripts that present succinctly theoretical constructs, identify essential elements of methodological approaches, offer major findings supported by the most compelling evidence, and outline implications for further theoretical, empirical, and practice-based work. Shorter manuscripts allowed for a great number of related studies to be anthologized in a single issue, all of which address a shared referent of the structure–agency dialectic. The expectation is that this collection will offer the science education field briefer research accounts that may serve as foundational readings for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers. Social theorists are challenged to define structure and agency independently from each other while also explaining their interrelationships so as to acknowledge the importance of each component even as due consideration is given to the ways they interact. For some science education researchers including authors in this special issue (Bang & Marin, 2015; Rodriguez, 2015; Varelas, Tucker-Raymond, & Richards, 2015), Anthony Giddens' structuration theory offers the foundation allowing structure and agency to be examined vis-à-vis particular science education contexts. Although the shorter manuscripts did not allow for extensive treatise of Giddens' theory, these authors and others who refer to theorists such as Sewell (1992) who share similarities with Giddens (Kane, 2015; Rivera Maulucci, Brotman, & Fein, 2015) rely on the duality of structures as both the “medium and the outcome of the social practices they recursively organize” (Giddens, 1984, p. 25). Structures are not only seen as constraints on actors but also as enabling their actions, and they do not only shape social practice but are also reproduced or transformed by this practice. Human and non-human agency, while influenced by structures, has the power to shape structures. “[T]he process of structuration always leaves room for social transformation, as structures are the result of the messy interaction of social actors struggling, negotiating and at times guessing in order to further their interests” (Bakewell, 2010, p. 1696). For other special issue authors (Martin & Carter, 2015; Wenner & Settlage, 2015), Margaret Archer's morphogenetic theory, often presented in opposition to Giddens' structuration theory (Archer, 1982), provides the theoretical grounding for structure and agency. As a critical realist, Archer objects to Giddens' “conflation” of structure and agency on analytical grounds because it makes it impossible to explore the relationship between them. Archer describes structure and agency as constituted in a continual morphogenetic process in which social structures have emergent properties, which are “outcomes of agency which ‘emerge' or pass a developmental threshold, beyond which they exercise their own causal powers, independently of the agency which produced them” (Parker, 2000, p. 73). Structures exist independent of agency but their causal powers “are at the mercy of two open systems: the world and its contingencies and human agency's reflexive acuity, creativity and capacity for commitment” (Archer, 2003, p. 7). Structures can then impinge on actors' agency, presenting constraints or enablements to actors' capacity to act, but agency cannot be deduced from the causal powers of society and its structures (Archer, 2000). Articles adopting different theories about structure and agency allow the science education field an opportunity to engage with different ways of conceiving the relationship between structure and agency vis-à-vis a range of science education topics and issues of equity, encouraging further exploration. The featured articles focus on various forms of structures and agency and articulate various conceptualizations of their interaction as they frame issues of equity across racial, ethno-linguistic, class, and gender lines. In each of the featured studies the author(s) engage with structures and agency in some similar but also some unique ways, and highlight particular dimensions of equity. Rodriguez (2015) links “institutional” and “sociocultural” challenges that a new teacher faces to structures he encounters as he strives to reach students in culturally diverse school settings via his science teaching. The institutional challenges arise from a combination of: (a) the mono-cultural content-heavy physics curriculum, (b) a lack of material resources, and (c) generic professional development unresponsive to specific teacher needs. Institutional hurdles are compounded by sociocultural ones—adults' low expectations for student learning and patterns of low student engagement and achievement. This study illustrates inherent tensions between frustration and satisfaction experienced by a dedicated novice science teacher as he strives to transform structures that are inconsistent with his ideology. Revealed in this study are the dynamics of ever-shifting structures, transformed by a teacher's agency. Even as one challenge is overcome, new problems (on personal and institutional levels) fill the void left by the success of dismantling barriers to student access and learning. Focusing on a pedagogical practice, namely dialogic teaching, as a structure, Kane (2015) describes how meaning making and participation unfold in a third-grade classroom of African American students. In this study, we learn about children constructing contested spaces where they and their teacher explore science ideas. It is the production of meaning, one of the forms of human practice that Giddens (1979, 1984) called “signification,” that both is enabled by, but also constitutes, the dialogic teaching structure in that class. As the contested spaces bubble up and simmer down, children and teacher negotiate power that as Giddens noted “presumes regularized relations of autonomy and dependence between actors or collectives in contexts of social interaction” (1984, p. 16). This study demonstrates how individual and collective agency are intertwined and can be supported by community-based discourse practices in the context of pedagogical structures, and their material, social, and semiotic resources, where meaning is constructed, shared, contested or validated over time. Heidi Carlone, Angela Johnson, and Catherine Scott (2015) document, over several years, shifts in female students' participation in science classes, explicating their findings with presentation of one girl's shifting performances in her 4th–6th grade science classes. As a fourth grader in a class that valued different social identities and with structural opportunities to nurture students' curiosities, the girl is widely recognized as a capable science learner. However, in subsequent grades, heteronormative social structures and science teachers with compromised science knowledge, and/or rigid and narrow expectations and conceptions of “great” science students lead her to perform stereotypical femininity. She becomes skillfully attuned to how she could “fit in,” but this is associated with enacting agency that distances her from science. The study illustrates the importance of studying participants for an extended period of time to explore intricate ways in which institutional, organizational, ideological, and interpersonal structures influence students' agency. Buxton, Allexsaht-Snider, Kayumova, Aghasaleh, Choi, and Cohen (2015) focus on teacher education offering a different way of enacting, studying, and evaluating professional learning programs where the teachers are positioned as agents who may choose to engage in and enact project activities. The teachers' enactment is not seen from a “fidelity of implementation” lens where teacher practice is measured against the reproduction of the structural elements of a professional learning program (i.e., project goals and activities), but from a “multiplicity of enactments” lens. From the latter perspective, enactment of program strategies is influenced by both teacher engagement in program structures and teachers' ways of conceptualizing structures of school policies (related to, for example, standards, assessments, and teacher evaluation criteria), in relation to the sociohistorical structures of social class, ethnicity, and language dominance, as barriers or malleable entities in terms of science education of Latino/a and bilingual learners. Moreover this study highlights the responsibility of teacher educators to transform program structures in response to teachers' engagement and enactment so that teacher agentic choices can be further nurtured. Wenner & Settlage (2015) examine structures related to elementary school administrators at schools whose science test scores exceed statistical expectations. In this study structures are conceived of in two ways, as: (a) externally imposed policies and mandates with the potential to interfere with principals' goals, and (b) structures fabricated by principals to deflect or diminish such impositions—a mechanism referred to as “buffering.” Principals exercise agency when they assess demands from outside the school and reinterpret those in light of what is perceived as in the best interests of teachers and students. Thus, as street-level bureaucrats, principals' perceptions of policies and their potential impact on teachers and students elicit varying forms of buffering, including the decision to not attempt to buffer at all in certain circumstances. As a cognitive act, principals engage in rational and calculated responses to external demands, buffering (or not) to more or less reproduce or transform structures vis-à-vis new policies. Attending to curricular and instructional structures (with various physical, material, symbolic, social, and affective dimensions), Maria Varelas, Eli Tucker-Raymond, and Kimberly Richards (2015) explore the enactments of agency of a Latino student in his yearlong third-grade science class. The study shows how the boy's agency was influenced by and influenced the enactment of structures in individual and collective ways. Structures, such as a read-aloud, are co-created among all classroom participants, and similarly to other social structures are governed by a system of social relations and a system of meanings that together shape who students are and are becoming in the science class. The study illustrates how identities and identifications are linked with structures and with students' participation in, and construction of, these structures via various dimensions of (human) agency, which include characterization, control, commitment, composition, reason, and thematization. Along with human agency, “disciplinary agency,” the agency of the science practice itself, is implicated in identity construction. Megan Bang and Ananda Marin (2015) chronicle the existence of “settled expectations” predicated on the structural principles of settler colonialism that have shaped science education. They use Indigenous knowledge systems, which acknowledge the importance of non-human agency along with human agency, community-based design research, and everyday parent–child interactions to unsettle normative time–space and nature–culture relations. The study highlights how conformity with Western science structures, which often conflict with Indigenous communities' ways of engagement, can be disrupted. How activities are launched, how aspects of the natural world are named, and how entities and phenomena in the environment are recognized and identified, all shape this disruption. In this way, Indigenous knowledge system structures become “legitimized,” one of the three forms of human practice that Giddens (1979, 1984) associated with the creation of structures; they become part of the norms and values of science and science education. In their study, Rivera Maulucci, Brotman, and Fain (2015) explore how physical, social, and knowledge structures interact with teacher agency and how opportunities for student agency intertwine with teachers' ways of reproducing or transforming various structures. Their focus is on a dual-language school context, and teachers who work within the structural features of a professional development context, which brings together preservice and inservice teachers, and makes use of resources in three settings (university seminar, city museum, and elementary school classroom). The study highlights how teacher agency changes over time from more similar to “structurally reproductive” agency to more similar to “structurally transformative” agency. Although teacher agency may not be dichotomized in such a way in teachers' practice, by explicating reproductive or transformative aspects of teacher agency, Maulucci and her colleagues show how different physical (e.g., a climate change exhibit), social (e.g., collaboration), and knowledge structures (e.g., curriculum) may support teachers' agency that enables, rather than constrains, English learners and students with individualized education plans (IEPs) to construct their own meanings. Jenny Martin and Lyn Carter's (2015) study focuses on the language used to express and create agency in discursive contexts, what they call the “grammar of agency.” Studying reflective journals composed by female, low socioeconomic status preservice teachers in a teacher education program emphasizing environmental sustainability, they show how preservice teachers draw on social and material resources to position themselves as pro-environmentally active. One student, presented as an illustrative case, uses the online platform Tumblr to take responsibility and offer a narrative that positions herself and her family as users of sustainable practices. However, structures that have led to her family's minimal resources are not problematized. Thus, her language indicates the development of personal agency related to environmental sustainability, but does not position her as taking social and political action to reduce ecological footprints by society, implying the need for further efforts in environmental education. The studies included in this special issue encourage us to consider the ambiguities associated with differentiating between structures and agents involved in, and interacting with, structures. Describing how science occurs and explaining what scientists do in their professional lives can inform school science (Jiménez-Aleixandre, Rodríguez, & Duschl, 2000). More than simply the processes used by individuals, anthropological studies of scientists in situ reveal dynamic social activities: argumentation, paradigms, language, and ontologies (National Research Council, 2007). However, science studies suggest that it is not only difficult to distinguish “human” from “non-human” (Hird, 2009) but there are indications that objects themselves could be imbued with agency within social acts (Latour, 1993, 2005; Sayes, 2014). Even more extreme is the notion that objects are actually political (Rowland & Passoth, 2015). On first encounter, and from a Western perspective, it feels fanciful to treat objects as possessing agency. And yet, within the assembled studies of the structure–agency dialectic, there is explicit and implicit engagement with this idea. Bang and Marin's (2015) article is the only one that explicitly names non-human agency and articulates how physical spaces and natural entities such as rivers, trees, animals have agency in indigenous science knowledge systems, which is an ontological difference between such systems and Western scientific ways of knowing. Without naming it as non-human agency, Varelas et al.'s study discusses “disciplinary agency,” the agency of science as a practice. In other studies in this issue, the authors imply agentic powers of non-human entities. In Martin and Carter's (2015) article, we learn that for pre-service teacher Ecocarmie, an online journal (via Tumblr) effectively worked in concert with her personal agency as she flexed her ecological consciousness. From Rodriguez (2015), we learn how, for physics teacher Gary, the school telescope, through rehabilitating its motor assembly, bought him the respect of students and their parents—almost as if the physics teacher and the scientific object collaborated to create agency within a school structure of low expectations. Similarly, Maulucci et al.'s (2015) study reveals that visiting a museum prompted teacher agency, and Kane (2015) shows how ideas created contested spaces where student agency thrived. One way to think about the online journal, the telescope, the museum, or an idea is to think of these as resources associated with structures, resources that have an agentic function for humans. However, another way of thinking about them is that the border that separates actors from objects may be less distinct, thus making it harder to distinguish structural dimensions from agents. Moreover, the recursiveness of shaping each other that characterizes structure and agency, and which was documented in several of the studies found in this issue, mitigates the uncertainty about “who” is an agent and “what” is a structure. Many of the structures discussed in these studies (e.g., new policy, institutional norms, curriculum, etc.) are human-generated just as many agents (e.g., “the test” or science textbooks) are affected by the power of structures they encounter. Such challenges are not unique to science education research: cultural anthropologists wrestle with the exceptionalism of the human species (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010), medical technologies have agentic properties through their intimate connections with patients (Prout, 1996), and qualitative researchers in education make compelling arguments to consider interviewing objects in schools to identify what learning technologies might “say” about learning (Adams & Thompson, 2011). Perspectives including Actor-Network theory (Latour, 2005) and Indigenous ways of knowing (Cajete, 2000) remind us to guard against oversimplifications when conducting science education research. One of the challenges in educational research is generating compelling answers for our questions through efforts to capture and interpret in ways that are valid, respectful, and ethical to the lived experiences of our research participants in the contexts in which we conduct our research. The structure–agency dialectic implies that we pay attention to how our research structures, from methods to outcomes, influence, and are influenced by, both researchers' and participants' agency. When we report on studies, we “fix” in some ways the data, claims, evidence, interpretations, and meanings. However, structure and agency are mutually constituted—fluid, dynamic, and ever changing. By the time readers read our studies, researchers and participants have grown, developed, and transformed. To offer an example outside of this special issue, consider “Heather” from the Private Universe project (Schneps & Sadler, 1987) who we might believe we (partially) know: we saw her in a science classroom, listened to her voice as she spoke to the investigator, and watched as she drew while puzzling through explanations for the moon phases and seasonal cycles. On deeper reflection, we should recognize that her 9th-grade self no longer exists. Today she has much richer identities and experiences than those burned to videotapes and distributed as DVDs. Viewing our research work through a dialectic has potential to animate non-human objects and reconsider the agency of “things,” such as achievement tests, science standards, learning technologies, interviews, or journals, as shaping our developing knowledge structures. The corollary is to avoid a tendency to rob study participants, such as Heather, of their agency by reporting about them as if they are fixed structures. The assembled studies afford opportunities to interrogate connections between larger social structures such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, language, and (dis)ability, implicated in injustices and inequities experienced by many people in science education, and various other structures identified in these studies. By spotlighting interactions of agency and structure, this anthology aims to underscore the complex relationships between the dynamic nature of structures of activity systems in which learners live and engage with science, and the construction and enactment of agency that empowers individuals and collectives to function, make sense, and thrive in these systems. This, in turn, relates to Freire's pedagogy of hope. For Freire, hope is “an essential component” of being human (1998, p. 69) and “it is impossible to exist without it” (1994, p. 72). “Hope is an ontological need… I am hopeful, not out of mere stubbornness, but out of an existential concrete imperative” (1994, p. 2), and without hope we cannot even start thinking about education, its value and premises (Freire, 2007). In the manuscripts of this special issue, hope partly emerges from the idea that structures are more or less open to intentional and unintentional human tinkering (Hays, 1994). Human and non-human agency, although shaped by the structurally available possibilities, can also create and transform structures. Principals of schools with diverse students buffer external mandates to protect their teachers' and students' needs (Wenner & Settlage, 2015). Elementary school teachers of bilingual students shift toward more equitable and meaningful practices and teacher educators become more nimble in supporting teachers' strengths and needs (Buxton et al., 2015). A beginning high school teacher, with ongoing support from teacher educators, creates and teaches culturally/socially relevant and authentic science that leads to increased student achievement and participation in a school with mostly Latino/as (Rodriguez, 2015). Experienced elementary school teachers collaborate with preservice teachers and teacher educators to reflect, act, and modify mandated curriculum for English learners and students with individualized education plans so that students have more opportunities for creative thinking (Rivera Maulucci et al., 2015). Young African American students create contested spaces where they collectively develop and claim their own ideas and science meanings (Kane, 2015). Middle-school girls, including girls from historically marginalized groups, find ways to participate within classroom structures, which, although move them away from science, keep them from being marginalized (Carlone et al., 2015). A young Latino student stitches together different ways of participating in science curricular and instructional structures, both shaping these structures for himself and his classmates, and creating multiple relations with science (Varelas et al., 2015). Indigenous communities use expanded time–space interactions to develop meaningful nature–culture relations creating spaces for science learning different from, and similar to, Western science (Bang & Marin, 2015). Preservice teachers from marginalized groups position themselves as members of a community of ecofriendly people who engage in environmentally sustainable action (Martin & Carter, 2015). The emphasis on the structure–agency dialectic is aimed to foster deeper commitments by the science education community to understanding how communities' resources, norms, ideologies, and ways of being and knowing interact with the ways in which people exercise their power to act and shape these communities' practices. It is our wish that attention to the structure–agency dialectic further energizes the science education community towards hope that is anchored in practice cultivating respect for difference and diverse views, expectations, and systems of knowledge.