Strong Sense Of Agency Research Articles

Leadership identity in a small island developing state: the Jamaican context

While the role of leadership in improving schools is attracting more worldwide attention, there is a need for more research investigating leaders’ experiences in different national contexts. Using focus-group and semi-structured interview data, this paper explores the background, identities and experiences of a small group of Jamaican school leaders who were involved in a leadership development programme. By drawing on the concepts of culture, socialisation and identity, the paper examines how the participants’ journeys of becoming and being school leaders are influenced by national-level societal and cultural issues, experienced at a local level. The findings suggest that in becoming school leaders, the participants perceived that they had a strong sense of agency in attempting to change the social structures within the institutions they lead and in the surrounding local communities, which in turn, they hope, will have a lasting effect on the nation as a whole.

The Quiet Ego Scale: Measuring the Compassionate Self-Identity

The quiet ego refers to a self-identity that transcends egoism and identifies with a less defensive, balanced stance toward the self and others. Study 1 establishes and confirms the 14-item Quiet Ego Scale (QES) as a higher-order latent factor (capturing the theoretical intersection of four first-order factors: detached awareness, inclusive identity, perspective taking, and growth). In studies 2–4 we examined the association of QES with 25 psychological constructs. Results demonstrate that QES is related to a wide range of characteristics and suggest that the QES measures an identity that strikes a balance between a strong sense of agency (but not egoism) and a strong concern for the welfare of others. Although QES was correlated with a number of related characteristics (e.g., self-compassion, self-determination, authenticity, self-transcendence), it was a distinct predictor of outcomes such as resilience, coping efficacy, and indices of well-being that could aid investigations of human happiness.

Identity and the Transition from School to Work in Late Modern Japan: Strong Agency or Supportive Communality?

This article examines the precarious transition from school to work, considers its relation to young people's identity formation in late modern Japan, and rethinks the theory of identity formation in late modernity. Although Japan's transition system had been efficient and stable over many years, since the late 1990s this has been replaced by an increasing precariousness. The Japanese government has responded with a Career Education promotion policy to foster young people's work aspirations and attitudes in the form of an employability enhancement policy. This policy discourse coincides with a late modernist theory (as put forward by Giddens and Cote & Levine) that emphasises the importance of personal agency for young people's transitions. However, in our longitudinal qualitative study, we found that the ‘transitional communities and networks' that young people encounter in their transition from school to work have an important supportive role to play. These transitional communities are important in young people's transitions from the school/college community to the workplace community. Those who had a strong sense of agency but no helpful community experienced serious depression and did not make a successful transition into work. Our case studies support Erikson's argument that community (communality) is indispensable for young people's identity formation. We conclude that both community and agency are important for successful transition in late modernity.

Zimbabwe Colonial and Post-Colonial Language Policy and Planning Practices

This monograph focuses on the development of colonial and post-colonial language policies and practices in Zimbabwe, attributing changes to evolving philosophies and politics in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe. In colonial Zimbabwe, we argue that the language policies had as one of their key objectives the development of a bilingual white colonial ruling class proficient in both English and at least one African language. Contrary to what some scholars might think, we will show that what was being imposed during the colonial era was not English on Africans but European variants of African languages on Europeans. The monograph also describes how, through linguistic description, Europeans appropriated African languages as a prelude to the imposition of European variants of African languages on Africans under the guise of the promotion of indigenous language. Despite the power and influence of the colonial regime, we demonstrate how Africans still retained a strong sense of agency during the colonial period which enabled them to select, albeit within restricted limits, the nature and type of education they received, the languages through which they were taught, and indeed even the materials which were used in teaching them languages, particularly English.

Secondary English Students' Engagement in Reading and Writing About a Multicultural Novel

Twenty-two 9th-grade English students' reading engagement and interpretation of a young adult multicultural novel dealing with biethnic identity development was explored. This multicase study charted students' literary engagement in an urban technology magnet school and a rural Hawaii high school. Analyses of 7 students' journal freewriting, character interpretation dialogue journals, and research papers on the novel's cultural authenticity revealed that students (a) produced more personal and interpretive reactions to the novel than simple descriptions of events and (b) had a strong sense of agency and voice, supported by reader-based teaching. Students need to have opportunities to read and talk about literature that explores ethnic and cultural identity development.