Meditations on Agency: the Pedagogical, the Personal, the Political

This is not the piece I wanted to write. I wanted to write about supporting student agency in the ballet class, where it’s historically and notoriously been limited. I’ll get there eventually, but as it’s impossible to remove any discussion of agency from the immediate contexts in which it functions, I am wading into my immediacy here. It’s Labor Day, we’re in the throes of what seems like societal collapse, and I’m trying to figure out what we’re even talking about when we suggest that agency exists, because sometimes I wonder. 

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Right now, across the U.S., educational institutions are denying employees agency. Those forcing an “in-person only” model—unless they’re instituting vaccine, mask, and distancing mandates—are abdicating their responsibilities to the health and safety of their communities. They’re gaslighting us, insisting that they’re doing all they can. But we know better. Despite all suggestions from the lovely people of the Internet, most of us cannot “just leave” our jobs in education. We shouldn’t even have to consider it. 

In Texas where I live and work, women (including trans women and women without uteruses) have lost our bodily autonomy. We have become (more now than before) tools of the patriarchal state and those who support it; abortion is effectively outlawed and those who seek it are subject to vigilante justice. As a woman, my reproductive capacity matters more, now, than my degrees, my career, and the whole of my humanity. Most of us, however much we might want to, cannot “just leave” Texas. We shouldn’t even have to consider it.

In classrooms, students are too often barred from exercising their agency. They’re assumed to be untrustworthy antagonists before they’ve even walked in the door. Surveillance, proctoring, and anti-cheating software—"cop shit”—has become an expected part of education now, as has a doubling down on behaviorist pedagogies and policies that prioritize compliance over learning. Most students cannot “just leave” a classroom. They shouldn’t even have to consider it. 

We are not so different from them. We should stop pretending.

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“Agency is the technical term for the feeling of being in charge of your life: knowing where you stand, knowing that you have a say in what happens to you, knowing that you have some ability to shape your circumstances.”

—Bessel van der Kolk
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

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I dated someone recently who I knew better than to involve myself with. He was among the politically befuddled: parroting talking points he didn’t fully understand from the right-wing playbook while donating his car to NPR and reupping his annual museum memberships. He even bought my book, but read only far enough into the front matter to see that my ex-husband, now dear friend, is in the acknowledgments: “I’d want to meet him, at some point, if you’re going to continue to see him” he said. I told him that wouldn’t be possible. He became confused, all sputtering and gesticulating. I wouldn’t allow him to own me.

Despite the infuriating absurdity of his suggestion that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford “just wasn’t believable,” which put me closer than ever before to telling someone to their face to fuck all the way off, I had plenty of agency in our brief courtship. Not all politically-confused-gents-one-might-meet-on-a-dating-app seek a partner’s consent or leave them unharmed, for that matter. How sad that the simple act of not being physically violent somehow seems to deserve credit when their violence against the agency of others is so insidious and accepted. It’s the nice ones. The mild-mannered ones, and most often white, who we should fear most. They would have us believe they are innocuous. But they are not. Not when it counts.

One day we were talking about labor unions and he said, “If they don’t like their job they can just leave.” I flew into a diatribe about his privilege and lack of compassion; I went on about power and capitalism and humanity and agency. He took it—just sat there. “They’re people,” I remember saying. “Human people.” 

He stared, then nodded once. “Thank you for sharing.”

“What the fuck am I supposed to do with that.” I didn’t expect an answer. It wasn’t a question.

“I should go.”

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“If any female feels she needs anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.” 

—bell hooks
Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics 

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Student agency has become a pedagogical buzzword of late—like “student-centered.” Buzzwords are important because we all (benefit of the doubt…) want our pedagogies to be on the front lines of progressivism, so we say they are even if we aren’t sure. Sometimes hearing ourselves say that our pedagogies are being or doing said buzzword seems to make it so, and we become convinced—we convince ourselves. #edutwitter does a remarkable job of helping us to believe what we say, even if we know we don’t know. 

Students are the only ones who know for certain what we’re doing when it comes to their agency. What a glorious irony. I wonder if they look at our Twitter accounts and sneer sometimes, or roll their eyes. How dare we.

Sometimes what we think is transformative pedagogy—what we think student agency looks like in practice—is really just us being nice, because being radical demands a near-existential level of introspection and self-awareness that’s hard to keep up when we feel disempowered. An institutional commitment to pedagogic agency (read: academic freedom) is essential too, although lately that’s been scarce. When we don’t have the energy to support student agency because we’re so busy fighting for our own, we lose our pedagogic optimism. Too many of us are there, I’m afraid, or dangerously close. I don’t know what happens next. I’m worried about us.

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At this moment we’re no different from most students. Our agency has been withdrawn, and so has theirs. We’re struggling, collectively. If we’d acknowledge this shared reality, perhaps we wouldn’t uncritically pass down educational paradigms that limit student agency. Perhaps we’d show some solidarity instead.

Perhaps we wouldn’t dress our own institutionally-inflicted wounds with band-aids made of toxic positivity and suggest that students have agency in our courses as we smile, tell them it’s okay that they turned in that paper late, and dock their grade.

Perhaps we’d ask them instead if they feel they’re “in charge of [their lives]: knowing where [they] stand, knowing that [they] have a say in what happens to [them], knowing that [they] have some ability to shape [their] circumstances.” And perhaps we’d try to help them get there because we’re trying to get there too.

Perhaps we’d give them every option to leave but every reason to stay. 

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On January 6, 2021, in the early evening, I got a phone call. He was clearly shaken, his voice wobbling: “You were right.”

“I know.”

“People need support.” 

“They do.” 

Photo credit: @darthxuan on Unsplash