The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore and map the "espoused theories" (Argyris and Schön 1978) of agency used in educational contexts. More precisely, we limit the focus on the normative view of student agency assumed within dominant school practices, desired by educational practitioners, leaving out non-normative emerging agencies such as student agency of resistance. Agency is a "tricky" concept, and often scholars who use the concept of agency do not define or operationalize it (e.g., Archer 2000). One reason is that there is no consensus among scholars about the notion of agency, especially when applied to educational contexts (Hitlin and Elder Sociological Theory, 25 (2), 170-191, 2007). Moreover, the recent neoliberal framing of individuals' agency as fully autonomous, flexible, and self-entrepreneur is adding the dilemma of agency manipulation in the sphere of education (Gershon 2011; Sidorkin 2004). To tackle this dilemma in educational contexts, we suggest to further interrogating the normative notion of agency in all its modes and develop a more nuanced conceptualization. We hope that such conceptualization would produce an understanding of the diverse manifestations and definitions of agency within a human ideal, educational content, behaviors, and social settings. We observed diverse uses of the normative term "agency" in educational discourse. We examined the term as used by researchers and practitioners. We also looked at the different ways it has been used in philosophical discussions of education, political framing of the civic role of schooling, disciplinary policy statements, school mission statements, and in everyday common use. It is worthy to note that our categorization of the use and meaning of the normative term "agency" depends on the scholars' epistemological paradigmatic assumptions, socio-political and historical situatedness, and ontological projects being translated into diverse scholarships of education. As a result of our research, we suggest four major normative conceptual frameworks related to agency mainly being adopted in educational contexts that we labeled as: 1) instrumental, 2) effortful, 3) dynamically emergent, and 4) authorial. In this paper, we discuss these normative approaches to agency as we compare and contrast the assumptions and their consequences for the current field of education, mostly from a point of view of authorial definition of agency (our bias).

In this paper we use practice theory, with its focus on the interplay of structure and agency, to theorize about teacher engagement in professional learning and teacher enactment of pedagogical practices as an alternative to framing implementation research in terms of program adherence and fidelity of implementation. Practice theory allowed us to reconsider assumptions about characteristics of effective teacher professional learning, and to rethink our own notions of agency. Using data from our three-year middle school science teacher professional learning project, Language-rich Inquiry Science with English Language Learners (LISELL), we discuss how individual teachers negotiated power structures of schooling and exerted their agency in ways that were influenced by their project participation. Framing our work in terms of engagement and enactment, we theorize about how a structure-agency dialectic challenging assumptions about effective teacher professional learning can support new ways of thinking about implementation research in education. # Research ProblemVignette: Questioning a one-size-fits-all model of fidelity of implementation. The middle school science teachers were gathered in a university classroom participating in the Language-rich Inquiry Science with English Language Learners (LISELL) summer teacher institute. Some teachers were new to the project and some had been participating for multiple years. The discussion turned to obstacles that teachers felt were hindering their efforts to engage all their science students, especially emergent bilingual learners, and solutions that working in our project might offer to help overcome those obstacles.Tia: The expectations keep shifting. Every year it's something new that becomes our top priority-new standards one year, new teacher evaluation system the next, new tests the year after that.

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Concepts in science education such as “science identity” and “science capital” are informed by dominant epistemological and ontological positions, which translate into assumptions about what counts as science and whose science counts. In this theoretical paper we draw on decolonial and antiracist perspectives to examine these assumptions in light of the heterogeneous onto‐epistemological and axiological values, cultural perspectives, and contributions of nondominant groups, and specifically of those who have been historically marginalized based on their gender, race, ethnic, age, and/or social class identity. Building on these arguments, we critique deficit‐based approaches to science teaching, learning, and research, including those that focus on systemic injustice, yet leave intact dominant framings of the scientific enterprise, which are exclusionary and meritocratic. As an alternative, we offer a design of science teaching and learning for the pluriverse—“a world where many worlds fit”. This alternative allows us to reconstruct science and science‐related “outcomes,” such as identity, in the service of cultural, epistemic, and linguistic pluralism. We close the paper with the idea that because mainstream theories reproduce deficit framings and educational injustices, we must engage with decolonial1 theories of pluriversality and discuss different onto‐epistemologies to be able to grapple with existing social, racial, environmental injustices, and land‐based devastations.

In an era of global climate change, intertwined with social and ecological predation, there is growing recognition of the importance of building socially, environmentally, culturally pluralistic, just and sustainable futures. Yet many of the calls for reform and discourses around sustainability are authored and defined through top-down approaches, by those who have power, privilege, and cognitive authority, and excludes the voices, identities, and epistemologies of those in the margins. In this paper we argue for the need to design and develop transformative learning ecologies that explicitly position the diverse voices of youth from nondominant communities as central to re-defining and re-envisioning relationally just, pluralistic, and sustainable futures. To this end, we seek to provide examples from participatory design-based learning ecologies to illustrate the centering of middle school youth voices and agencies from multilingual Black, Brown, and Latinx communities through critical response-ability. These examples highlight how these youth grapple with the uncertain landscapes of sustainability in their communities and provide counter-narratives to traditional deficit-based discourses and youth empowerment. We draw on what we have learned from multilingual youth to offer some suggestions for designing transformative learning ecologies situated within the framework of critical-response-ability in the quest for sustainable, thriving, and just futures.