Agentic engagement: Transcending passive motivation.

Abstract

Agentic engagement refers to people's active contribution to the environment in which they function to make it more supportive of themselves. In the context of education, where agentic engagement has been studied almost exclusively, it refers to students' active contribution to the flow of instruction they receive in order to enrich the instruction for themselves and their peers. People who use agentic engagement realize that they can help to propel their own growth by seeking support that leverages their inner motivation. Focusing on existing scholarship within education, theory and research suggest that this agentic form of engagement is uniquely proactive, collaborative, and constructive, predicting desirable outcomes for both students and teachers. The benefits of agentic engagement likely generalize to other contexts. However, siloing across subfields of psychological research has meant that it has yet to be applied beyond education. In this overview, I review the origins and theoretical underpinnings of agentic engagement and review existing research on links with outcomes. Next, I assess the promise of agentic engagement for addressing challenges people face in a variety of contexts in order to encourage desiloing. I also review obstacles to realizing the promise of agentically engaging, including the behaviors of those in positions of authority who receive and respond to agentic engagement and the characteristics of those who would seek to use agentic engagement. Finally, I discuss possible future directions the research on agentic engagement might take as we seek to better understand how it works and how to leverage its potential.