Fostering Agentic Engagement: Working toward Empowerment and Equity through Pedagogical Partnership

Political Context and Faculty Attitudes Towards High Maintenance Students in Kurdistan, Iraq

“…They represent an application of ideas which indicate how investigating student perceptions can contribute to designing evaluation and assessment strategies which offer instructors a more diverse view of what is happening in their classrooms while enabling them to adjust and meet student needs. Regarding student engagement with specific concerns for the challenges to empowering agency [1,11], explaining the variation depends on the questions asked. In the case of the Kurdish university and student stress, it would be relevant to explore the role of empathy as it relates to engagement and how feedback can help instructors understand student needs and create a supportive learning environment.…”

Agentic engagement: Transcending passive motivation.

“…In this way, students’ agentic engagement is posed to provide critical input for shaping educational environments that are need supportive and mitigate concerning levels of disengagement. However, beyond being informative to teachers’ attempts to support students, agentic engagement provides students with a collaborative tool for resilience when educational experiences are not sufficiently aligned with their needs and can even be a tool of resistance and self-realization (e.g., Cook-Sather et al, 2021; Peach & Matthews, 2011). Promoting agentic engagement in education settings encourages students to authentically define and express who they are and collaboratively solicit and coconstruct the instruction they need, rather than passively accepting instruction that is not serving their needs.…”

“…Promoting agentic engagement in education settings encourages students to authentically define and express who they are and collaboratively solicit and coconstruct the instruction they need, rather than passively accepting instruction that is not serving their needs. Students report that agentic engagement does not just serve themselves as individuals, it serves as a prosocial tool to support their class community as well (Cook-Sather et al, 2021; Zambrano et al, 2022). To the extent that many educational outcome disparities reflect failures to equitably prioritize students’ perspectives and needs in the education process, encouraging a culture of agentic engagement creates an opportunity for students to highlight their collective needs and communally amplify the perspectives of students who have been historically marginalized.…”

“…Take students in the context of education as an example. Because instruction in most classrooms is relatively dominated by teachers, many secondary and tertiary students are not comfortable with being agentically engaged and activate it more rarely than other forms of engagement (e.g., Cook-Sather et al, 2021; Manzuoli et al, 2019; Zambrano et al, 2022). Qualitative research with students and teachers reveals that agentic engagement is relatively rare for a number of reasons, including students’ personalities, existing beliefs and motivation, academic and behavioral background, social roles, and especially, teachers’ encouragement or discouragement of agentic engagement with their strategies and in communication (e.g., Montenegro, 2019; Zambrano et al, 2022, 2023).…”

Do midcourse evaluations impact college students’ agentic engagement or perceptions of teaching and learning?

“…According to Reeve, agentic engagement, which is student-initiated, differs from formative assessment, which is teacherinitiated (Reeve, 2013). Recent studies have shown that faculty members can play an important role in fostering agentic engagement and allow for a transformative learning experience in their classrooms through autonomy-supportive teaching (Reeve & Cheon, 2021), forming "pedagogical partnerships" (Cook-Sather et al, 2021), and helping students to meet their personal best goals (Benlahcene, 2022). Given that midcourse evaluations invite students to provide constructive criticism to their instructor and directly impact the "flow of the instruction" (Reeve & Tseng, 2011, p. 258), their potential to foster agentic engagement should be examined.…”