Reading Review Part B - Literature on Student Agency and Digital Making

We aim to help students share their stories in a powerful way. When they do this, they experience agency as learners.  

The powerful sharing of stories goes beyond handing them in to a teacher. It involves the teller and listener experiencing connection. In her presentation “Stories are Good Medicine,” Sayantani Dasgupta unpacks “the magical space of storytelling” (5:15). She shares the fable of the minstrel and the storyteller, who only together are able to discover their true selves, proving that “a story isn’t an object; it’s a relationship between two human beings” (8:30). This coming together, enjoying stories together, is what we aim to accomplish when kids use technology tools to share stories.  

Video: Sayantani Dasgupta - Stories are Good Medicine

Shane Safir and Jamila Dugan present an "Agency Framework" in their book Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation:

They place representation on a spectrum along with the confidence to have an impact in their world. When kids know "I am seen," they are moving towards this place of efficacy. Safir and Dugan's video introduction to their book gives more context about the goal of equity in our learning spaces.

 Video: Street Data: A Pathway to Transformation

A few scholarly sources examine more closely the conditions where kids experience agency by creating at school. 

Jennifer Keys Adair focuses on the Primary context in her article "Agency and Expanding Capabilities in Early Grade Classrooms: What it Could Mean for Young Children". She argues, "Early learning is meant to help all children develop and expand a broad set of capabilities so that they have agency and freedom as adults in a rapidly changing global society" (223). 

Anne E. Crampton et al. look at adolescent learners finding empowerment as video creators, in their article "Meaningful and Expansive: Literacy Learning Through Technology-Mediated Productions". The article emphasizes the transformative effect of creating something new, and working in a new format together. The authors call the effect "collaborative cotransformations" (576). 

Anne Burke and Abigail Crocker's chapter "Creativity in an early-learning makerspace" offers a helpful discussion of "Big-C Creativity" and "Little-c creativity" as we think about how to include all students as capable tellers of their own stories. 

Finally, we can use the Canadian Library Association's Leading Learning: Standards of Practice for School Library Learning Commons in Canada to check in with their various markers of LLC development. Connecting our initiatives with these indicators is a valuable piece of advocacy for our program.