The Road Less Travelled? Pathways from Passivity to Agency in Student Learning

Abstract

This qualitative study examined fourth-year undergraduate students’ responses to reflective writing prompts and journal entries related to their practical experiences in two capstone courses, both based in SBL/PBL pedagogies. We examined their ‘strategic’ approaches to learning that make engagement with subject matter and learning processes more instrumental than meaningfully grasped and applied. Three levels of analysis were used in a recursive process of description, reduction, and interpretation, and the results were added to our previous work examining student responses to reflective activities that foster deep learning. Our provisional conclusions are that strategic learners are invested in a mastery relationship with subject matter that makes grade procurement the evidence of this mastery and this shifts their focus to product over process as an obvious consequence. This disconnect from process leads students to an unhelpful relationship with formative assessment and feedback. They tend to wrestle with the formative elements and see them as mini summative assessments or quasi final products, rather than the necessarily perplexing engagement that leads to the imaginative generation of possibilities and recursive building and refining of ideas and processes. Our future research will focus on environments that encourage more comfort with mistakes and contingencies as learning opportunities.

Keywords

• problem based learning
• service learning
• reflection
• passivity
• agency