From Interpsychological to Intrapsychological: Developing Students’ Agency

Abstract

This paper starts from the contradictions that permeate the Latin American democratic context to dis¬cuss how psychology can contribute to expanding students' agency in public schools located in vulnerable contexts marked by poverty and social exclusion. The contributions of Cultural-Historical Psychology and German Critical Psychology are articulated to substantiate the importance of building participatory spaces for human development. The authors were inserted in a public school from the year 2015 to the year 2017, holding class assemblies with primary school students. The content discussed in these meetings was re¬corded in field diaries, from which three narratives were selected for analysis. The first narrative deals with a discussion of physical education activities; the second presents a student sharing his suffering in the face of bullying as he cries in class; the third reports a discussion about the theft of a pencil. It is concluded that guided by critical perspective, psychology can contribute to the strengthening of subjects, collaborating to the expansion of their agency.

Keywords

• student participation; agency; cultural-historical psychology; german critical psychology; school democratization; child development