Education that leads to development of agency

Abstract

Background. L.S. Vygotsky’s vision of teaching and learning, which enables child development, remains useful for problems face by the modern-day school. Today, one of the central duties of education is, from the beginning of schooling, to lay the foundations for obtaining the ability to learn. Ability to learn is demonstrated when a person is faced with meaningful task, understands what is needed to solve it and knows how to compensate for their own limitations. Ability to learn is one of the aspects of human agency i.e., the ability to have and the self-perception of the ownership over one’s behaviour. This ability is manifested in children at a very early age and education can both strengthen and weaken, or even totally preclude its development. Agency in learning, which is the basis for future ability to learn, can enter the zone of proximal development (ZPD) as early as primary school age, but only in certain educational environments. Objective. The current research is focused on the relationship between the teaching, learning, and development of the child as a subject of educational activity in the scientific school of D.B. El’konin and V.V. Davydov, who advanced the cultural-historical theory. Methods. Clinical studies of setting and solving educational tasks in primary and secondary schools. Results. This article describes the most significant characteristics of the educational environment, through which the ability to learn can be developed for the majority of students: the content and form of learning activity in the strict, original meaning of this concept, which does not correspond to its everyday use. We highlight the discrepancies between the scientific and everyday meanings of the concepts “learning activity” and “learning task” and clarify the relationship between the structure of the learning task and the structure of the ability to learn. We also describe the characteristic actions of an adult at the stage of designing the learning task and then at the stage of interpsychological interaction with children when setting a learning task and searching for the means to solve it. Conclusion. Children's initiative in constructing general methods of action and sensitivity to conceptual contradictions manifest themselves systematically, as an age-related tendency, only when students set and solve learning tasks aimed at discovering and mastering theoretical concepts. Education that provides ready-made answers to unasked questions minimizes the opportunity for students to become self-teaching agents. Practical application of the results. The identified discrepancies between the scientific and everyday meanings of the concepts “learning activity” and “learning task” can protect these fruitful concepts from profanation and save their creative potential.

Keywords

• agency
• primary schoolchildren
• ability to learn
• learning activity
• learning task