Estimated reading time: 4 minutes, 39 seconds

Maha, This quest for agency is also something that I am very interested in. I’m reading David Rose’s book, The Intellectual History of the British Working Classes and Rose frames European autodidactism, which he charts from the early 16th century, within the context of intellectual independence, that the self-taught should

“become individual agents in framing an understanding of the world. They resisted ideologies imposed from above in order to discover for themselves the word of God, standards of beauty, philosophical truth, the definition of a just society… More than a few members of the educated classes supported his movement, but many others treated it as a serious threat to their own social position — which, in an important sense, it was,” (Rose, 2001, pp 12-13).

Of the options you’ve cited here, I think Dave’s negotiated syllabus comes closest to this ideal of letting students direct their own learning. As instructors, our intervention should be carefully weighed and considered. I do not see advising students in the design of their course to be much different from advising faculty in the same task. That said, we are not usually dealing with a roomful of seasoned autodidacts (those often avoid institutional education, for obvious reasons). Dave reported that his students required more “direction” than he had initially anticipated, and this can create a dilemma for instructors who are committed to minimal intervention.

Goal oriented, task driven students often expect close direction and can be disoriented when presented with too many choices (some don’t want any choices at all). In programs where “independent learning” is a stated curricular goal (and this is a common “buzz word” in American HE programs), we can write self-direction into syllabi and work students up to it as they progress from more elementary to more advanced modules or courses. So, considering “agency” as a goal that requires the development of both understanding and skill may offer us an alternative to throwing everyone into the deep end and then lamenting that they swim like stones.