With the rapidly changing global economic, technological and health environments, it is more important now than ever that adults are equipped with the tools they need to become lifelong learners. Whether they’re gaining an education, retraining for a new job or career, or getting up to date with online learning, strong literacy and numeracy skills are crucial.
Aotearoa New Zealand’s recent results from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) survey indicate an urgent need to address literacy and numeracy capabilities. So, how do we, as educators, support learners in managing change, overcoming challenges, and thriving in an educational environment? One of the most practical solutions is to help them understand and develop learner agency.
What is learner agency?
Learner agency is about encouraging learners to take control of their learning, have their voices heard, and manage their resistance to adversity along the way. Learners don’t learn by simply being told what to do; they learn by being shown how to learn and establishing their own processes. This ideology underpins the concept of learner agency and promotes an attitude toward education based on self-sufficiency.
For learners to discover and exercise their agency, educators must recognise that not all learners are alike. The key to empowering learners to develop agency is to create educational environments that cater to everyone. In 2015, Aotearoa New Zealand signed up to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which address global challenges, including education. Goal 4, in particular, is about providing inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning for all.
A common approach to achieving this goal is Universal Design for Learning (UDL)—a framework for educators to anticipate barriers to learning, address them head-on, and comprehensively cater to all learners.
Why is learner agency important for literacy and numeracy education?
Learner agency acknowledges literacy and numeracy's essential and transformative role in lifelong learning. By integrating learner agency into literacy and numeracy education, we give learners the skills they need to participate fully in the knowledge-based economy while building resilience to social, economic, and technological changes.
Fostering learner agency in literacy could involve allowing learners to choose their own books based on their interests, while in numeracy, it could include asking them to apply problem-solving skills to real-life scenarios. When learners feel empowered through their agency, they develop a stronger sense of ownership, motivation, and engagement, which can only lead to positive educational outcomes.
Strategies educators can implement to develop learner agency
Now that we’ve introduced the idea of learner agency and its importance in literacy and numeracy education, let’s explore some practical ways educators can put this practice into action.
Give learners control over their learning
Educators can promote learner agency by encouraging learners to make decisions about the topics, content, activities, and learning schedule. When learners are still developing capability around this, educators can offer defined choices before allowing more creative freedom as the learner grows in confidence.
Encourage learners to:
- Select their own projects
- Choose who to work with and where
- Negotiate the outcomes of various projects
- Select what topics to work on over specific periods.
Helping learners find their voice
Finding your ‘voice’ has been described as a growing confidence and courage to express a person’s own opinions, values, and beliefs.
Environments that foster this process are those in which the learners are encouraged to share their ideas and have their ideas valued and used by the group. The ideas do not always have to be agreed upon, but they must be valued and taken seriously.
Ways to do this include:
- Projects and activities that involve learners expressing and articulating their ideas
- Brainstorms, persuasive paragraph writing and critical thinking exercises
- Presentations, show-what-you-know sessions, information-finding and feedback activities.
Emphasise the importance of trial and error
Learners become more agentic as they reflect on their learning process and become aware of what works for them and what doesn't.
For example, they might begin to set their own goals about what they want to learn, engage in a series of activities to meet the goal, and then reflect on which activities they prefer and which were most effective.
As they reflect on what worked well, they can develop their unique approach. A good educator will encourage learners to reflect on their learning process and support the learners' identification of their learning preferences.
Ways to do this include:
- Ask learners to use two comprehension strategies (see below for details) and then evaluate the pros and cons
- Provide time in class for learners to identify two learning techniques they like and share these with the class
- Use various learning strategies, ask learners to rank each out of 5, and then share with the class.
Support learners to come up with their own strategies
Within the reflection process, learners will begin to develop a preference for their learning strategies.
For example, a learner might discover that the best way to learn is to draw a mind map of the information and read out the results. On the other hand, other learners may find that identifying the most important sentence in each paragraph and summarising it in their own words is more beneficial.
They will also develop a preference for various resources and become better at selecting effective ones. In time, they will develop expertise in finding resources for different learning objectives.
Teach learners how to:
- Use different activities and strategies to learn by using them in class
- Evaluate which activities and strategies are the most effective for them.
Foster the development of a positive set of beliefs
Learner agency grows as learners develop a positive set of beliefs about themselves. These are sometimes called ‘availing beliefs’ because they teach learners to adopt positive learning behaviours, even when they are struggling.
Educators can foster these beliefs by reinforcing that learning is the result of effort, time, and good strategies, rather than ‘just being smart’. As the learner realises they can learn complicated things, their confidence grows, leading them to try to understand other hard material.
For example:
- Ask learners to share something they know a lot about (typically their interests or hobbies, such as cars, music, sports, etc)
- Ask them how they learned so much information about the topic
- Identify that they can learn, and have learned, and that they can apply the same strategies they used to learn about their interests to other topics.
Create supportive learning environments
Society is constantly changing, which is why learner agency is such an essential skill for educators to teach. When learners have the correct tools and know-how to exercise their agency, they can succeed—not just in an educational environment but throughout their lives.
Educators have the power to create an environment that shows learners they can make choices, have their voices heard, reflect on their learning, come up with strategies, and reinforce their own positive belief systems. By encouraging and developing learner agency through literacy and numeracy education, learners can participate in life-long learning and contribute to a more inclusive, productive society.
At Ako Aotearoa, we are committed to advancing our work in language, literacy, numeracy, and cultural competency by providing professional development resources to the tertiary education workforce. By integrating research and experience with fresh thinking, we continue to collaborate with the sector to identify future needs and opportunities. Our work aims to establish parity of achievement for Māori and Pacific peoples, as well as for priority learners and those with additional needs.
We would like to thank Ako Aotearoa Adult Literacy and Numeracy (ALN) Effective Practice Model Project Lead Damon Whitten for his extensive contributions to the concepts covered in this article. Check out his Ako Talks video on supporting lifelong learning through learner agency in literacy and numeracy education and access more information and his full report.
Ako Aotearoa is a government-funded organisation committed to supporting the country’s tertiary sector teachers, trainers, and educators to be the best they can be for the success of all learners.