Agency as a Core Condition for Meaningful Learning

Why agency matters in learning design

In contemporary education discourse, agency is frequently invoked but rarely clarified. It often appears in curriculum documents, learner profiles, and pedagogical frameworks, yet its practical meaning remains ambiguous. In many cases, agency is reduced to surface-level choice: choosing a topic, selecting a task format, or deciding how to present work.

While choice can support engagement, it does not in itself constitute agency. Learning environments may offer multiple options while still tightly scripting thinking, interpretation, and judgment. In such contexts, learners appear active, but their intellectual agency remains constrained.

If learning is to move beyond compliance and performance, agency must be understood as a structural condition of learning design, not a motivational feature added at the margins.

What do we mean by agency?

At its core, agency refers to the capacity to exercise judgment. In learning, this means having the opportunity and responsibility to think, interpret, decide, and act on understanding. Agency is not simply about freedom; it is about participation in meaning-making.

For learners, agency involves:

• interpreting ideas rather than reproducing them

• making sense of evidence rather than following procedures

• taking responsibility for explanations and conclusions

For educators, agency involves professional judgment: deciding how evidence of learning is interpreted, how instruction is adjusted, and how assessment supports growth rather than merely certifies performance.

Agency, therefore, is relational. It exists within structures that either enable or restrict judgment.

Agency in educational research and theory

Educational research consistently highlights the role of agency in deep learning. Sociocultural theories emphasize that learning is an active, interpretive process shaped through interaction, language, and shared inquiry. Learners do not absorb knowledge; they construct it through engagement and dialogue.

Research on assessment literacy similarly underscores the importance of teacher agency. When assessment is reduced to fixed rubrics and mechanical scoring, professional judgment is displaced. Evidence becomes something to be collected rather than interpreted, weakening both learning and teaching.

Philosophers of education have also warned against over-scripted systems that prioritize predictability over thinking. When outcomes, methods, and interpretations are pre-determined, agency is replaced by compliance, and learning becomes procedural rather than intellectual.

Across these perspectives, a common conclusion emerges: agency is essential for meaningful learning because understanding cannot be delegated.

Agency in classroom and curriculum practice

When agency is taken seriously in learning design, several shifts occur.

Curriculum planning begins to foreground questions rather than answers. Learners are invited to interpret texts, data, and ideas, not merely locate correct responses. Tasks are designed to require reasoning, explanation, and decision-making.

Assessment practices also change. Rather than asking only whether criteria have been met, educators attend to how learners reason, how their thinking develops, and how evidence of learning is interpreted over time. Feedback becomes dialogic rather than corrective.

Importantly, agency does not imply the absence of structure. Well-designed learning environments provide intellectual scaffolds that support learners in exercising judgment responsibly. Structure enables agency when it invites thinking rather than dictates it.

Agency as a leadership responsibility

Agency is not sustained by individual classrooms alone. It is shaped by leadership decisions, policies, and cultures.

When systems prioritize uniformity, pacing guides, and compliance metrics, both teacher and learner agency are constrained. Conversely, when leaders protect space for professional dialogue, interpretation of evidence, and reflective practice, agency becomes part of the institutional culture.

Supporting agency requires trust: trust in educators as professionals and in learners as thinkers. Without this trust, agency becomes rhetorical rather than real.

Agency is not an optional enhancement to learning. It is a condition for understanding. Without agency, learners may perform tasks, but they do not own ideas. Educators may implement programs, but they do not exercise judgment.

Designing for agency means designing for thinking. And without thinking, learning cannot be meaningful.