ABSTRACT
Since the emergence of Learning Development (LD) in the 1990s, much discussion has focussed, appropriately enough, on pedagogical principles and practices. This chapter argues that these ongoing discussions can be aided by paying closer attention to questions of student agency. Taking support for the development of students’ practical, epistemic, critical, etc. agency to be central to LD’s mission, the chapter explores how such agency is always realised in dynamic interaction with multifarious structural constraints and enablements, and how our practical, pedagogical endeavours often spring from attempts to create, at a variety of levels, the kinds of structures more conducive to the development of students’ agency.
The chapter concludes with a nod towards those sections of the book more explicitly concerned with critical theory and critical pedagogies, suggesting that attention to the interactions between structure and agency also helps remind us how our educational practices are always already political.
