ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the focus is on the women’s feelings and notions of their agency, including educational opportunities and alternatives (well-being freedoms) and autonomy to make decisions and take actions accordingly (agency freedom), that is, in brief, the relation between structure and agency. Earlier, referring particularly to the scientific tradition emphasising a socially constructed nature of reality, the concept of educational agency was defined to involve four constitutive elements: there is an intentional and rational agent; in a particular socio-cultural environment; aiming at something; and having at least two means for pursuing the goal. Evidently, it is plausible to claim that the research participants are rational and intentional agents, whose actions are contextualised and pre-conditioned by socio-cultural structures, institutions and meanings alike. But to what extent their educational beings and doings are determined, for instance, by the system, by which I mean, in this study, the educational establishment including educational policies and the school environment, and/or the ideas that ‘They’ and ‘Us’ have. Furthermore, to what extent are their educational aspirations and the ways in which to construct educational pathways pre-established and ‘given’? For instance, the findings from the studies of young adults in Ghana, India
and Kenya (Arnot et al. 2012a, 2012b), Mozambique and Tanzania (Helgesson 2006) and Zambia (Hansen 2005) criticise the individualised view of people’s lives, women and men, which gives emphasisis to individual autonomy as the major goal of the transition from education to employment, and from childhood family to one’s own family (compare the studies by Thomson, Henderson and Holland 2003 in England and Northern Ireland). Similarly, in examining young women’s life-and education-strategies in Tanzania, Posti-Ahokas (2012) has shown the strong impact of social and familial relationships on individual aspirations and their realisation. For example, pursuing and studying at the upper secondary and higher education level often overlaps with working, getting married, becoming a parent and establishing a family. Consequently, the ideas that ‘Us’ and ‘They’ have may significantly govern, even lock, people, particularly women, into social and familial responsibilities and obligations,
and block the utilisation of well-being freedoms and the exercise of agency freedoms (see Latvala 2006; Morley, Leach and Lugg 2009; Posti-Ahokas and Okkolin 2015). Hence, apart from the functionings and capabilities to realise ‘beings and doings’, the research participants’ notions of their freedoms to choose and decide, take actions accordingly, and to realise their educational aspirations are required for a fuller understanding of their overall well-being and agency. By listening to the women’s narratives and analysing their choices and decision-making processes, four kinds of agency freedoms were identified: ‘systemic given’ (given by the education system/establishment), ‘educated by someone’, ‘own reasoning’ and ‘yes, but no’ kinds of strategies to decide what to reach for and how, when and under what pre-conditions. Next, each of these agency notions is discussed.
