ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses theoretically develop the notion of "critical student agency." It deals with the "Freirean Pedagogical Practice: Striving for Agency, Creating Change," where attempts at critical pedagogical practice and critiqued. Antonio Gramsci, a founder of the Italian Communist Party, has generated much discussion in the century on the nature of social control and human agency through his theories of "hegemony" and "counter-hegemony." According to Gramsci, resistance is simply a matter of displaying signs of subaltern discontent rather than making conscious efforts at social change. Poststructuralism positions itself against the encompassing and deterministic nature of the modernist Enlightenment project, and the meta-narratives that guide it. Critical social theorists from the Frankfurt School onward have attempted to go beyond modernist/structuralist determinisms and acknowledge both the potential limiting nature of sociocultural formations and individuals' ability to still act agentively within them.
