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Big Thinking for Little People: An Interpretive Study of the Relationship Between Student Agency and Play-Based Learning at an Auckland Primary School

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Dissertation(10.78 MB)

Date

2023

Authors

van Hoffen, Emma

Supervisor

Smith, Alison

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Master of Education

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Publisher

Auckland University of Technology

Abstract

Student agency has been hailed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as an ideal context in which the skills young people will need to succeed in the future can be developed (OECD, 2019). Accordingly, the New Zealand Ministry of Education has emphasised that the development of the skills aligned with student agency be prioritised in classrooms throughout the country (Ministry of Education, 2020). However, traditional methods of developing student agency that appear in the literature generally relate to older students and are not necessarily appropriate for younger learners (Adair, 2014; Mayes et al., 2019). Play-based learning, an educational approach also gaining traction in New Zealand schools, may help to address this issue. Play-based learning also seeks to develop vital skills, but through the developmentally appropriate means of play. The purpose of this research was to examine the relationship between student agency and play-based learning, to discover the extent of overlap between these two disciplines and ascertain whether there may be the opportunity for amalgamation. This study was positioned within an interpretive phenomenological paradigm and used several qualitative research methods of data gathering. A series of semi-structured interviews were carried out with a New Entrant (children aged five years) classroom teacher to understand her experience of student agency and play in her classroom. A Mosaic approach (Clark & Moss, 2001) was used to gather data from six child participants about their experiences. This took place over six focus group sessions using a variety of creative research methods including drawing and photo-elicitation. Analysis of the data revealed that there appear to be misconceptions from all stakeholders around the way power manifests in the classroom, and that reintroducing a non-binary view of power to the student-teacher relationship may have a greater effect on student agency than other methods. However, attempts to develop student agency or play-based learning in the classroom may be met with significant barriers in the form of an already crowded curriculum and differences in parents’ expectations of their child’s schooling. Finally, this research suggests that play-based contexts have the potential to be suitable environments for student agency to be developed, with the caveat that teacher scaffolding is still required to extend children’s learning and make the development of student agency skills explicit. Overall, this dissertation concludes with four recommendations at a national, school and teacher level. First, that the Ministry of Education keeps student agency at the forefront of the curriculum refresh currently underway by minimising prescriptiveness and having a greater focus on key competencies, particularly in junior primary classrooms; second, that schools facilitate comprehensive professional development around student agency and play-based learning, culminating in a school-wide definition and approach to these disciplines; third, that teachers make choice-making explicit in their classrooms by specifically voicing when and how the children make choices; and lastly, that teachers challenge their understanding of power, because it is from here that genuine opportunities for agency will be created.

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https://hdl.handle.net/10292/16129

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Masters Dissertations