Student voice is a concept and a set of approaches that position students alongside credentialed educators as critics and creators of educational practice. Student voice and student agency are closely linked when school stakeholders connect the sound of students speaking with students having the power to influence practices and analyses of…

In this article, I adopt a practice theory consideration of student agency, that is, I consider students' power to act on their interests and intentions, on their own inclinations; this will-to-act-on-the-world is central to becoming an active, adaptive participant across the life span. As practice theorist Shery Ortner has explained, none of us…

In this article, we engage in a discussion about how we came to Torres' Rights of the Learner (RotL) and how these ideas can transform the way we teach mathematics and the ways our students learn mathematics. This article serves to introduce teachers and teacher educators to the RotL and to remind ourselves that before one can rehumanize our…

The literature on student agency is missing the voice and perspectives of teachers. Although theoretical and empirical research aims to explore student agency by observing and documenting the structures and supports involved in fostering agency, the field knows little of what student agency means to teachers who currently teach and who have…

In order to position Black and Latinx youth to challenge racism and other dynamics of oppression, their education must be oriented toward equipping them with the requisite skills and sense of efficacy. This article makes an argument for teachers having to develop a reciprocal sense of authority rooted in their students' freedom in the face of…

In this article, we highlight the affordances of agency that is not merely individual, but rather emerges in and through collectivities. We take up these issues within the context of our own work in the field of sociocultural perspectives on literacy and through the methodological vantage point of community-based and participatory research. First,…

Thoughtfully planned professional development (PD) that fosters teacher agency has the potential to impact student agency in the literacy classroom. Drawing on a body of research with 82 teachers across multiple schools and clinical settings, this article first presents findings from a variety of PD contexts that are synthesized to highlight four…

Supporting agency can be complex and challenging, especially when teaching students with severe disabilities (i.e., students with intellectual disability, autism, and/or multiple disabilities who are eligible for their state's alternate assessment). In this article, we compare Bandura's model of agency with constructs from the severe disabilities…

This culminating article synthesizes the collection of articles to discuss conceptualizations of student agency across contexts. Themes that exist across the collection of articles include agency as multidimensional, agency as a navigational tool, and agency as advocacy. In this concluding article, ideas from across the articles are presented to…

All science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educators working in urban public school systems are expected to provide opportunities for students to develop foundational scientific literacy skills in mathematics and science learning. However, the demands on STEM educators teaching the "gifted" or…

Education has the power to change the world. We wrote this article in the spirit of the hope embodied by the election of President Obama and the critical need for improved teaching to benefit all the nation's students. This article offers a synthesis of the characteristics of excellent teaching for the diverse student population. This article…

This article describes a project that positions high school students as teacher educators within an undergraduate secondary certification program. A brief review of researchers' arguments for listening to students and a description of the project contextualize the perspectives of graduates of the program who teach or have taught in city schools.…

The author outlines five promising principles, emerging from his research, on teaching that can empower teachers and Black male students in urban school contexts. In particular, teachers and students (a) envision life beyond their present situations, (b) come to know themselves in relation to others, (c) speak possibility and not destruction, (d)…