At the SEL Summit that @Aimee_DeFoe and I attended last week, (Beyond Talk: Building Tomorrow Together) a main topic was SEL in relation to youth agency and action. There was one speaker in particular that has stuck with me. He was talking about SEL and civic engagement, and how there were really 3 pieces that needed to come together in order for students to feel that they could make a difference - analysis, action, and agency.
Using a pie graphic, he went on to explain that having just one or two pieces of the pie could lead students awry. If you have good social analysis skills for instance, you can identify problems in society and understand them, but without agency - be left feeling hopeless and powerless about them. With action skills, you are motivated to take action, but without the analysis, can be left to misinformed, ill thought out action (which we tend to sadly see a lot of today). And lastly agency is what enables students to feel that they are able to make a difference - but without analysis or action, they don’t have a path forward to act on that agency.
It occurred to me that this analysis-action-agency trifecta can also have strong parallels for building students’ STEM learner identity. The analysis piece is the knowledge, the ability to identify a problem and think flexibly to problem solve it. The skills used to think of the build or code, or iteration needed to solve a problem. The action piece is the skills used to actually make the build or code happen - constructing the robot, building a manipulator, writing code, etc. The agency piece is the feeling of being a problem solver - of having the confidence and courage to try something new, and to learn from mistakes. If you have the analysis but not the agency, you might think of a solution to a problem, but feel powerless to try it. Alternatively, if you have the action piece without the analysis, you want to build, build, build, but without applying thought or prior knowledge. Like creating a great intake manipulator on a robot meant to track lines and follow a path.
With all three working together, however, you build student identity as a STEM learner. They have the knowledge to identify the problem, the skills to act on that knowledge, and the agency to feel capable and competent to solve it. While these skills are STEM related, the concept of student identity is very much an SEL construct, and one that is extremely important in adolescence. Supporting our students to build that STEM learner identity can help fill in a piece of their identity puzzle that may be missing, or lacking.
I’m curious to know how you have seen your students express or grow their STEM learner identity through analysis, action, or agency in your setting. Please share your stories!
