Agency, learning and professional practice: CRADLE Seminar Series
25 February 2020
What does thinking about agency offer when considering questions of how professionals shift the status quo, respond to new challenges, or preserve something important when so much around them is changing? Join us on Tuesday 24 March to hear A/Prof. Nick Hopwood (UTS) explore questions and concepts of agency in the context of professional practices.
| When? | 2.30 pm to 3.30 pm, Tuesday 24 March 2020 |
| Where? | Online |
| Cost? | This is a free event |
| Register? | Register here! |
How do professionals shift the status quo, respond to new challenges, or preserve something important when so much around them is changing? There are many ways we might approach questions like these – perhaps in terms of power, or innovation. What might thinking about agency offer? Agency is a concept that is at once seductive and slippery. So why bother with it? And if we do consider agency, where does that leave us in terms of professional learning?
In this seminar I will explore why I have been repeatedly drawn to questions and concepts of agency in the context of professional practices. What does it offer that other concepts don’t? What aspects of professional practice can we reach in unique and valuable ways? What are the consequences of looking at agency in one way or another? And how might it complement a non-trivial concept of learning in practice? (By which, I mean a concept that acknowledges the connections between learning and practice without ending up with a notion that we are all learning all the time, which leaves us with little to say!) And how might we ‘see’ agency in data? What would it look like in practice?
These are not all questions I have stable answers to, but are ones I hope at least to convince you are worth pondering. I will ground the discussion in empirical examples, through which relational, transformative and other aspects of agency might be glimpsed in concrete terms. In considering agency in professional practice, I will pay particular attention to practices that involve high levels of collaboration or partnership with others.
