At the Next Level Lab, we often tell the story of a “fast fish” that uses its fins to create vortices in the water and push off them to propel itself forward, allowing the fish to swim faster than it could without this modification to the environment. The fast fish serves as a useful metaphor for what we refer to as contextualized agency. Contextualized agency assumes that learners must (a) be centrally agentive in their own learning; (b) be able to act on and modify the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional contexts of their learning to support their best performance; and (c) understand learning principles related to human cognitive, social, and emotional architecture. In a recent article published in the Review of Research in Education, NLL researchers Megan Cuzzolino, Tina Grotzer, and Jingyi Xu examine the research on feedback and transfer to consider how the relationships between agency and context have been treated in the learning sciences literature. The paper discusses how contextualized agency manifests in prominent pedagogies and offers suggestions for future research and educational practice.
Learning Like “Fast Fish”: A Research Review on the Promise of Contextualized Agency
