Insight on Student Agency from the Galileo Program

This article was first published in ReConnectEd.

By Ester Koelle & Linh Dang

The Galileo Program is a term-long speciality program undertaken by University High School Year 9 students in Melbourne. It is based on an inquiry and project-based learning model, with a strong focus on collaboration across students, teachers and the wider community. 

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Based on the four General Capabilities in the Victorian Curriculum - Critical and Creative Thinking, Ethical Thinking, Intercultural Understanding, and Personal and Social Development - the program aims to support students to develop agency as independent learners who feel empowered to make change in the local community. While the program design involves Year 9 students leaving mainstream classes for one term to explicitly develop the General Capabilities with a focus on student empowerment, these experiences can also be facilitated in mainstream classrooms. Our hope is that through sharing the Galileo model, staff can access opportunities in their classroom to support student agency. 

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Community Partnerships

One key element of the program is facilitating community partnerships, in particular through community service and local excursions. These opportunities allow students to build connections with the outside world, facilitating a sense of ownership and social purpose. Throughout the term, students participate in a community service program with Carlton Primary School students. As part of the program, students research literacy development strategies for young learners and utilise these strategies in 1-1 reading sessions with Prep to Grade 3 students. Additionally, Galileo students organise team games for the primary school students, utilising their leadership and organisational skills to mentor and coach.  

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Research Projects

Students further develop connections beyond the classroom through their Galileo Research Project. Early in the term, students research the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and select five goals that they are the most passionate about. Based on their preferences, students are placed into a Research Group with four other students. 

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Within their groups, students are required to interview an expert on their topic, and to survey the general public. These experiences require students to demonstrate independence, as they are tasked with contacting an expert to interview, and utilising research to create their own interview and survey questions. Students can often find this process daunting as they are required to complete tasks well beyond their comfort zone, yet feel a deep sense of accomplishment and independence through facilitating the process themselves. These experiences allow our students the chance to develop personal and social skills through interacting with the community outside of the classroom. Student empowerment is further facilitated through agency and choice within the classroom environment. Once students have been placed into a research group based on their preferences at the beginning of the term, students individually write an inquiry question to frame their research. While receiving support from their teacher, students are encouraged to lead the direction of their project, exploring topics that are important to them. Through placing students at the centre of the classroom, the program redefines students as agents of knowledge rather than recipients. This allows students to build educational purpose and drive, as they take active roles in the ownership of their learning. In the diagram below, we represent this growth as rising steps in a ladder, from students experiencing themselves as manipulated objects of education processes, to people who exercise and develop agency in their activities of co-creative learning.

Ladder of youth participation (Jovanovski, 2020)

‍Co-Agency

The program's unique structure reframes the role of teachers in the classroom to foster student agency as individuals and within collective activity. Whilst the traditional classroom promotes teachers as figures of authority, delivering knowledge and learning through instruction to passive recipients (OECD, 2018), Galileo creates a learning environment built on co-agency among students, and between students and teachers, by positioning students as researchers and teachers as mentors. Teachers encourage students to call them by their first names, and they promote student independence and voice by providing guidance, rather than instruction throughout the research project’s development and active fulfilment. 

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This shift in power dynamics in the classroom supports student agency to emerge, evolve and grow, as the student-teacher relationship becomes a partnership in which students take active roles as organisers of, and in, their learning. Students can thus recognise that their opinions, perspectives and viewpoints are valuable to the learning process – including reciprocity in which students ‘teach their teachers’ as well as learn from and with them. Furthermore, this pedagogical model builds students' senses of autonomy and ability to work confidently in groups, sharing with peers the load of worthy knowledge labours, while teachers offer lessons in supportive tools such as ‘conflict resolution’ to equip students to work together without direct teacher intervention, enabling students to gain a higher level of social, emotional and communicative skills.

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This reciprocity in learning and teaching (‘pedagogy’) starts with re-evaluating the traditional roles of ‘students’ and ‘teachers’ in the classroom. By taking a step back, teachers make space for students to take more active roles in their learning, which in turn establishes a relationship based on mutual trust and respect, thereby empowering students to voice their thoughts, questions, and indeed critical and opposing opinions, while feeling comfortably safe to do so. As student voice achieves parity with teachers in the classroom, a culture of collaboration evolves, reinforcing the formation of a student-and-teacher partnership. 

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How can student-teacher partnerships be created?

Actively utilising student feedback to redevelop pedagogical practices in the classroom is a richly valuable means to generate sustainable learning-and-teaching partnerships among students and teachers. This can be done through various strategies, such as a weekly or bimonthly student survey with questions coupled with short responses to questions such as, ‘How can this be improved?’ When actively prioritising student feedback, teachers are better able to understand how students learn, to hear what students say is and isn’t working in teaching approaches, to consider how they might better tackle the learning process and content in the future, and so on, thereby enhancing classroom pedagogic practices. 

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Importantly, viewing students as co-creators in the learning and teaching process shifts away from assumptions that students are merely learners in an educational didacticism, instead actively centring students at the heart of the learning-and-teaching model. This shift engages and empowers students, as they feel purpose and ownership in their education, thus making good, in practice, on principles of student voice and agency. 

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Ultimately, by giving students the opportunity to co-create, interact with their local communities and take initiative in their learning, schools not only empower students but provide them with a platform to understand, develop and embody student agency and voice. This places students at the centre of the learning and teaching process as they take ownership of their role as the largest stakeholder in education.

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Sources

STUDENT AGENCY STUDENT AGENCY FOR 2030 FOR 2030 Conceptual learning framework. (n.d.). https://www.oecd.org/education/2030-project/teaching-and-learning/learning/student-agency/Student_Agency_for_2030_concept_note.pdf ‌

Jovanovski, A. (2020, March 29). Ladder of Youth Participation. Trainers Library. https://www.trainerslibrary.org/ladder-of-youth-participation

Ester Koelle

Humanities and Inquiry Teacher at the UniversityHigh School who has taught in the Galileo Program for four years.

Linh Dang‍

Recent High school graduate and former VicSRC student executive member

Contact:

Ester.koelle@education.vic.gov.au

Linhdang.dtl@gmail.com