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What is Agency and how is it exercised

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In literature agency is defined as a personal capacity. It is the feeling of gaining control over ones action. When a person has a good understanding, feels confident about something and is able to make decisions is an agentic person. However agency is exercised and enacted in a context where other factors like the structure, the rules, other people and the norms of the context affect our ability to take action or make a decision. In the research field people are generally referred to as ‘actors’ or ‘agents’. In my opinion, actors are those who follow rules and are good followers. In our context ‘actors’ are generally those who ‘act’ in a TV drama or film or theatre. These people act on a script written by someone else, usually the script writer. So the ‘actors’ act upon it. In research particularly in educational research, actor are used for those people (school management, or teachers) who enact an educational policy or curriculum. So actors generally follow rules and implement p

Literacy: The new development and how to teach it

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Literacy is traditionally defined as the ability to read and write. With this definition in mind, read the following statement and answer the two questions that follows: Statement: A mayber was railing his temp. Sintly a durf accotted some padis in the mayber’s temp. Q1: what did the durf accot in the mayber’s temp? Q2: Why did the durf accot padis in the mayber’s temp?   You might have answered Q1 as “the durf accotted padis in the mayber’s temp” which is correct. But to answer Q2 is tricky. It is an analysis question which requires a level of understanding to answer why. The statement is just a made up one which can be used as an example of being literate but can’t be used to answer higher level of thinking and understanding. So instead of being literate (ability to read and write) we need literacy (the ability to gain knowledge and use higher order thinking) in today’s modern world. In today’s world literacy is more than just the ability to read and write. Some scholar

Students should feel safe: Caring for emotions in the classroom

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Unsafe classrooms are where the teacher:          uses physical punishment          uses verbal abuse and degrade students           bullies students           calls names to students           calls students useless           insults students’ in-front of their peers Some teachers think that the above strategies can teach the students a good lesson and they can learn better. Some teachers believe that such strategies are effective to maintain classroom discipline. They want to control students by force. They want to show that the students know less and so the teacher has the authority to feed them what they do not know. However research has strongly rejected such claims, proving that any kind of punishment affects the child’s personality. The child loses confidence on him/herself. This has life-time implication for the child.  There are other and more effective ways of soft discipline strategies through a positive teacher-student relationship that I have talked abou