Moving beyond the agency-structure dialectic in pre-collegiate science education: positionality, engagement, and emergence

Agency and structure postulate a dialectic relationship: agents’ actions shape and are shaped by social structure in a spiral and dynamic manner. Empirical studies in pre-collegiate science education contexts, however, tend to focus on individual’s positionality instead of the engagement between agency and structure. This paper first charts the theoretical and methodological terrains of agency and structure from sociological, critical/post-structural, and psychological perspectives. It then reviews empirical studies on the agency-structure dialectic in pre-collegiate science education with a focus on their theoretical frameworks (agency), research contexts (structure), and related methods and methodologies. The reviewed studies are divided into four categories: teacher agency, teacher-and-student agency, student agency, and administrator agency. The results reveal how the agency-structure dialectic is taken up and studied in science education and how the notions of culture and language provide the possibility for hybrid perspectives of agency. We argue that the notion of emergence, based on the engagement within and among individual and collective agencies and structures, is the key to move beyond the current agency-structure dialectic in science education.