Forms of Student Agency in AOP
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In the AOP (Action-Oriented Pedagogies) framework, agentic action is at the heart of meaningful learning and transformative sustainability education. Agency isn’t something students (or educators) simply have — it’s something we do. Agency shows up when we take initiative, make decisions, and take action in ways that matter in our classrooms, schools, communities, and beyond.
Three Forms of Student Agency
Three Forms of Student Agency
Below are three forms of student agency supported in the AOP framework. Each one is essential — and together, they help students move from understanding the world as it is to co-creating the world as it could be.
Intellectual Agency: Thinking for informed action
Intellectual Agency: Thinking for informed action
Intellectual agency shows up when students think deeply and critically about sustainability issues and use what they learn to take informed action. It’s about helping students grow their awareness and understanding, ask good questions, and evaluate options.
Intellectual agency refers to the cognitive and analytical engagement students develop as they make sense of complex sustainability issues. This form of agency is accomplished through productive and purposive efforts to increase one’s awareness and understanding of a phenomenon, situation, or problem.
Students use intellectual agency when they:
Use systems thinking to explore how issues are connected and complex, including how to understand interdependencies and feedback loops. Draw on different forms of transdisciplinary knowledge (i.e., scientific, cultural, local, Indigenous) to frame and reframe sustainability challenges.
Analyze and critique data, trends, and perspectives to inform strategic decision-making and proposed actions.
Relational Agency: Co-creating with others
Relational Agency: Co-creating with others
Relational agency emphasizes the social and collaborative nature of action. It’s about working with others — peers, teachers, administrators, and/or broader communities — to co-design, co-lead, and co-enact sustainability-related efforts.
Relational agency refers to the capacity to act with others in ways that are interdependent, dialogic, and collectively generative. It emphasizes collaboration that is reciprocal, respectful, and rooted in shared responsibility. Actions are not merely carried out side by side—they are co-produced through open dialogue, mutual learning, and shared authority.
Students demonstrate relational agency when they build relationships across differences, make decisions together, and co-create responses to sustainability challenges. While relational agency is inherently co-constructed, educators play a key role in preparing students (and their collaborators) to engage relationally and equitably.
Students use relational agency when they:
Recognize how their actions are interdependent with those of others.
Build and sustain relationships across roles, cultures, and communities to amplify the reach and impact of collective efforts.
Engage in dialogue, co-planning, and joint decision-making, distributing responsibility and honoring diverse voices
Participate in collective sensemaking to build shared understanding of complex issues and align on meaningful goals
Share authority and practice democratic forms of collaboration, where decisions emerge through negotiation, listening, and shared purpose.
Transformative Agency: Changing systems
Transformative Agency: Changing systems
Transformative agency focuses on changing systems and structures. It emphasizes student’s capacity to reframe and challenge what currently is, and imagine and work toward what could be.
Transformative agency is about cultivating students’ initiative and commitment to disrupt the status quo and participate in reshaping unjust and/or unsustainable systems. It positions youth as not just respondents to external forces but as active contributors to systems that shape our lives. This includes:
Sociopolitical systems - the networks of people, institutions, and power relations that determine how decisions are made, whose voices are included or excluded, and how policies and norms are set.
Socioecological systems - the interdependent relationships between human societies and the natural world, including ecosystems, climate, food and water systems, and the ways human activity influences and is influenced by ecological processes.
Students exercise their transformative agency when they…
See themselves as capable of shaping or disrupting existing norms or institutions.
Identify leverage points in systems to initiate broader change.
Understand their role as social actors within systems—not just a respondent, but a shaper of futures.
Envision and act to transform unjust or unsustainable systems.
Identify leverage points where small actions can lead to large shifts.
Move beyond individual change, taking initiative to put learning to use by reframing possibilities and exerting effort toward civic or ecological ends.
What Educators Can Do: How to Support the Three Forms of Student Agency
What Educators Can Do: How to Support the Three Forms of Student Agency
What educators can do to support Intellectual Agency:
Use scenario analysis and modeling to explore possible futures and their implications.
Structure opportunities for evidence-based argumentation that strengthen reasoning with credible data, diverse perspectives, and counterarguments.
Facilitate investigations of local socio-ecological issues, helping students connect abstract or global challenges to the lived realities of their communities.
Introduce and scaffold engagement with multiple knowledge systems—scientific, local, cultural, Indigenous—to support inclusive framing and reframing of challenges.
Integrate systems thinking tools (e.g., causal loop diagrams, system maps) to uncover interdependencies, feedback loops, and points of leverage in complex problems.
Analyze drivers of change (e.g., economic, political, environmental) and examine the potential impacts of various interventions.
Weigh trade-offs, values, and evidence as they evaluate possible paths forward.
Cultivate foreground intellectual risk-taking through inquiry-driven approaches, structured debates, or collaborative data analyses.
What educators can do to support Relational Agency:
Create structures for co-planning and co-leading with students (and potentially community members), such as participatory design teams or student advisory roles.
Facilitate dialogue protocols that support active listening, perspective-taking, and consensus-building.
Design experiences that require interdependent roles, making collaboration essential—not optional—for successful action.
Model and scaffold collective sensemaking, helping students identify patterns, perspectives, and interpretations that arise from group inquiry.
Connect students with community partners for co-designed sustainability work that reflects mutual concern and shared benefit.
Normalize shared authority, inviting students into classroom-level or school-wide decisions related to sustainability efforts.
Encourage reflection on group dynamics, relationships, and interdependence as part of project evaluation and legacy-building.
What educators can do to support Transformative Agency:
Design learning experiences that foreground systemic analysis, helping students map structures, identify inequities, and surface leverage points for change.
Create opportunities for students to design and test interventions that challenge existing practices or norms (e.g., school waste systems, campus resource use).
Support students in policy and advocacy work, such as writing proposals, presenting to decision-makers, or collaborating with community leaders.
Help students scale and sustain innovations, revisiting projects over time to refine, expand, or institutionalize changes.
Provide platforms for student voices in classroom, school, or community-level decision-making.
Model and normalize justice-oriented practices, guiding students to reflect critically on power, equity, and the ethics of transformation.
Encourage sustained commitment, showing how classroom learning can be applied in civic and ecological contexts beyond school.
"Real Work, Real Consequences" Stories
Stories of students and educators taking meaningful action for sustainability—real work with real consequences that shape just and livable futures. These narratives highlight experiences, actions, and reflections through the lens of Action-Oriented Pedagogies."Real Work, Real Consequences" Stories
Photo Credit: Michelle Jordan
In Amber and Madison’s second-grade classroom, sustainability isn’t abstract—it’s lived. Through water-focused inquiry, co-produced projects, and student-led celebrations, their co-teaching nurtures agency across the full arc of Action-Oriented Pedagogies, helping children imagine, act, and leave a legacy for future learners.
In Cheri’s high school environmental science science classes, students don’t just study the environment—they shape it. From measuring carbon sequestration to proposing native planting and improving irrigation, they turn inquiry into action, practicing agency as scientists, problem-solvers, and stewards of their school ecosystem.
Curated Resources for Exploration, Planning, and Practice
Curated Resources for Exploration, Planning, and Practice
Educators interested in supporting student opportunities for agentic action can assess agency in terms of its forms (intellectual, relational, transformative). They can also assess the level of student agency afforded in classroom activity systems. The OECD Sun Model of Co-agency is one tool for doing so. The model defines the various degrees of agency young people have while collaborating with adults, ranging from complete adult leadership to shared leadership.
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