Agency and Empowerment

This entry provides an overview of the concepts agency and empowerment, and their link to diversity in education. An exploration of the concepts and the processes and outcomes associated with them is used to present the challenges and possibilities of making them critical to meeting the needs of a culturally diverse K–12 and postsecondary population in the United States.

A major challenge faced in exploring and making use of the ideas associated with the concepts is the multidimensionality and complexity of the concepts and the focus of educational institutions on standardization, testing, and accountability. Agency refers to the freedom to do whatever one needs to in order to achieve goals or values that one views as important. Empowerment refers to the ability to gain power to, power over, power with, or power from within, in spite of opposition from those with whom one interacts. Empowerment is sometimes viewed as synonymous with agency, and at other times as a subset of agency, a precondition to agency, or an extension of agency. This entry's definition of empowerment, a concept that Paulo Freire introduced in the 1970s in Brazil, is just one of many. Solava Ibrahim and Sabina Alkire point to 29 of the many definitions of empowerment and propose internationally comparable indicators of agency and empowerment. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the many indicators could go a long way in helping researchers and policymakers to make the connections between agency and empowerment and human and economic development.

Agency is directly connected to all aspects of an individual's well-being, self-esteem, autonomy, and self-efficacy. According to Albert Bandura's social cognitive theory, its two main dimensions are intentionality and behavior. Human agency is often perceived as personal. When scholars look at it from this perspective, there is a focus on the cognitive, motivational, affective, and choice processes through which agency exerts its effects.

Bandura holds that human agency can also be proxy and collective. In proxy agency, individuals and groups use persons who have power and influence in the society and/or communities to act on their behalf to achieve the desired results. Collective agency is an option for those who believe that some goals are more easily attained through people's shared belief in their collective power to achieve desired results. There is also the less talked about social and material modes of agency that are [Page 75]not located in the subject. Scholars Karen Bar ad, Charis Thompson, and others are doing work on reproductive technology that relocates agency in material contexts. Judith Butler, a postmodern scholar, believes that there is an invariable interaction between human and nonhuman elements in the sense of agency. To adopt this attitude will be useful in that it lessens what Bandura refers to as the contentious duality between the various theories and perspectives on agency. The diversity in terms of the various approaches and perspectives should empower instead of disempower. Agency can either affect the empowerment process or be affected by it. If the individuals/groups believe that they have the power to achieve their goals, can make choices, decisions, and effect change, then there is the possibility of a feeling of empowerment.

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