Investigating students' change agency in teams through a relational lens

As the Physics community pursues change work that aims to improve departments and create more equitable learning environments, it is important that these efforts are approached by teams with diverse stakeholders who can inform the change. Students bring an expertise of their own educational experiences. When students participate in these teams, it becomes imperative that the physics community investigates how students build their own sense of agency and the ways they create the capacity for change within these teams. We aim to capture the ways that agency occurs in the interaction within these teams. We use the lens of Relational Agency to interpret student experiences. In this talk, I illustrate how Relational Agency illuminates the ways in which students exercise agency in social interactions through two examples from different team contexts. One from a student leadership team within the Access Network, and a second from a departmental action team. Through these two examples, I illustrate how taking an interactional framing of agency helps identify essential features of change teams that support centering students. This talk will provide directions for continued research into student agency in change work and offer suggestions for partnering with students in future efforts.