What is Learner Agency?

At its core, learner agency is about the power to act in learning. It’s not only about what students know, but about their ability to make choices, set goals, and shape their educational journeys. When learners see themselves as capable of influencing their future, learning becomes more than just meeting requirements — it becomes meaningful, self-directed, and deeply connected to who they are.

But what exactly do we mean by learner agency? Scholars have offered many perspectives:

Agency can be understood as the capacity to intentionally influence one’s actions and environment. This highlights the learner’s ability to make deliberate choices and guide their own progress (Bandura, 2001).

Agency can also be seen as something that emerges through the interaction of personal effort and the resources available in one’s social and cultural environment. In this sense, learners’ ability to act depends not only on what they can do individually but also on the opportunities and supports around them (Biesta & Tedder, 2007).

From another angle, agency is woven through time — learners draw on their past, imagine their future, and make evaluative choices in the present. This view emphasizes that learner agency is not a single moment of action, but an ongoing process of navigating time (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998).

Agency has also been described as the freedom to pursue valuable goals and expand the choices available to oneself. This perspective focuses on agency as capability — not just having opportunities, but being able to act on them (Sen, 1999).

Others see agency as intertwined with structures of society, where human action and social systems continually shape one another. From this lens, learner agency involves not only individual choice but also how those choices are enabled or constrained by institutions and norms (Giddens, 1984).

More recently, agency has been framed as postdigital and relational, where learners act with and through technologies, networks, and material contexts. This highlights that agency today cannot be separated from the digital environments and social ecologies in which learning takes place (Code, 2020).

Taken together, these perspectives show that learner agency is personal, temporal, and relational. It is personal because it involves intentionality, planning, self-regulation, and belief in one’s capacity. It is temporal because learners continually weave past experiences, present decisions, and future aspirations into their actions. And it is relational because agency is always shaped by the communities, cultures, and contexts in which learning happens.

When learners have agency, they become active participants rather than passive recipients. They can navigate uncertainty, adapt to change, and take responsibility for their growth. This transforms education into something much deeper than memorizing facts — it becomes about building the confidence, adaptability, and resilience learners need in today’s world.

For teachers, parents, and communities, supporting learner agency means creating opportunities for young people to set goals, make choices, and connect learning to their lives. It also means recognizing that agency is not just an individual trait — it depends on the environments we build for learners: classrooms that welcome questions, communities that encourage exploration, and systems that value curiosity as much as compliance.

Learner agency, in the end, is about students becoming the authors of their own education. It is about equipping them with the skills, confidence, and imagination to shape their futures. And as we look ahead, nurturing this disposition may be one of the most important things we can do to prepare the next generation for a rapidly changing world.