The Development of a Dialogical Pedagogical Agency in Initial Teacher Formation Programs: A Critical Inquiry

A Problematic Context for Education: Neoliberalism and Its Logic of Instrumental Rationality

In order to understand problems in the education field, it is crucial to consider the wider scenario in which it takes place, which is the neoliberal context. The scope of study follows Giroux (2004), when he affirms that neoliberalism is not only an economic order but a cultural field that operates from a technical reason or technical rationality (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1997). This rationality orients our common sense as society, is inspired by our most basic instinct to survive the environment, is moved by an interest of control, and it is reflected in the way we research and know (Habermas, 1986). Technical rationality unfolded over modernity and instead of being liberating and progressive as expected, became dominating and controlling (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1997), making us perceive social reality in terms of means to ends, putting even human beings as means to others’ predefined ends and turning them into objects – hence, without capacity of action, as Arendt (2018) would say, looking more like a bureaucrat than a human being. Thus, dehumanization is the harm resulting from relating from this logic, and even more so of bringing it to the educational field. This research addresses this concern about instrumentalization in human relations and the subsequent domination that it implies as the key element to problematize when considering transformational education.

As this instrumental culture is transmitted in the school system through educational curriculum (Torres, 2017), usually arranged by objectives (Gimeno Sacristán, 2021), any transformation of our social culture from the educational system will need teachers to be able to recognize and deal with this technocratic perspective. This includes being able to go beyond purely instrumental criteria of learning, their subject knowledge, and the mere administration of predefined learning goals.

The complexity of this purpose is that the instrumental culture is highly naturalized: it seems to be easier to value things by applying criteria of efficiency, performance or throughput, than understanding the qualitative aspects of a process of learning. Unfortunately for those who believe in a different rationality – such as communicative, dialogical, or critical – the educational system itself works to transmit this instrumental logic (Torres, 2017), making it very difficult to change.

The Chilean educational system is a good example of this. The context of the work of teachers is regulated by post-dictatorial educational policies that have been strengthened through mechanisms associated with managerial logics (Oyarzún & Soto, 2021), such as standardized census-type evaluations, results-based management, and competition between schools (Assaél et al., 2021). As a result, this has defined a curriculum and assessment policy increasingly as standardized and prescriptive, which has impacted teachers’ work, as it has become an obstacle to the exercise of autonomous, flexible, contextualized, and active teaching in school daily life (Assaél et al., 2021). These conditions limit the pedagogical action field and predefine the type of teacher desired by the system.

This standardization or performativity, as Perryman and Calvert (2020) affirm, acts as a disciplinary technology that uses judgements and comparisons against what is seen as efficient as a means of control, as well as a culture of performativity that leads to performances that measure efficiency. This reality demands that teachers turn into a technical workforce to be managed and controlled rather than a profession to be respected (Perryman & Calvert, 2020).

Thus, this social environment ends up reducing the autonomy of teachers. Assael et al. (2021) point out that this distance between assuming an autonomous and professional role of teaching and the standardizing demands of a business environment is generating growing frustration in teachers and a loss of meaning in their work. Other research about managerialist policies applied to schools concluded that the institutional context, mainly the various standardization and accountability mechanisms, restricts the possibilities of agency for teachers and generates tensions that arise from mismatches between the prescriptions of the institutional framework and contextual elements (Oyarzún & Soto, 2021).

Referential Framework and Concepts of Social Justice, Dialogic Pedagogy, Initial Teacher Formation, and Pedagogical Agency

This research was developed considering the tension between micro and macro levels. Formal education has been placed in a micro educational context of the classroom and faces tensions at the macro educational level of standardized and managerial educational policies that frame the teaching practice and tend to reproduce technical rationality. It is important to study the role that cultural transmitters play as they are the link between the social heritage and the possibility of transformation. Such a transformation creates a horizon of education that shows a more humanized, democratic, and reflective of a fairer society (Pérez Tapias, 1996).

The teleology of education that this research employs is that of social justice, which is understood, from a critical perspective, as the due recognition (Honneth, 1995) and absence of institutional oppression (Young, 2011). Recognition is fundamental since the human being is only constituted in relation to others in an intersubjective interaction (Honneth, 1995), so it is crucial to eliminate institutional oppression to promote an environment that strengthens people’s capacities to participate in discussions related to issues that influence their lives (Young, 2011). By considering this perspective, this research affirms that social justice is served when power is distributed in a fairer way in everyday interactions, contributing to a more democratic culture and social transformation.

In this sense, teachers can play a key role in the social transformation of education. To change an instrumental culture to a humanizing one requires teachers to work from the micro-level, where interactions take place, as they are embedded in power dynamics, as power is everywhere, grounded in everyday life (Gledhill, 2000, p. 126) and permeating social relations. As Scherer (2015) explains, micropolitics contributes to the formation of desire, belief, inclination, and judgement in political subjects; when interactions unfold, they influence and transform people, in a dynamic and spontaneous process, conforming an experience that affects them according to the way they are treated by others. It is at an imperceptible level that gestates who we are.

In the case of teacher formation, concerns for social transformation would lead them to be more careful with the kind of relations they develop with their students and the way they exercise authority. When education is understood as a humanization process and not mere training, teachers develop the means to exercise authority and promote dialogic interactions. Human encounters are more respectful of the learners as ‘subjects’ – the opposite of ‘objects’ – and foster reflective awareness that is facilitated by the teacher’s mediation between the students’ subjectivity and the world (Freire, 2000). As awareness, will and action can be developed in others, then power can be distributed in a fairer way.

Forming teachers able to deal with this technocratic perspective and able to offer a dialogic pedagogy requires putting human interaction at the centre of the pedagogical work, as pedagogical interaction is the channel of a hidden curriculum that configures subjectivities (Giroux & Penna, 1979). Interaction is a space that contains implicit meanings (Manghi, 2017), and teachers, aware or not, put into play the dynamics of participation and reflection that they promote in their classrooms (Cerda et al., 2004). It is through interactions that political, ethical, and epistemic issues are unconsciously absorbed by learners.

Interactions oriented to a fairer, ethically healthier and politically more democratic society need pedagogical awareness about how to promote dialogical forms of relation that go beyond monologic to be communicatively validated (Lee, 2019). These interactions treat people as subjects capable of acting and getting involved, causing transformative learning that links thoughts, actions, and emotions to see a new form of reality (Jarvis, 2005) and allows students to reinterpret the frames of reference that they have uncritically developed throughout their lives. This type of change builds new interpretive frameworks that guide their experiences in a more negotiated way (Alhadeff, 2014).

Forming teachers who are capable of interacting dialogically needs, in turn, people who have lived a similar experience in their learning, as dialogic rationality is not achieved with the mere absorption of critical texts or rhetorical discourses because the capacity to be dialogical and democratic requires a socialization experience (Sanjurjo, 2000). What is more, without the ability to put the discourse into practice, there is a risk of fostering dogmatism. On the contrary, learning about how to be dialogical and democratic requires that the educator offers these types of interactions in the classroom as lived experiences, provoking democratic socialization practices based on participation and reflection (Cerda et al., 2004).

Therefore, the importance of considering Initial Teacher Formation (ITF) is much more than an academic process with a specific path in an institution, requiring students to carry out a set of subjects and experiences that lead to obtaining a final credential (Sánchez Ponce, 2013). Instead, this research understands ITF as a socialization process; this is, ITF is a process that tries to arouse in people certain moral, intellectual and affective dispositions through specific forms and contents transmitted to them (Bernstein, 1974, in Sánchez Ponce, 2013). To consider ITF as a socialization process makes visible pedagogical interactions a crucial element in teacher formation.

ITF programs can develop capable teachers who can resist the technical scenario they have to work in, which leads us to the concept of agency. Following Akram (2010), who proposes a novel and interesting dialectical view by incorporating Bourdieau’s notion of habitus, it can be said that agency is the capacity of influencing the circumstances of one’s own life, which requires overcoming the unconscious factors that limit the person from having greater control over the circumstances of the structure of which they are a part.

The habitus is referred to as the orientation or way of being in the world, the predisposed way of thinking, acting and moving in and through the social environment that encompasses posture, behaviour, perspective, expectations and tastes, which is socially acquired and culturally incorporated (Akram, 2010). The habitus reflects the social construction of reality in which even our unconscious cognitive structures are inscribed, so it is shown mainly through our actions. Thus, the acquisition of a certain habitus shapes our thoughts and actions.

It is important to remember, as Akram affirms, that to claim that agents act unconsciously and habitually in terms of everyday structural interaction is not the same as arguing that agents do not have conscious and reflective capacities, but rather that structural and agency interaction occurs in a mundane, habitual, and unconscious way (Akram, 2010, p. 105). In this research, we understand in-formation teachers with the potential for awareness and agency, but not as something given, since we live in an alienating neoliberal context that makes it difficult to develop critical awareness. This research proposes that ITF is the stage at which one can develop critical awareness.

From this perspective, an educational process that values the formation of agency capacity will emphasize developing reflective capacities. As Bourdieau and Wacquant (Akram, 2010, p. 119) explain, reflexivity is the ability to rethink the ‘unthought’ and consists of the systematic exploration of the unthought categories of thought that delimits the thinkable and predetermined thoughts. From this conceptualization, it is interesting to consider how much ITF can influence the habitus that pedagogy students bring with them and how much it can develop greater reflective capacities to expand that framework absorbed through previous socialization processes.

Another important element in developing the notion of pedagogical agency in this research is taken from Dalmiya (2016), who considers that agency is made up of three dimensions: epistemic, ethical, and political. This research brings these dimensions to the pedagogical field to develop a framework within which we can see and interpret teachers’ actions from a critical perspective.

The political dimension refers to the exercise of rights and responsibilities expressed in issues of power relations, resistance, domination, and oppression. In the pedagogical field, for example, this is reflected in confronting institutionalized oppression that resists curricular standardization, particularly when learning is put at the centre of the process of change (Bourn, 2016).

The ethical dimension refers to the weighting of criteria of justice, equity, and dignity to support the decisions that are made, paying attention to the relational and affective forces of the students that arise in the classroom (Zapata et al., 2019). Furthermore, it involves interacting with the students dialogically, developing a pedagogy as a communicative phenomenon with sentient beings, in which messages that cannot be monologically imposed, but communicatively validated (Lee, 2019). It also asks teachers to encourage students to become someone recognized, through a relationship that involves a welcoming encounter that generates moral qualities of responsibility and respect, becoming someone willing to bond affectively (Martínez et al., 2003).

The epistemic dimension has to do with the degree of awareness or reflection on what is known and how the action itself is justified (Jarvis, 2005). As Zanotto and Gaeta (2018) point out, personal epistemology refers to the cognition that an individual has regarding the nature of knowledge and the nature of knowing (Zanotto & Gaeta, 2018). It can be explored by reviewing the capacity for self-reflection of one’s own beliefs. Another expression of the epistemic is when teachers are able to create learning experiences capable of provoking transformative learning in their students, linking thoughts, actions, and emotions to see a new form of reality (Jarvis, 2005).

Research Problem Definition, Questions, and Methodological Decisions

The Chilean educational context described earlier reinforces the reproduction of the dehumanizing instrumental logic of education. This research examines these concerns about the role of ITF in preparing teachers to deal with this technocratic rationality and determines whether, once working in the educational system, a transformative education empowers students politically, ethically, and epistemically.

This research focuses on the capacity of pedagogical agency of secondary teachers who recently graduated from ITF programs and the demands they face in their first teaching experiences. Pedagogical agency is examined as a key capacity to carry out practices of recognition and empowerment. Specifically, this research asks about the contribution of ITF in the development of a dialogical pedagogical agency capacity of recent graduates of pedagogy programs for secondary education and aims to make it visible through the analysis of their experience when they have started to work as teachers. Thus, the general question guiding this research is: What is the capacity for ethical/political/epistemic agency that novice teachers develop in their initial teacher formation? Furthermore, the main objective of this research is to analyze the capacity of pedagogical agency that teachers have developed throughout ITF, to propose guidelines that redirect efforts to recover an integral human dimension of the formation of secondary education teachers to contribute to social justice.

Methodologically, the approach of this study is, as previously described, situated in critical theory, as the focus of the problem and the development of pedagogical agency relies on issues of power related to institutional processes. Cohen et al. (2018, p. 53) point out that much of behaviour is the result of repressive or dominant factors, so to explore the capacity of pedagogical agency of novice teachers can shed light on if this is something developed by ITF. This approach places this research in the field of analysis of power dynamics, making explicit the need to form teachers responsible for the use of power as a minimum to advance in the development of more dialogic and democratic communities. As Cohen et al. (2018) point out that this spirit of transformation in research occurs because critical theory is explicitly prescriptive and normative, and its purpose is not merely to understand situations and phenomena but to change them.

In terms of methodological decisions, this research was developed from a critical qualitative perspective. As there is not a critical methodology by itself (Ashgar, 2013), it was necessary to design a methodology according to the purposes of the research. This design was a methodological bricolage, a construction of an emancipatory research (Kincheloe et al., 2018) that goes beyond the blinders of disciplines and looks through a conceptual window into a new world of research and knowledge production (Kincheloe et al., 2018). This design is an eclectic process of research that required epistemological vigilance to maintain theoretical coherence (Kincheloe et al., 2018).

The instruments to collect the data used in this study were the semi-structured interviews and critical incident, as they privilege the appearance of novice teachers’ voices. The critical incidents collected information to answer the first specific question, while the semi-structured interviews collected information for the other specific questions.

The sample of this study, as expected in qualitative research, was not probabilistic, but significant. It was defined at the beginning as a purposive sample and, later, self-defined by availability, as teachers agreed to participate in the study. The criteria for the purposive sample was to be a teacher who graduated from a secondary education ITF program no more than two years ago; to have studied in institutions that publicly declare social commitment; and to have chosen to study pedagogy for their desire to contribute to social change.

A formal invitation to participate in the study was sent to secondary ITF programs of four universities in Santiago, Chile that fulfilled the requirement of declaring social commitment; that is to say, universities which promote publicly a profile, through publicity or official motto, connected to or concerned with social issues, social justice, social change, or social transformation. The ITF programs that accepted provided lists of recently graduated teachers, to whom a formal invitation was sent via email, inviting them to participate in the study. Twelve teachers agreed to participate, and they received the instructions to develop the critical incidents. The sample was defined by an availability criterion, as from the twenty participants who agreed to participate in the study, some did not send any critical incidents. Twelve participants completed the process and participated until the end of the study. Thus, the sample of the research is constituted of twelve novice teachers, studied in eight different ITF programs of two universities that declare concern about social issues, situated in the capital of Chile, Santiago.

Data Collection and Analysis

This section focuses on the data collected to answer the specific question: What is the capacity for ethical/political/epistemic pedagogical agency that novice teachers show in their first professional experiences as teachers?

The peculiar aim of this question is that the capacity of pedagogical agency is not something that can be asked for, as it is not necessarily situated at a conscious level that can be literally verbalized. As Alvesson & Sköldberg (2009) say, we can hardly go around asking people about their ‘psychic prisons’ or ‘false consciousness’, or about ‘communicative distortions’ (p. 162). To have access to the messages absorbed throughout the formation, it is necessary to dig below the surface of the discourse, to understand the influences and effects of ITF in the development of pedagogical agency. We required, then, an instrument that collects evidence of concrete actions in real situations, which can be subsequently analyzed. That is why the instrument for collecting information to answer this specific question was the critical incident.

The critical incident or critical episode is an information-gathering instrument that consists of narratives about unforeseen situations, which illuminate in an instant some key problematic aspect(s) of the teacher’s role (Woods, 1993) As Angelides affirms following Tripp (1993), critical incidents or episodes are the common events that occur in everyday life in the classroom, not all of them dramatic or obvious, which indicate trends, underlying motifs, or structures. A critical incident is an interpretation of the meaning of an event (Tripp, 1993, p. 8). Therefore, the criticality of the incident is not about how sensational it is, but rather its justification and meaning (Angelides, 2001, p. 431). In the case of this research, the interpretation of the events offered in this study were oriented by the political, ethical, and epistemic dimensions of pedagogical agency, based on criteria such as power, justice, equity, dignity, and autonomy. As a methodological decision to facilitate the deductive analysis, a table was elaborated (See Table 1).

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Table 1.

Guidance to Orient Analysis of Critical Incidents. Process of Extracting Meaning From the Critical Incidents. Source: Own Elaboration From Theoretical Framework Revision.

Guidance To Orient Analysis Of Critical Incidents
Dimension of pedagogical agency	Elements of pedagogical agency expressed into reflection and/or action, with its corresponding author(s) (Those without citations are descriptions deducted from critical theory in general)
Political dimension: Understanding of issues of power and interests that exist in the school, exercising rights and responsibilities in contexts of debate and decision	- Creativity over bureaucracy (Arendt, 2018)
	- Resistance over powerlessness (Giroux, 1989)
	- Criticism over naturalization. Examination of reflection and action, pointing out on what kind of assumptions, on what kind of ways of thinking, not questioned, not considered, the practices we accept rest (Foucault, in (Johnson, 1997)
	- End over means. Going beyond the instrumental, breaking the condition of bureaucrat
	- Analysis of the whole picture of the system they are in, recognition of own and others’ power (political literacy (Kelchtermans & Ballet, 2002))
	- Resistance to curriculum standardization (Bourn, 2016)
	- Creativity in learning experiences to provoke in students new forms of understanding reality (Jarvis, 2005)
	- Empowerment of others proposing activities leading students to reinterpret their frames of reference to build new interpretive frameworks (Alhadeff, 2014)
	- Spontaneity over programming (Grundy, 1987)
	- Making justified decisions that defy the norms over immobility, acceptance, docility and/or obedience to what is instructed
	- Having control of resources over being powerless
	- Capacity to influence the context with the own action over incapacity to do it
Ethical dimension: The weighting of criteria of justice, equity and dignity to support the decisions that are made	- Relation to others beyond the instrumental (…) understanding teaching as a communicative phenomenon to validate messages communicatively (Lee, 2019)
	- Dialogic relationship to encourage students to become someone recognized (Martínez et al., 2003) (dialogicity over monologicity)
	- Proximity and help, to gain warmth and recognition from others, giving space to relational and affective forces that emerge in the classroom (Zapata et al., 2019)
	- Negotiation over imposition
	- Decision-making considering others’ development and well-being
	- Power regulation, careful with the repercussions that own decisions have on others
	- To be oriented by critical values over by technical values
	- Care of others under his/her power
	- Comprehension of the demands of the context and capacity of taking responsibility for the consequences over not comprehension of the demands
	- Inclusion over exclusion
Epistemic dimension: Personal epistemology concerns the cognition that an individual has regarding the nature of knowledge and the nature of knowing	- Aware of conceptions about knowledge, what is known and processes to know
	- Problematization over naturalization, to question reality as something that is not natural, and therefore can be different. Going beyond ‘objective appearances’
	- Reflection about own beliefs
	- Inquiry of underlying assumptions over accepting things as objective or neutral
	- Producing meaning over consuming meaning
	- Active self-involvement in epistemic processes over passive/unconscious
	- Acceptance of reality as something socially constructed over naturally given
	- Deep comprehension of the context in different layers and dimensions over naïve or superficial understanding of the context (criticism over naturalization (Foucault, in (Johnson, 1997))

Following the description of the application of critical incident as a data collection instrument, once the participants agreed to be part of the research, they were asked to write the critical incidents. To motivate and orient the writing, a set of instructions was sent via email, which is detailed as follows:

This exercise requires you to have about 30 minutes alone and as calmly as possible. Any distractor could affect the depth of the narrative.

At this first stage, I will ask you to focus on your work as a teacher on a day-to-day basis: on everyday matters in different areas of the school: the teachers' room, the classroom, the playground, the entrance to the school, the room where meetings are held with the management team, the library, a laboratory, or special room, among others.

Try to review the emotions/sensations that invade you when you remember these different spaces, times, and relationships. Try to stop in those situations that come back to your memories, related to any actor of the school: a director, a teacher, a student… in short, anyone with whom you have had to relate from your role as a teacher.

Please try to identify a specific moment in which, interacting with any of these actors, you have felt that have been able or not to carry out something that you wanted to do as a professional. Some tension that you have perceived and that you have had to face. Try to focus on the emotions that you have felt, that allow you to identify that moment... It does not matter if that tension was resolved in favour of your will or that of others, the important thing is the situation per se.

Now, I would like to ask you to write that situation, as descriptively as possible. That is, imagine that it is a scene from a film, in which you have to say when, where, and what happens, who is acting in that scene and what is the plot of that scene (what the actors present in the scene do and say).

Start by writing the first thing that comes to mind. The most significant for you. What happened, who was present, what you did, what others did, how you felt about it – which is not necessarily the same as what you feel now). Write, read it again, and then re-include the details that allow you to complement your story and allow those who were not there to recreate it as faithfully as possible to what happened.

As previously noted from the twenty participants agreeing to participate, twelve sent critical incidents. Some wrote one incident; others, two; and others three. In practical terms, once the critical incidents were collected, a first reading was carried out to have an initial look at what facts the writer posited as relevant. This first reading was complemented with an unstructured interview immediately after the incident was submitted, to delve into possible information that would allow a better understanding of the incident and clarify any aspect of it. This step is recommended so that the narrator of the incident can decipher the basic assumptions of any context that might be taken-for-granted (Angelides, 2001). The interview did not have a predefined structure; it was led by the questions that arose by reading the incident together – the researcher and novice teacher – to clarify the narrative and facilitate the later analysis.

Once the incident’s reading and interview were completed, a second reading was made, interpreting from a critical perspective the facts and decisions described in the incident to evaluate in critical terms the agency capacity of the teacher. This process of analysis was first deductive, oriented by a frame of reference developed to guide the analysis (See Table 1), elaborated from the theoretical framework, considering criteria from political, ethical, and epistemic dimensions of pedagogical agency to guide the analysis of teachers’ actions. The analysis followed inductively, developing interpretations of the data that derive from themes, concepts, explanations, and understandings that explain the data (Cohen et al., 2018, p. 645).

As Alvesson and Skoldberg (2009) say, in critical theory, the theoretical frame of reference possesses a special importance because it can help to make good interpretations to go beyond surface meanings. This is important to declare in this kind of research, as critical theory works interpretively, focussing on relating the action level to the broader social, historical, and economic context. Considering this, it is necessary to review those beliefs and values that lead people’s conscious lives and those unquestioned beliefs and values upon which the taken-for-granted structure rests (Alvesson & Skoldberg, 2009).

Once the incidents were recovered, the deductive analysis focused on situations to identify if any action described fit with any criteria defined in Table 1, elaborating a summary to facilitate the later analysis, considering:

• Relevance of the incident in terms of interaction between teacher and environment; that is, if the incident illustrates the teacher’s interaction with different actors of the school to test the way he/she faces situations that demand different wills at stake.

• Presence of every dimension (political/ethical/epistemic) according to how the teacher acts. This is to signal the presence of elements related to pedagogical agency (political, ethical, or epistemic) implied in the way in which the teacher faces the situation.

• Strength of pedagogical agency resulting from dimensions. This is a very complex definition, as it is an effort to describe in brief the pedagogical agency of the novice teacher – as a result of the three dimensions implied – per incident.

• Elements of every dimension according to how the teacher acts. These elements, the political, the ethical and the epistemic, refer to a description of the elements found in every incident, according to the detail of Table 1.

• Comments/Aspects that highlight – Possible explanation. Any distinctive feature? Comments about peculiarities of the teacher, the situations narrated, the context or any other aspect that could help to the later analysis.

In the next sections, two incidents have been selected randomly – out of twenty-nine collected – as an example to offer an analysis of each. In Section 7, there is a more general discussion resulting from the general findings of the research process.

Final Comments

Educational processes oriented to transformation towards a fairer and more democratic society cannot be solved on the basis of inspiring speeches. Change is not about rhetoric or talking about change but about relating in empowering ways that allow us to achieve a greater capacity for agency to act in the world. Education is fundamental in this and demands that teachers know how to do it.

Agency capacity is in the field of practice, so it is not a speech to learn but a habitus to develop through socialization processes. It is a result of a complex network of interactions that is offered daily by any teacher of future teachers to pedagogy students, as a meta-pedagogy that affects the cycles of cultural reproduction of society, in which issues of power and human formation are involved.

Research about the development of pedagogical agency is scarce. Considering its importance, it is even more urgent to develop more research in this sense. This research takes place out of these concerns and expects to be a starting point for further research.

Further implications of this research are related to investigating the future ITF internal processes. The lack of studies that penetrate what can be called the black box of teacher training to study the characteristics of teacher training processes (Ávalos, 2011) are an urgent call to observe the processes of formation of teachers in the programs. Particularly, it is important to observe those processes related to the pedagogical practices of teachers of future teachers, to understand the habitus that is modelled in everyday interactions and through the hidden curriculum. In technocratic times, our students in the educational system need teachers who are better prepared to offer a transformative education, and this must include a greater capacity of pedagogical agency.