Rights and Responsibilities

“The final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.”

Anne Frank

Around this time last year I wrote a blog post titled “Give a S***”, describing my experience of finding plastic bags of dog excrement along the riverside track that I cycle on most mornings. Sadly, not a lot has changed since then and I regularly find these small, green packages left along the side of the track on my morning cycle. This morning was no different, with two of these packages located less than 20 metres away from a rubbish bin into which they could have been deposited.

It got me thinking as I cycled home. What do the people who leave these there think will happen to them? Is it a case of leaving them there until “they” come and collect them (whoever ‘they’ might be)? It got me thinking then about the tension between rights and responsibility that seems to lie behind a lot of what we see happening in our society these days. For example…

• We like to eat fast food – but do we dispose of the wrapper responsibly?
• We’d like to drive and arrive quickly at our destination, but do we do that in a way that will keep others on the road safe?
• We want to enthusiastically hold to the views and beliefs we may have, but are we prepared to listed and respect the views and beliefs others have that may be different?
• We like the idea of owning a pet – but are we prepared to commit to what that involves for the period of it’s lifetime?

These are just a few examples that illustrate my point – with rights come responsibilities. It’s not a new thought – but it’s one worth reflecting on as educators as we consider our role in working with our young learners.

Our education system has evolved from a ‘one-size-fits-all’ preparation for work in the factories of the industrial era, to accommodating the unique characteristics of individual students within an increasing diverse population. The mantra of ‘personalised learning’ is an indicator of this. This shift is ongoing and was highlighted at the United Nations’ Sept. 2022 Transforming Education Summit which concluded that; “Education systems need to adapt to the shifting skills needed professionally, making learning more student-centred, connected, dynamic, inclusive and collaborative, allowing creativity to blossom.”

The problem I see about the construct of a ‘personalised’ approach to education is that it becomes simply unmanageable within the structural constructs of our existing system (which were, after all, designed to support the ‘one-size-fits-all’ paradigm).

As a consequence, the response of many educators, parents and others to the challenge of personalisation has looked more like an abdication of their responsibility, allowing learners to roam ‘free range’, able to pursue their own interests and preferences WITHOUT any form of guidance or structure to help them develop the understanding that with rights come responsibilities.

As a result, whether it’s in the classrooms of some of our elite, private schools, or those in some of our more deprived regions and suburbs, we observe behaviours that are chronically self-indulgent and self-centred. When something goes wrong it’s generally ‘their’ fault – ‘they‘ took it, or ‘they‘ didn’t make it clear in the instructions, or ‘they‘ will pick it up if I leave it there… and so on.

This behaviour is observed among some teachers also… “I can’t attend afternoon staff meetings because that’s my time at the gym (or wherever)”, ”They didn’t tell me I needed to return the hall to normal after my PE class” etc.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m actually a strong advocate for personalisation – my experience with my own five kids (one with a disability) and now six grandchildren convinces me that everyone is different, and their experience of and reaction to experiences in life are all different. This is at the heart of my thinking about learner agency, and the book I co-authored last year titled “Agency By Design: An Educators Playbook” (details at the end of this post).

In our book I talk about the fact that Agency is actually about taking responsibility – and that there are three dimensions to that:

1. Responsibility to self — Managing self, self-regulation, and self-direction are all terms used in classrooms where learner agency is intentionally promoted. Having the freedom to choose or express ideas is good, but those things come with a responsibility to do so in a way that avoids harm or negative consequences. Think here about a very young child learning about the danger of touching something very hot, for example. Or a teenager having to navigate the responsibility that comes with choices they make about smoking, alcohol, speeding or over-exposure to digital devices. This is where the notion of agency and wellbeing overlap.
    
2. Responsibility to others — To focus purely on self and not consider the impact of our words and actions on others isn’t agency — it’s hedonism. As individuals, we live within an interdependent ecosystem. As such, a student’s capacity to enact personal agency mediates and is mediated by the classroom’s sociocultural context. Consider here the impact of cyber-bullying for example, and the programmes and strategies that have been introduced into schools to build understanding and establish patterns of responsible behaviour.
    
3. Responsibility to our shared environment — Just as we live in an interdependence with other humans, we must take into account the environments we share. For example, a creative activity in the classroom involving groups using tools, paint and other resources can go awry if there’s no responsibility taken for how these are stored, managed and made available to the next group – or if no-one takes responsibility for cleaning up at the end! On a larger scale, if we continue, as a society, to extract more from the planet we inhabit that it is capable of providing, the legacy we’re leaving the next generation isn’t that promising.

There are so many opportunities that we have presented to us on a daily basis in our schools and classrooms to reinforce this with our students – and our staff. We must be committed to looking past our innate excuse making, and stop thinking that ‘they‘ will sort it out, or, worse, ‘there’s nothing we can do because it’s their fault’. Having agency means that as individuals and as a group we always have an opportunity to make a difference in what is happening – whether in small ways (i.e. how we care for each other) or big ways (enacting a change to legislation).

The reason many struggle with the concept of agency in our education system is that we’re still living in the shadow of the post-industrial structures that define how we work and operate. We’re used to being told what to do and how to do it (even if we don’t like it, we comply because ‘they‘ are telling us to do it), and we’re comfortable with the structures we have because there’s a sense of familiarity and certainty that comes with them – even if, again, we don’t like them or feel that they’re fit for purpose, but we comply because that’s what ‘they‘ have designed or required.

Which brings me back to my small, green packets of canine excrement. Pretty much all of us would acknowledge this is wrong (except the small percentage of dog owners who, for some reason find it an acceptable thing to do!) – yet our response needs to be considered in those three areas of agency.

• Responsibility to self – is it harming or affecting me? After all, it’s their right to be able to act the way they want I guess.
   
• Responsibility to others – is it harming others? What precedent does this set for other dog walkers? What if a child picks it up and plays with it?
   
• Responsibility to the environment – wait a minute – will ‘they‘ come and pick this up or will it be left here indefinitely? What happens if it is – to the plastic bag and to its contents? What could or should I do to ensure the environment we share is maintained in the way we might all find acceptable? (HINT – each day I collect the bags I find and deposit them in the rubbish bins provided).

While my canine excrement story may seem trivial to some, it’s really just a microcosm of the sorts of decision-making that goes on in our minds every day – sometimes with regards to our personal lives or the things happening in our classroom or school, and other times as we process the ‘global’ issues we’re exposed to on our TV screens at newstime or in our newsfeeds online etc. To be agentic means not only having the ability to make choices and act on those choices at a personal level, but it also involves being critically and actively aware of what those decisions mean for us personally, collectively and sustainably in terms of the environment we share.

Consider this in light of all of the political decision making we see going on in NZ at the moment, or in relation to the events unfolding on our screens each night – natural disasters, famines, wars etc. These things have always been a part of our human existence (albeit more frequent and more extreme according to some) – but it’s our response as humanity that becomes the issue here. In our efforts to recognised the rights of individuals and personal freedoms, we’ve lost sight of the fact that we’re also an elaborately interconnected ecosystem that requires us to maintain a balance between the individual and the collective, and take into account our combined impact on the environment we share. We can’t simply expect that ‘they’ will sort it out.

What a privilege and responsibility we have in our schools and classrooms then. It’s in the small things that the difference will be made – from the policies and processes we put in place to address issues and concerns as they arise, to the programmes and pedagogy we design and implement that enable and empower the individuals (students and teachers) to find their voice and work collectively to live, learn and grow in sustainable community.