Why empowering student agency has never mattered more – and what you can do about it in your classroom and kura tomorrow.
A conversation I had this week with a colleague reminded me of an OECD report I’d read highlighting the importance of empowering our young people to think and act in meaningful ways when it comes to our environment and the future of the planet.
The conversation centred around an incident in a classroom where a student – bright, engaged, the kind who asks the questions that keep you on your toes – looked up from a newspaper article about the implications of NZ’s decision to begin further mining of the seabed and asked: “What’s the point?”
This sort of question can stop you in your tracks. Not because you don’t have an answer, but because some part of you understands exactly where that feeling comes from.
We are living and teaching in the Anthropocene – the geological era defined by human impact on Earth’s systems. Climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification: these are not distant abstractions for our students. They are the world they are inheriting. And right now, New Zealand’s own policy landscape is shifting in ways that make this conversation even more urgent for our classrooms.
The question is not whether we should equip young people for this reality. The question is how — and whether we are bold enough to do it well.
What the OECD Is Telling Us – and Why It Matters
In 2023, the OECD released a landmark document: Agency in the Anthropocene, which forms part of the PISA 2025 science framework. This is not just another policy paper to skim and file. It is a serious, research-grounded call to reimagine what science education is for.
At its heart, the report argues that 15-year-olds around the world need more than scientific knowledge. They need the capacity to act – individually and collectively – with hope and efficacy in the face of complex, interconnected ecological challenges.
The OECD identifies five core competencies that sit at the heart of this vision:
- Systems thinking – the ability to understand how things are connected, how changes in one part of a system ripple through others, and how humans are not outside of ecosystems but part of them.
- Self-efficacy – a genuine belief that one’s own actions can make a difference. Not blind optimism, but grounded confidence.
- Collective efficacy – understanding that working together multiplies impact, and that the challenges we face are too large for individual heroes.
- Outcome expectancy – the ability to reason about consequences: if we do X, what might happen, and for whom?
- Hope – not wishful thinking, but what the researchers call “substantiated hope”: belief in viable pathways forward, built on evidence and imagination alike.
These are not soft skills. They are the intellectual and emotional infrastructure young people need to engage as citizens – rather than retreat into helplessness or cynicism.
The New Zealand Context: Why This Hits Close to Home
For New Zealand educators, this framework lands in a particularly charged moment. Our policy environment has shifted significantly in recent years, and our students are paying attention.
The Resource Management Act (1991) – a cornerstone of New Zealand’s environmental governance for three decades – is being replaced by the Planning and Natural Environment Bills, designed to streamline consents and accelerate economic development. Fast-track approval processes now allow ministers to expedite major projects, creating real tension between development pressures and biodiversity protection.
Methane reduction targets have been revised downward to between 14 and 24 percent below 2017 levels by 2050, with the government favouring technological solutions over agricultural pricing mechanisms. Meanwhile, the previous ban on offshore oil and gas exploration has been lifted.
I am not here to tell you what to think about any of these decisions. That is not the teacher’s role – and it is not mine. But I am saying this: your students know these things are happening. They are forming opinions, feeling things, asking hard questions. The choice we face is not whether they engage with these realities, but whether school is a place that equips them to engage well.
School can be the place where confusion becomes curiosity, where anger becomes advocacy, and where uncertainty becomes the starting point for inquiry – rather than the end of it.
What Agency Actually Looks Like in Schools
Here is where I want to get practical, because I know that “student agency” can sometimes feel like one of those phrases that sounds meaningful in a keynote and then evaporates when you’re standing in front of 28 Year 10s on a Tuesday afternoon.
As I’ve written in our book, Agency By Design, agency is not the same as simply giving students choice. It is not about letting students do whatever they want, or abandoning curriculum structure. The OECD framework is clear that agency requires knowledge – deep, rigorous scientific understanding – as its foundation. You cannot think systemically about what you do not understand.
But agency does require something that is sometimes harder to build into our teaching: genuine stakes. Real questions. Authentic audiences. The sense that what happens in this classroom connects to what happens out there.
Here are four practical approaches you can begin with – none of which require a curriculum overhaul, and all of which I have seen work in New Zealand classrooms:
| 1. Systems Mapping Choose a real, local issue – a proposed fast-track development near your school, a change to freshwater regulations, a threatened species in your rohe. Ask students to map the system: who and what is affected, what are the feedback loops, where are the leverage points? The goal is not to arrive at a “correct” answer but to practice the habit of seeing connections. Students who can map systems are students who resist simplistic narratives – and that is a skill that transfers far beyond science class. A fun way to do this is to use giant sheets of butcher paper and post-it notes. Physical, messy, collaborative mapping often surfaces insights that digital tools miss. |
| 2. Efficacy Projects Self-efficacy is not built through affirmation – it is built through experience. It is about building hope through action. Students need to actually do something, present it to a real audience, and see that their work has impact. Student-led audits of things like waste collection at your school or oxygen level readings in a local stream are some of the effective examples I’ve seen. Students gather real data, analyse it, and present recommendations to the board of trustees or local council. The learning is rigorous. The audience is real. The stakes matter. The point is not whether every recommendation gets adopted. The point is that students experience themselves as people whose analysis is taken seriously. These sorts of investigation provide authentic ways to partner with your local council or a community organisation early. Even a 30-minute slot at a community meeting can transform a student’s sense of what is possible. |
| 3. Hope Dialogues One of the most powerful things a teacher can model is how to hold complexity without collapsing into either denial or despair. Hope dialogues are structured conversations where students grapple with real policy trade-offs – the kind where there are no easy answers. Cross-age forums work particularly well here. Pair senior students with juniors to explore questions like: What do we owe future generations? How do we weigh economic development against biodiversity? What role should mātauranga Māori play alongside Western science in decision-making? These conversations do not need to reach consensus. They need to build the capacity to reason carefully about competing values – which is exactly what citizenship in a democratic society requires. Practical tip: Use a structured protocol like Socratic seminar or philosophical chairs to ensure all voices are heard — especially quieter students who often have the most considered views. |
| 4. Civic Simulations Democracy is a set of skills, not just a set of values. Role-playing a resource consent hearing, a select committee submission, or a community consultation practises the actual moves of civic participation – making an argument, listening to opposition, revising a position. Simulating a planning consultation around a fictional (or real) fast-track development gives students a chance to inhabit different perspectives: the developer, the environmental advocate, the farmer, the iwi representative, the Minister. It builds both systems thinking and outcome expectancy in one exercise. Where possible, consider inviting a local councillor, planner, or community advocate to attend the final simulation and give feedback. The shift in student engagement when there is a real adult in the room taking them seriously is remarkable. |
A Word to Principals and School Leaders
Individual teachers doing brave, creative things in their classrooms matter enormously. But they should not have to fight the system to do it. If you are a principal or a leader, here is what your teachers need from you:
- Permission to go slow on coverage and deep on understanding. The OECD framework asks us to value competency over content breadth. That requires trust from leadership.
- Cross-curricular time and structures. Agency in the Anthropocene does not live only in science. Social studies, te reo Māori, health, and the arts all have roles to play. Create the timetable space for genuine integration.
- Community connections. The most powerful efficacy-building experiences happen at the intersection of school and community. Use your networks to open doors for student action projects.
- Your own modelling. Talk openly with staff and students about the challenges of this moment. Leaders who engage honestly with uncertainty – rather than projecting false confidence – build exactly the culture in which student agency can flourish.
New Zealand has an opportunity to position its education system as a genuine example of what it looks like to prepare rangatahi for the Anthropocene. That is not a small thing. But it will not happen through a single unit plan or a new resource. It will happen through thousands of small, deliberate choices – by teachers and principals who believe their students are capable of more than we sometimes ask of them.
Back to that student story
Remember the student who asked, “What’s the point?” Here is what I want us to be able to say – not as a platitude, but as something we have built into the fabric of how we teach:
“The point is you. Your thinking matters. Your actions matter. And in this classroom, we are going to practise being the kind of people the world needs right now.”
That is what agency in the Anthropocene looks like in practice. Not certainty. Not easy answers. But genuine belief – backed by knowledge, skill, and experience – that what we do matters.
Our rangatahi deserve nothing less.
Further Reading
- OECD (2023). Agency in the Anthropocene: PISA 2025 Science Framework. OECD Publishing, Paris.
- New Zealand Curriculum Refresh — Te Mātaiaho (2023), Ministry of Education.
- Agency By Desing: An Educator’s Playbook (2023) Aurora Institute
