Promoting agency in history classrooms: The role of historical-citizen abilities in Chilean history classes

Abstract

Agency is important to contribute to a democratic society. Therefore, agency development within the school system requires studying. By developing historical-citizen abilities, History classes provide an opportunity to promote agency in students. This article aims to investigate how critical-transformative agency can be fostered through a Critical Citizenship Sequence (CCS) by integrating history, citizenship, and human rights. Data were obtained from implementing the CCS in tenth-grade History classrooms. We studied the relationship between agency and the abilities of interpretation and positioning based on 182 students’ written performances. We observed four agency profiles: lack of agency, duty-oriented agency, social agency, and critical-transformative agency. We identified a relationship between each profile and the performance in interpretation and positioning abilities, that is, the greater the capacity for action, the higher the level of performance in abilities. In a second phase, we analyzed 13 student interviews to investigate students’ perspectives on the relationship between their abilities and the CCS implementation. Results show that the CCS stages most valued by students for developing interpretation and positioning abilities were Using Sources and Open Classroom Discussion. Although agency was not fully recognized by the students, they still identified the role that history and human rights play in fostering agency.