🔗 linkedin.com/in/matthias-olson84

Research Focus: Teacher Agency • Student Identity • International Education

“Connection, Culture, and Constraint: An Action Research Study of Teacher Agency and Student Identity Expression at an International School in East Asia”

What challenge did your research address?

International schools bring students together across cultures and then ask them to learn inside a curriculum, language, and set of expectations built somewhere else. Students are welcomed as learners, but sustaining them as whole people is a different problem, and schools rarely have a way to solve it. My research points at the institution rather than the teacher. At the school I studied, teachers could identify what their students needed but lacked was room to act on it.

What inspired you to pursue this research?

Education has always been about relationship for me: knowledge forming relationally, inside a community, rather than just as an individual endeavor. International schools have a rare opportunity to build a genuinely diverse community where knowledge transforms the people in and around it, rather than a place where knowledge is delivered and measured by test scores. I wanted to understand what it would take for a school to be that kind of community.

What did your research find, and what is its impact?

Two ideas emerged from this research. The first, which I called the cascading cost, showed how institutional ideology can constrain teacher agency, and how constrained teacher agency in turn constrains what students can express. The second is the difference between welcoming student presence and sustaining student wholeness: schools are good at the first, but a student can hit every metric a school tracks and still learn to leave part of themselves at the door. The study’s second cycle led to a faculty community of practice that gave an international faculty a forum to surface tensions they’d had nowhere else to raise.

“A student can hit every metric a school tracks and still learn to leave part of themselves at the door.”

Matthias Olson

Full dissertation: https://www.proquest.com/openview/3b8d3c15c5a6a705b2319b7d3bfead46/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y