Autonomy vs Agency

Autonomy has been baked into the Makerspace’s pedagogies and values from the start. For example, “Interest-based learning and autonomy” is one of our core pedagogies, and we say “Makerspace learners are encouraged to work on projects that genuinely interest them, including personal projects, and have the autonomy to choose their methods and media as long as they fall within other Makerspace guidelines.” Similarly, in our Team Charter, we list “Autonomy” as a core value, saying: “We value having autonomy over how we accomplish the goals of our work.”

This framing has worked fine, but I’ve been thinking lately that “agency” might better capture what I’m trying to achieve. I actually had this thought while reading Ivan Illich’s “Tools for Conviviality,” though I don’t remember exactly what prompted it; looking back I can find lots of things that speak to autonomy vs agency, but nothing explicit.

I’m going to use this space to think through the difference between the two and how they might apply in our space.

“Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision.” Ivan Illch - Tools for Conviviality

“Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally. They do not require previous certification of the user. Their existence does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning in action.” Ivan Illch - Tools for Conviviality

Autonomy is about freedom from constraints and being able to make choices without external control. Agency is about the active ability to make choices and decisions that have an impact on your condition or environment. You exercise agency. Autonomy is a negative, the freedom from; while agency is a positive, the ability and freedom to.

In it’s focus on actively making decisions, agency acknowledges that we don’t operate free of constraints or contexts. For example, the Makerspace has a code of conduct and guidelines for the use of equipment and supplies. Wwe are also explicitly a learning space, not a space centered around production or play, even if those do sometimes happen here.

Nobody acts totally autonomously in the Makerspace (or anywhere, really). Learners and those of us who work in the space are not free to act with total autonomy. But hopefully, we can exercise agency about our work and learning. Hopefully, we are expanding our own and others’ agency.

Learning-by-doing is one of our main pedagogies because we believe it is how people best learn to use tools but also because it expands their agency when it comes to making decisions about when and how to learn about or use tools. Self-directed learning is important because exercising agency over how we learn increases our capacity for exercising agency in future learning situations. Maybe that means finding a YouTube tutorial or asking someone else in the space for help. The focus isn’t meant to be on “self” it’s meant to be on “directed.” The purpose isn’t that people should learn on their own, it’s to help them make choices about how to learn that work for them.

When a learner is struggling with troubleshooting a machine that isn’t working our instinct is often to just fix it for them. Through an autonomy lens, we might see this as the learner’s job, with the best case scenario being they fix it themselves. We (or they) might also see it as irrelevant if their goal is just to make what they want autonomously. Through an agency lens, we are pushed to ask how we can best help them build their capacity to have agency in the future by expanding (in a Vygotsky sense) their ability to make choices in this scenario. Sometimes them asking is in itself expanding agency. In other cases, we might want to push them to go further alone or through seeking help with others. I suppose there could be cases where letting them give up is also the right approach. But the question is always what expands their capacity for having agency.

There might be places where autonomy is still the right frame - I still believe in letting people pick their vibe in the space, and for some that means they barely interact with us. I also believe in a certain level of “benign neglect” in situations where interfering in something feels like it is more likely to harm a learning situation in some way. But I’m also going to start shifting how I talk about our space and see how it feels. After all, the Makerspace is always evolving - our language should too.