Shared Agency: The Agency Partnership Framework for Instructor–Student Collaboration

Synthesis: This conceptual paper introduces Agency as shared agency — a relational construct that emerges not from the student or the faculty alone but from a relationship built through intentional partnership. It presents the Agency Partnership Framework, which operationalizes shared agency through eight relational, psychological, and instructional conditions: Instructor Presence, Trust, Psychological Safety, Dialogue, Voice and Choice, Meaningful Feedback, Reflection, and Shared Responsibility. The framework is grounded in the Pedagogical Partnerships (Students as Partners) movement, relational agency (Edwards), co-agency (OECD), Self Determination Theory, Self Efficacy (Bandura), Adult Learning (Knowles), and Transformative Learning (Mezirow). A central argument is that offering choice alone does not create autonomy; the conditions enabling meaningful agency must be co-created with students, distinguishing supported autonomy from isolation.

Shared Agency as a Relational Construct

Anastasia argues that existing scholarship on collaboration has focused on what partners do — shared decision-making, co-creation of the learning experience, and curriculum design — without interrogating the relational conditions that allow those partnerships to form and endure. Drawing on Pedagogical Partnerships (Students as Partners, Cook-Sather) and relational accounts of agency such as Edwards' relational agency and the OECD's co-agency, the paper coins the term shared agency to describe a special, relational type of agency formed through the deliberate joint construction of psychological, relational, and instructional conditions for transformative learning.

The key conceptual move is that agency is not transferred from the individual to the relationship; it emerges from the relationship. Rather than treating Agency as an individual attribute possessed by either instructor or student, shared agency treats the capacity to act as distributed across a reflexively developed relationship in which both parties intentionally co-construct the conditions under which agency can develop.

The Agency Partnership Framework

The framework operationalizes shared agency through eight components, each framed as a mode of working rather than a feature of effective teaching:

Instructor Presence — a purposeful display of Accessibility, authenticity, and engagement that signals to students they are seen, cared for, and valued (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer).
Trust — mutual assurance granted through honesty, reliability, respect, and integrity, building the relational stability that lets students take risks and act as working partners.
Psychological Safety — safety to ask questions, try new things, and make mistakes without embarrassment or punishment, enabling agency through openness.
Dialogue — an interactive, two-way, respectful exchange that co-constructs understanding between instructor and student (Freire).
Voice and Choice — empowering students to contribute ideas and exercise autonomy, giving them ownership over what and how they learn (Deci & Ryan).
Meaningful Feedback — encouraging, timely, formative, reciprocal, and forward-looking feedback that functions as an ongoing conversational cycle (Hattie & Timperley).
Reflection — mutual examination of experience that questions assumptions and informs future action (Mezirow, Schön).
Shared Responsibility — a reciprocal commitment to learning activities and outcomes that does not shift all liability onto one side.

Theoretical Foundations

No single theory fully explains shared agency; the paper synthesizes several. Self Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan) grounds the framework in the three needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness — voice and choice support autonomy, meaningful feedback supports competence, and instructor presence, trust, psychological safety, and dialogue support relatedness. Self Efficacy (Bandura) explains why autonomy alone is insufficient: students given choice may not exercise it if they lack confidence to act, and the framework's conditions (psychological safety, feedback, dialogue, reflection) build that confidence. Adult Learning (Knowles' andragogy) positions adult learners as bringing experience, self-direction, and motivation into the learning relationship rather than receiving instructor-directed knowledge. Transformative Learning (Mezirow) provides the outcome: reflection, dialogue, and psychological safety enable learners to critically examine assumptions and change frames of reference.

The paper extends andragogy by shifting attention from the learner's attributes to the relational conditions under which adult-learner agency might emerge. It notes that identifying learner characteristics does not explain the relational conditions through which they are expressed within an instructor–student partnership.

Supported Autonomy

A central argument distinguishes self-direction from isolation. Anastasia proposes supported autonomy as the junction between self-determination theory, shared agency, and andragogy. Self-direction does not mean the learner is cut off from knowledge, discussions, challenges, feedback, or support; the instructor's presence and the exercise of self-direction are reinforcing rather than adversarial. Choice alone does not create meaningful autonomy — learners may be offered choices while lacking the information, confidence, psychological safety, or relational support to exercise them well. Recognizing experience does not ensure experience becomes learning, and assigning responsibility does not automatically create agency. Each requires the relational conditions of the framework to become genuine.

Implications for AI in Education

The paper is framed explicitly against the rise of increasingly autonomous artificial intelligence in education. Anastasia argues that a high-quality relationship between faculty and students is required to ensure engagement, a sense of belonging, critical understanding, and lifelong learning — especially as generative tools reshape the Student AI Interaction. By conceptualizing agency as arising from intentionally enhanced relationships, the framework offers academic staff a research-driven tool to improve collaboration and elevate transformative learning, positioning the Teacher Role and the relationship-centered conditions of partnership as central to responsible integration of AI in Higher Ed.

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Citation

Anastasia, C. (2026). Shared Agency: The Agency Partnership Framework for Instructor–Student Collaboration. SSRN Working Paper.

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