Student Agency - A Conversation with Larissa Raymond and Dr. Jayne-Louise Collins

Dr. Jayne-Louise Collins is Co-director and lead designer and researcher at EdPartnerships International. Her interests include organisational and system learning through a regenerative and ecological paradigm of change.

Jayne-Louise’s work is focused on educational research and building learning capacity in organisations through a partnering approach. She has had extensive experience in partnering with a range of education systems and schools across Australia to build connected leadership capacity, creating the conditions for regenerative change, and in turn flourishing and hopeful cultures of learning.

Jayne-Louise also brings a depth of knowledge and understanding of recent research and practice in the field of learner agency – for both young people and adults. Her learning designs privilege internal research processes that activate the voice of young people and adults and invite collaborate analysis and collective sense making; an important anchor for ongoing co-design with partners.

Larissa Raymond is a designer and leader of professional learning at EdPartnerships International. Prior to joining EdPartnerships she was Head of Teaching and Learning at Caulfield Grammar School.

Larissa has a wealth of experience and insight in partnering with young people and adults in primary and secondary school contexts and local communities. She recently designed, researched and published the outcomes of a longitudinal research project exploring the structural, material, and cultural challenges encountered by a secondary school when conceptualising and enacting learner agency: Beyond Student Voice: Navigating Challenges in a Time of Neoliberalism (co-authored with Anne Cloonan).

Jayne-Louise, Larissa and their EdPartnerships colleagues completed a two-year qualitative research project exploring learner agency in partnership with young people, their teachers and principals (2019-2021). 

This resulted in the publication of a series of papers and a conceptual framework which continues to shape learner agency initiatives in various education sectors: Learner agency as a living ecology: A way of being in the world and being in the world with each other.

This is the introduction in a series of short podcast spotlights on schools around the world who are putting many of these ideas into practice in which we speak with young people, teachers and leaders.

Social Links

LinkedIn: @dr-jayne-louise-collins / @larissa-raymond

Twitter: @Jayne_Louise_C / @PartnershipsEd