Abstract

Recent scholarship in rhetoric and composition studies theorizes agency as irreducible to human cause-and-effect. While this theory infiltrates many disciplinary conversations, however, our reliance on the terms students and teachers within pedagogical discourses manages our rhetorical imagination of pedagogical agency by committing us to individual, human agents every time we invoke these terms. Rather than expel these terms and the important work they underwrite, we can draw on social systems terminology of elements and relations in order to account for the ways that students and teachers emerge as agents and to imagine alternative conceptualizations of pedagogical agency.