Go Forward with Agency

Good afternoon. I am Nonie Lesaux, and I have the great privilege of serving as the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

I’d like to begin by recognizing those who came before us in the space we share today. Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett Tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself which remains sacred to the Massachusett People.

To our graduates and all of you joining them on this momentous day: welcome.

It’s wonderful to celebrate with you, just steps from our small but mighty — and deeply beloved — Appian Way campus. Having been faculty member here for more than 20 years, I’ve been to a lot of Commencement ceremonies, but I have to say: this is one tradition that never loses its luster.

Let me also say that I conducted a spontaneous observational analysis this morning at the Yard, and I am certain that we were the loudest and most exuberant of all the schools. HGSE for the win.

In fact, you kind of chased me off the stage. Forgive my rookie move.

During your studies, you have pursued important questions and ideas that help deepen our understanding of the efficacy, purpose, and process of education. And if you’re curious about your collective effort, by our estimate, our master’s students have completed roughly 935,000 hours of course work. We are celebrating 25 capstones for the Doctor of Education Leadership and 21 theses for the Ph.D. in Education. Collectively, this represents over 4,600 pages of work devoted to doctoral projects.

I think you all deserve a round of applause.

I’d also like to recognize the many staff and faculty whose tireless work has brought you to this point, and still more who have planned and organized our celebration today — the teams in academic programs and student services; faculty affairs; operations; and my colleagues in the Dean’s office. Please join me in thanking the staff and faculty who have supported you.

We have one beloved faculty member retiring this year, from whom we heard yesterday afternoon. Please join me in congratulating the legendary Catherine Snow.

Finally, I know that no one accomplishes graduate studies alone. So I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the families, friends, and classmates whose support has been instrumental to our the HGSE journey for those graduating today.

Graduates, please join me in standing, as you’re able, to thank those who helped you arrive at this day.

This is fabulous. And it’s cozy under this tent. Welcome.

Today, we are celebrating your work and accomplishments — and we are also, as is customary, handing out advice. You’ll probably hear lots of it, so I promise to keep my remarks brief.

In fact, rather than advice, I want to invite you into a final act of learning.

If there is one thing I’d like all of you, our graduates, to remember, it’s that you have agency.

To unpack that idea, let’s begin with the context.

There’s no question that these are rocky times for the enterprise of education. Political polarization continues and we often feel more divided than united. The pandemic has had lasting consequences on all of us in education, especially our teachers and our students and their families. Demographic changes have brought declining enrollments that can fracture communities, and ideological differences threaten to stall progress on student achievement and success. Trust in public education and in higher education has declined precipitously, and it will take collective effort to reverse this trend.

In this atmosphere, it’s easy to feel powerless. But in reality, we will all face uncertainty throughout our lives. We will also face situations in which we feel overwhelmed by the challenges before us, whether in a classroom, boardroom, or living room. We will all encounter problems that leave us feeling compromised by the ability to look ahead or to overcome the hurdle in front of us.

But here is where I turn hopeful.

As an early childhood expert, I can confidently say that each of you was born with a unique capacity — one that you can always draw upon to fulfill your dreams, hopes, and even get you through hard times. This unique capacity might not always be top of mind, but it is never out of reach. This unique capacity is agency — or in much more hip language: your superpower.  

When you are uncertain, as we all are at one point or another, facing headwinds, or you encounter a pervasive problem, I encourage you to rely on your superpower. In other words, remember that you have agency.

The first thing a baby learns in order thrive outside the womb is agency. They learn that their actions can cause reactions. That crying may result in being fed or picked up. That smiling often elicits goodwill. And as a child develops, they experiment with other forms of agency. They often learn that screaming results in attention of one kind or another; they may mobilize and crawl to attain a desired item; they may learn that screaming results in attention of one form or another; they may develop gestures to communicate.

In settings all around the world, our educators work on developing children’s agency — toddlers and preschoolers learn to stick with a task even when it’s challenging. In fact, the entire schooling enterprise tries to teach and develop individual agency.

If you’re sitting here thinking that the concept of agency is a little vague and maybe even a little weak as far as superpowers go, that wouldn’t surprise me.

So in the spirit of a last learning act, let’s make this Radcliffe tent into a classroom for just a moment by turning to an expert.

Albert Bandura, the renowned psychologist, writes: “Agency refers to the human capability to influence one's functioning and the course of events by one's actions.”

Bandura identified three types of agency, on which I’ll elaborate to hopefully give you a better sense your superpower.

The first type of agency is individual agency. This means that you see what needs to change, you have the requisite knowledge, skills, and opportunity to change it, and you find the strength within yourself to take the initiative and do it.

Let’s say, for example, you are studying informal learning, and you’re from a rural county where the poverty rate is 50%. You know that literacy rates here are low; that many families do not own a book and for many, the nearest library is miles away; and as an education scholar you know that children who are read to by adults have a higher likelihood of school success. You are reflecting on this problem and rather than accepting it as such, you decide to take action.

This is the story of Cynthia Hagan, HGSE Class of 2022. While studying at the Ed School, she founded Book Joy, which gives a curated box of books to each incoming kindergartener in McDowell County, West Virginia.

Cynthia didn’t wait for someone else. She relied on what she knew, built upon her expertise and passion, drew on seminal research in early literacy, and did something with a high probability of adjusting the course of children’s lives. She tapped into her individual agency.

I have seen it from this class, too. Take Gabriela Nguyen, a master’s student in Education Policy and Analysis, who became aware that social media was impacting her life in negative ways. In response, she founded the HGSE student organization, Appstinence, alongside Kaylee Brubaker from Human Development and Education and Zhao Li from Teaching and Teacher Leadership. They’re working on ways to help others reimagine a life without social media.

They saw a problem and did something about it. They used individual agency to innovate and make a difference.

And speaking of innovation, as HGSE graduates, engaging in innovation may be one of the most natural ways to exercise your individual agency.

As I shared last August at Welcome Day, our colleague Junlei Li has a particularly helpful and insightful frame on innovation: to innovate, or to see a problem or challenge in a new way, we must find something new in something known. Finding something new in something known.

And to do that requires three things: a firm grasp of the key ideas and debates in our field. A solid background in the contexts, research, and controversies that have led to the current moment of possibilities. And knowledge of what’s been tried, what methodologies were used, and why.

As HGSE graduates, just like Cynthia, and Gabriela, Kaylee, and Zhao and thousands of our amazing alum, your innovation skills will combine very well with individual agency to make change.

So that’s individual agency. But there are other types of agency to draw on to make change — beyond what we do on our own.

The second form, according to Bandura, is called Proxy Agency. Proxy agency means you inspire others — like teachers, parents, advocates, or policymakers — to make change and solve problems by showing them that they have the resources, information, and rationale to act.

I see my two kids using proxy agency often at home. As one example, they regularly lobby me for a Yes Day. A Yes Day is a day whereby no matter what is proposed, I must say yes. My kids are surprisingly creative about this. They will inform me that it’s been a very long time since the last Yes Day; they point out holidays that would be the perfect opportunity for a Yes Day; they remind me that they’ve been doing their chores and their part in the community. And you know what? Once in a while, it works. At ages 10 and 13, they can’t declare a Yes Day — but they can use their proxy agency to successfully inspire action and influence the outcome.

Much more important and profound than in my household, so much of the enterprise here at the Harvard Graduate School of Education is a form of proxy agency. Our beloved HGSE, is, effectively, an effort to equip those in practice and policy with the information they need to make change.

Proxy agency shows up in research breakthroughs and insights, new solutions to old problems, solutions to new problems, and it shows up in our initiatives and collaborations with educators.

Research by Tom Kane and the team at the Center for Education Policy Research shows that many children, schools, and communities are still grappling with the pandemic’s effect — from disrupted development and learning to ongoing behavioral health challenges. Our schools face chronic absenteeism and staffing shortages. While the picture can seem dire, some districts have successfully countered these trends and achieved real gains.

At a recent Askwith Education Forum organized by Tom and the Center’s team, many of us heard first-hand about proxy agency from three superintendents working in New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and California. These superintendents discussed the strategies, tactics, and efforts they led in their districts to drive positive change. Just as so many of you will do as transformative educational leaders, they used their proxy agency to mobilize others.

Let’s take another example: how we teach reading. Faculty member Jimmy Kim leads a program of research to develop tools that promote children’s reading comprehension across the subject areas, in science, social studies, and English Language Arts. He does this through large-scale, long-term partnerships with school districts. This design work is about dialogue and co-construction and an iterative approach for positive change. It is not just researchers trumpeting a generic solution. Jimmy and his team are using proxy agency to drive reading improvement.

And one more: rapidly changing technologies can make us wonder if we risk losing our agency. Does artificial intelligence place us on the threshold of expansive curiosity — or are we simply outsourcing? And importantly: how should we use, or not use, AI in the context of schooling? My colleague Ying Xu studies exactly this. Her research explores how children interact with generative AI, and how chatbots can support bilingual learning. Ying’s work directly informs how we might use proxy agency to empower learners, responsibly, with these technologies.

As you can see, there are many ways to enact proxy agency to effect meaningful change, and I am certain you will, at some point in your career, draw upon what you’ve studied and learned here, and your experiences that led to this moment, to do just that.

The last type of agency Bandura describes is collective agency. With this type, teammates, classmates, collaborators, or even strangers to make progress together toward a shared goal. The important thing to remember here is that you don’t work in isolation — you actively engage others and build consensus knowing that many challenges simply cannot be solved by one person acting alone.

There are countless examples I could name, from large-scale actions like the civil rights movement, to local actions, like a city or community mounting a robust birth to age 8 early learning initiative to a community-wide effort that uses volunteers to read with children across schools, through to team-based actions, like the Toronto Raptors winning the NBA Championship in 2019 (to name just a random example. I am Canadian).

Several HGSE faculty study this very kind of collective agency. Gretchen Brion-Meisels studies how school communities can create supportive and learning-rich environments. Monica Higgins, Ebony Bridwell-Mitchell, Jen Cheatham, and others who study leadership and organizations show us that when challenges are complex — as they so often are in education — it is coordinated, collective efforts that lead to sustained improvement. And Paul Reville’s EdRedesign initiative has collective agency at its core; their team empowers community leaders to deliver supports to all children, expanding and amplifying the impact of schools and local governments. All of this research focuses on aligning people and purpose for progress to advance systems, communities, and schools.

Collective agency is considered the hardest form of agency to activate. But it’s also the type of agency that connects most to our HGSE mission and that your time at HGSE has prepared you to activate and implement. Look around you. You are surrounded by people who believe in the power of education to change lives and to change the world. You are seated next to someone who cares deeply about learning, teaching, and innovation at the intersections of technology, art, health, and human development. And they are only a phone call or text message away.  

So, how does this convergence of passion, knowledge, and shared experience equip you for what’s to come?

I have seen this class do hard things. Many of you had your undergraduate experiences profoundly affected by the pandemic. There has no doubt been difficult moments during your time here, and you have not only survived, but thrived. The concepts you’ve mastered, research you’ve done, relationships you’ve built, the classroom debates — these are the experiences that will serve as the foundation of your agency for the work ahead.

You have been, and will continue to be, the driving force of our educational future — our children’s teachers, our civic and district leaders, our organizational changemakers, and champions of community.

You are the visionaries shaping policy, the entrepreneurs forging new paths, the scholars and innovators designing what comes next — bridging research and practice, and reimagining what’s possible for learners and communities alike.

You are the authors of education’s next chapter, stepping into a sector that urgently needs your leadership — and is counting on all of us — to guide it forward with purpose and resolve.

So that’s it. That’s my non-advice, my teach-in on a concept that is core to our everyday life and work.

Remember you were born with agency and that you are never helpless, no matter the situation or how powerless you may feel. And that agency is not just about you as an individual but also about what you can do to inspire others, and what you can do together in common cause.

You have this superpower. And I cannot wait to see how you use it.  

At this very moment, I think we have a shared goal, which is to celebrate with families and friends, and so I will end here. Thank you, and congratulations to the Class of 2025.