An Activity Theory Approach Towards Postgraduates’ Agency In Research Activities ——A Case Study Of Research-Based Postgraduates From Foreign Languages And Literatures Discipline

The research-based postgraduate education（RBPE）in China,aiming at promoting innovation and scientific research,is an essential sector in the modern higher education system.By nature,the process of RBPE is to provide postgraduates opportunities to shape and reshape themselves by delving into various research activities.Therefore,to investigate the status quo of RBPE and to focus on postgraduates’ agency in research activities may contribute to catalyzing the full-range potential of the institutions and individuals.However,previous research mostly adopted the etic approach to investigate RBPE conditions while gave scant concern from an emic perspective to the content,mechanisms,and functions of postgraduates’ agency in research activities.The theoretical analysis framework and contextual explanation of research agency may remain underexplored.Therefore,to address this issue,this qualitative case study followed three graduate students’ research activities and experiences for three years in a public university in China and collected multiple sources of data（including semi-structured interviews,informal communication,field notes for classroom observation,documents,and so on）.The participants were majoring in Foreign Languages and Literatures in a RBPE program at the time of research.To explore those participants’ performance,influencing factors and functions of agency in research activities,this study mainly adopted the thematic analysis method and carried out multiple rounds of data cleaning and data integration.Data analysis revealed that:First,the postgraduates’ agency in research activities mainly belongs to three types:ideal agency,resistant agency,and subordinate agency.The ideal one refers to students’positive responses to the structural requirements both at the intentional and behavioral level,while the resistant one is enacted negatively.With a subordinate agency,students’behavioral responses to the structure in their research activities may weigh over their intentional responses.Notably,participants’ intentional decision and behavioral manifestation made in various research activities were the essential criteria to identify performances of postgraduates’ agency.Framed within an Activity Theory,the former one corresponds to the activity subject,object,and outcomes,and the latter one matches with the mediating factors such as community members,rules,division of labor,and tools.Perezhivanie is found as a significant bonding tool to melt the intentions and behaviors of our participants,which may facilitate the researchers’ exploration of agency from an Activity Theory perspective.Second,the postgraduates’ agency in research activities is mediated by multiple factors in the research activity system.On the one hand,an individual’s agency can change across different research settings,such as course learning,project conducting,and thesis writing.These changes in agency were found closely related to postgraduates’ ways of setting their practical objects before a research activity and their states of needs gratification after a research activity.Changes in agency can be a result of participants’positive agentic solutions to solve their contradictions met in a research activity or their negative agentic strategies for avoiding these contradictions.On the other hand,our participants’ agency was mediated by the community members,rules,and tools.Among them,the peer communication circle around their supervisors exerted major impact on the participants’ agency in research activities as well as their adjustments in pursuing an academic profession.The rules refer to the perceived subculture of the academic research community as well as the "other-regulation" elements in the form of assignments,tasks,homework,and so on.Tool factors mainly belong to the adequate knowledge and skills afforded by digital devices,supervisor-postgraduate negotiation,and teacher-student communication.Third,in a long run,the postgraduates’ agency in research activities would act iteratively in the form of perezhivanie and then influence their new research activities.It is the perezhivanie that unified the participants’ subjective experiences and objective practices.Specifically,the participants’ perezhivanie formed before their RBPE training period could take a lasting effect on their negotiation of personal growth will and their self-adjustment in the research situation.Then,the postgraduates’ perezhivanie generated in the current training period would pave the way for their future career choices,which were empowered by their course learning,project conducting,and thesis writing experiences.The academic career choice made by these participants is the ultimate embodiment of their research agency,of which the selection process could be reflected in their changes in negotiating learning goals.The theoretical contribution of this study lies in the integration of postgraduates’agency in research activities with an Activity Theory approach.First,this study contextually decomposed the object of activity system into the growth will,learning goals,and practical objects of the subj ect,and then theoretically recomposes them in the process of subjects’participation in research activities.This bi-directional demonstration,together with the perezhivanie,could preliminarily repair the insufficient explanatory power and the operational possibility of the object in Activity Theory.Second,this study intends to propose an Activity Theory model for approaching postgraduates’ agency in research activities.This model modifies the agency analysis methods in the Activity Theory tradition,reveals the bidirectional transformation mechanism between the agency and elements in the activity system,and therefore provides a valuable analytic framework and interpretive perspective for the follow-up research on postgraduates’ agency.Third,this study visualized the operation process of postgraduates’ agency in an Iterative Unit of Mediation,which might provide implications for educational institutions,supervisors,or teachers to promote postgraduates’ agency in their master training period.The present study suggests that universities and their relevant academic research communities need to pay a close attention to the intentional decisions and behavioral demonstrations of postgraduate students made before,during and after certain research activities,for fostering the postgraduates’ intrinsic agency in research activities efficiently.Notably,the effects of perezhivanie on research agency demand considerable attention from structure as well.Universities and their academic research communities are also suggested to adopt the Iterative Unit of Mediation mentioned above to facilitate the melting effects between the structure and individual.Priorities of research-based postgraduate education program may be distributed into the connection between curriculum and academic research,the communication between students and supervisors,and the integration of academic and social content in the real academic research activities.Based on the Activity Theory model for approaching postgraduates’ agency,future research can further expand the types and scope of research activities encountered by the postgraduates,draw on abundant research data,involve more participants from various disciplines,and thus form a better recognition and a deeper understanding of the issue of postgraduates’ agency in higher education.