Human‐Material Agential Ensemble: Uncovering the Underexplored Territory of Student Agency in What‐Sensemaking

Student agency in science classrooms has been studied with an emphasis on the sociolinguistic dimension of science. This trend has overlooked a key agent—natural entities that students explore and make sense of. Despite having learned conceptual knowledge in classrooms, students often struggle to apply this knowledge to make sense of natural phenomena they directly encounter. We suggest that this struggle reflects the need to attend to what‐sensemaking process, in which, guided by the central question of “what is it that's right in front of me?”, students make sense of natural entities through the interplay between human and material agency. We adopt a posthuman perspective on agency to examine how students and natural entities made an agential ensemble and develop the what‐sensemaking process. Data came from a seventh‐grade science classroom in which students engaged in a group activity designed to find how xylem was distributed in real plant stems. Video recordings and transcripts of the student activity were qualitatively analyzed to identify how the human agency of students interacted with the material agency of the plants, and how this agential ensemble drove the what‐sensemaking process that unfolded across the phases of unknown unknown, known unknown, and known known. The findings present agential ensembles between students and natural entities that emerged as what‐sensemaking processes developed when the students (a) adapted an investigation plan to a material constraint, (b) modified a way of applying prior knowledge to identify the structure of the natural entities, and (c) took the initiative on a new sensemaking process. Based on the findings, we suggest including what‐sensemaking in science classrooms as an important step in the development of knowledge of the natural world and advocate for a posthuman perspective on student agency. Pedagogical implications are also presented in light of this perspective.