Towards the integrated study of the dialogical self and agency to research personal change in education

Dialogical and sociocultural perspectives propose the dialogical self and agency, respectively, as privileged constructs to account for the processes of personal change in education. However, the integrated study between both phenomena has rarely been addressed systematically in education to understand in greater depth how students and teachers construct their identity as learners and teachers. This special issue seeks to contribute to this research gap through the theoretical advances and empirical evidence presented by eight original articles. This introduction identifies the main contributions to education of the developments on the dialogical self and agency and, furthermore, defines the conceptual scopes and implications of their integration. Then, the structure of the special issue is described and a brief summary is presented of the content of the eight articles. Altogether, this issue is an invitation to capture and explain in more detail the originality, innovation and relative autonomy in the activity of students and teachers as they situate and position themselves and participate in educational practices.