Investigating the professional agency of secondary school English teachers in South Korea

Abstract

This qualitative study examines the professional agency of secondary English teachers in Midwestern South Korea. Specifically, it investigates how secondary English teachers in South Korea understand their professional agency and what mediates their professional agency. The ecological approach in this study recognises that agency encompasses both individual and environmental dimensions and is formed through the constant interplay between the individual and the environment. The dataset for this study comprises 15 semi-structured interviews with secondary English teachers in South Korea. The thematic analysis highlights a significant gap between Korean English teachers' espoused agency and realisable agency, as well as three levels of legitimation that teachers have to negotiate. These levels are individual, collegial and sociocultural. The findings from this study suggest that the participating teachers censored their own pedagogical behaviours due to their own sense of inadequacy and in response to structural requirements as well as the external evaluation of parents and high-stakes test scores. This study concludes with implications for English teachers in South Korea, theorisation on teacher agency and future research.

Repositioning teachers as assessors:

“…Moreover, an ecological perspective also acknowledges the development of teacher agency through professional development and collegial collaborative practices. Teachers' subjective past experiences and future orientations can reform an educational ecosystem through interactions with objective present environment such as collegiality, policy expectations and material resources, which can strengthen and reform teacher agency (Namgung et al, 2020;Molla & Nolan, 2020;Stetsenko, 2019).…”

“…(Teacher 11: Male, Upper Sec., 1y teaching exp) Finally, collegial consensus was a crucial factor that KSETs took into account in assessment. In South Korea, English teachers that are assigned to teach in the same grade at a secondary school should reach collegial consensus regarding what is assessed (Namgung et al, 2020). Under the structure of collegial consensus, KSETs often had to compromise their aspired assessment ways with those of the colleagues in case what a KSET wanted to teach and assess conflicted with what a colleague did.…”

An Ecological Approach to Teacher Agency in English Curriculum Design at Korean Secondary Schools

“…This perspective, however, does not deny directive and transformative attributes of agency, rather it can embrace them. In other words, teacher agency can be developed through professional learning and collegial collaborative practices as teachers can bring about new educational environment through interacting with objective contexts (Molla & Nolan, 2020;Namgung et al, 2020;Stetsenko, 2019).…”

Teacher Agency and Futures Thinking

“…Several such undertones are visible in the first writing. We identified lines 1 through 7 as an extrapolation from current trends of co-operation between preschool and primary school (lines 1, 4), the shift towards more action-based learning methods as well as increased use of technology as a tool for learning (2,3,5,6), and the shift in the role of the teacher from a "sage on stage" to "a guide on the side" (3, 4, 7) (see [63]). What the future adds to these current trends is only a question of degree-all three trends become intensified in the image of the future.…”

“…During the first decades of the new Millennium, research interest in teachers' agency has rocketed. A plethora of studies employing teachers' agency as a theoretical lens has been conducted across the field of education; see e.g., [1][2][3][4][5][6]. The main motivation for the interest in teachers' agency is to be found in the school reforms that have taken place around the globe during the last three decades [7].…”