Space as a lens for teacher agency: A case study of three beginning teachers in England, UK

Abstract

Drawing on conceptualisations of space, we explored the ways three beginning teachers in England experienced and developed agency during the first three years of their careers. We completed a series of interviews with the same three teachers during their year of Initial Teacher Education and subsequent two years as Early Career Teachers; a total of 15 interviews over three years). Our findings demonstrated that the key barrier to agency beginning teachers experienced was a rigid curriculum, with reduced opportunities for innovation at a classroom and/or department level. Participants highlighted enablers of agency including demonstrations of professional trust; opportunities to develop their pedagogies and subject knowledge and their own recognition of the temporal and dynamic nature of agency. Through engaging with conceptualisations of space, we have shown how some teachers were able to identify spaces of agency, move between different spaces of agency and even create spaces of agency where none previously existed. We argue that in addition to the widely understood emergent, dynamic, and temporal facets, conceptualisations of teacher agency as a phenomenon can be extended through the lens of space. Space helps us understand agency as a messy entanglement of the cultural, material, and relational conditions and qualities of agency made explicit in the ecological approach. Through space, we can explore these entanglements as multiple, non‐linear, loose connections which teachers bring together when they achieve agency. We contend that the lens of space may support more nuanced understandings of teacher agency in research and policymaking worldwide.

Developing Scenarios for Exploring Teacher Agency in Universities: A Multimethod Study

“…The aim of the current project, consisting of four studies, was to develop and test a real-life instrument to measure teacher agency from an ecological perspective. As Rushton & Bird (2023) pointed out, elements of teacher agency are nonlinearly intertwined and thus do not act in isolation but rather interact with each other in situations, which led us to provide context-rich descriptions of situations for measuring agency. This type of research emphasizes the collection of in-depth, contextual data through methods to understand the complex and dynamic nature of human behavior, interactions, and structures within specific social and cultural contexts (Lave & Wenger, 1991).…”

“…Using the diverse set of scenarios as conversation starters -rather than as a measurement tool as we intended -can serve as a way to contribute to deep introspection and promote self-awareness and growth. Conversations or reflections through scenarios can reveal relationships and structures in this way, which is important in developing agency (Priestley et al, 2015;Rushton & Bird, 2023).…”

Enhancing Teachers’ Capacity to Foster Autonomous Learning in EFL Acquisition – A Case Study of Georgia

“…Promoting learner autonomy also proves to be beneficial for educators -as proven by Jerrim et al (2023), teachers with very low levels of autonomy are more likely to report reduced job satisfaction. At the same time, however, individual professional autonomy does not prove appropriate in cases of continuing students' academic underperformance (Day, 2020), while strengthening teacher agency can be difficult to achieve due to perceived issues of workload, accountability and rigid curriculum (Hughes & Lewis, 2020;Rushton & Bird, 2023).…”

Fostering teachers as sustainability and climate change educators through understanding of teachers' self-efficacy beliefs

“…In particular, climate change education is a key element responding to climate change (UNESCO, 2019), and thus also related practices have been studied recently (Monroe et al, 2019). In this article, we specifically focus on sustainability and climate change education for teachers, because teachers have an important role in educating the future generations and have shown to express valuable insight on improving climate change education in schools (Rushton, Dunlop & Atkinson, 2024).…”

“…(Redman et al, 2018). Teachers have also shown to have valuable ideas on how to develop climate change education (Sihvonen et al, 2023;Rushton, Dunlop & Atkinson, 2024). However, not all teacher education programs have been able support teachers in their sustainability teaching abilities.…”