Teacher Agency and Futures Thinking

Abstract

Problems encountered in top-down school reforms have repeatedly highlighted the significance of teachers’ agency in educational change. At the same time, temporality has been identified as a key element in teachers’ agency, with teachers’ beliefs about the future and experiences of the past shaping their agentic orientations. However, research on teachers’ future orientations is typically limited to short-term trajectories, as opposed to long-term visions of education. To address this, we draw on a futures studies perspective to give more explicit attention to teachers’ long-term visions of their work. We argue that the method of future narratives, already well-established in the field of futures studies, is a fruitful methodological framework for studying these long-term visions. In this paper, we first show that the futures studies approach is theoretically compatible with the ecological model of teacher agency. We then outline the method of future narratives to point out the possibilities it offers. Finally, we illustrate our approach with an exploratory analysis of a small set of future narratives where teachers imagine a future workday. Our analysis reveals that the narratives offer a rich view of teachers’ longer-term visions of education, including instances of reflecting on the role of education in relation to broader societal developments. Our study suggests that this novel approach can provide tools for research on teacher agency as well as practical development of teacher education, addressing long-term educational issues and policies.

Teachers’ voice behavior—Principal leadership‐driven or teacher self‐driven? Evidence from Taiwan

“…In this view, personal influence is part of the causal structure, and individuals are self-organizing, proactive, and selfreflective. They are not merely spectators of their behavior, but also contributors to their life circumstances (Varpanen et al, 2022), and not just products of them (Bandura, 2006). In brief, cognitive abilities provide the means for individuals to function as mindful agents (Bandura, 2000) by involving the functional aspects of consciousness in accessing and processing information purposefully to select, organize, construct, and evaluate actions (Bandura, 2006;Hennebry-Leung et al, 2023).…”

Teachers’ perceived opportunity to contribute to school culture transformation

“…When teachers' professional agency is studied in the context of educational reform, it is common either to define their agency as strong or weak in relation to their perceived opportunity to contribute to such reform (Ketelaar et al, 2012;Oolbekkink-Marchand et al, 2017;Pyhältö et al, 2012;Vähäsantanen, 2015) or to categorize their agency into diverse profiles according to their orientations toward change initiatives (Buchanan, 2015;Rajala & Kumpulainen, 2017;Varpanen et al, 2022). Both approaches highlight valuable aspects of the phenomenon.…”

“…Strong agency, on the other hand, is not necessarily related to innovative activity in school-level development work; in fact, it can exert a negative effect on such work if teachers fail to take ownership of the planned changes (Ketelaar et al, 2012). Furthermore, when teachers' agentic activity is categorized based on their orientations toward school reform or school culture transformation, research has emphasized that all teachers possess agency and that only the goal of their agentic activity varies (Rajala & Kumpulainen, 2017;Vähäsantanen, 2015;Varpanen et al, 2022). Thus, agency positions and orientations are situational (Goller & Harteis, 2017;Heikkilä, 2022;Oolbekkink-Marchand et al, 2017).…”

Transformation toward sustainability in Finnish teacher education policy: Promises and shortcomings

“…In the general tone of the guidelines, teachers' agency seems limited to primarily dealing with changes instead of making them happen, to implement rather than create reforms, and to develop rather than to participate in a transformation (see also, Varpanen et al, 2022). When discussing the roles of teachers and students as actors in the educational sector, the documents do not particularly denote the transformative function of education.…”

“…As Zilliacus and Wolff (2021) argue, there is a pressing need at all educational levels to support a profound worldview change as a response to the environmental and climate emergency. This position not only calls for a transformative change at individual and societal levels in schools and other educational institutions, it also calls for teacher education to revisit the notion of transformative learning (see also Varpanen et al, 2022). Yet, even if sustainability education, education for sustainable development (ESD), global citizenship education (GCED), and issues like human rights, peace and inter-cultural understanding are visible in teacher education, they are often only included in optional courses (Bourn et al, 2017;Cockerell, 2020).…”