Teachers’ positioning towards an educational innovation in the light of ownership, sense-making and agency

Professional agency in the stream of change: Understanding educational change and teachers' professional identities

“…The finding concerning teachers' agency at an individual level is in line with notions that the ways of working of teachers are not totally externally imposed (e.g. Ketelaar et al, 2012). The findings also drew a picture of the teachers' work as manifold in nature, since the possibilities for teachers to influence their work practices involved a very wide spectrum of activities and behavior.…”

“…First of all, professional agency can be understood as the teacher's opportunities to influence his or her own work (Ketelaar et al, 2012;Priestley et al, 2012;Pyhältö, Pietarinen & Soini, 2012). This includes negotiating the contents and conditions of one's work (including reform practices), and making decisions on one's ways of working.…”

“…Multi-methodological approaches, including ethnographical approaches, could be used to capture the complex nature of professional agency. In that case, agency could be analyzed by focusing on (i) authentic actions in social practices (via observation), and (ii) the purposes of actions and the decisions beyond them (via interviews) (see also Ahearn, 2001;Ketelaar et al, 2012). This paper suggested some interventions that could help individuals and organizations to achieve change, through enhancing professional agency.…”

Professional identity tensions of beginning teachers

“…Since teachers in profile 1 did not (easily) adapt to others' orientations regarding learning to teach, but strongly adhered to their own orientations, it seems likely that they put a high value on their own agency. Agency is the extent to which someone feels in control of their goals and own actions (Ketelaar, Beijaard, Boshuizen, & den Brok, 2012;Metcalfe & Greene, 2007). Teachers in profile 1 seemed to want to feel in control of the choices they made in their work, which were based on their own interest and motivations (Vähäsantanen et al, 2008), but they felt limited in experiencing agency by the conflicting orientations of others regarding learning to teach.…”

Critical Intentions and “Care of the Self:” Reconsidering the Role of Agency in Preservice Teachers’ Thinking

“…While there have been attempts to develop a more integrated concept of agency (Archer, 1995;Biesta & Tedder 2006, 2007Bourdieu, 1977;Emirbayer & Mische, 1998;Foucault, 2001;Giddens, 1984), there remains much debate regarding the influence of structure on an individual's agency. Classrooms provide excellent contexts for exploring an integrated concept of agency (Ketelaar et al, 2012;Liggett, 2011;Priestley et al, 2012;Riveros, Newton, & Burgess, 2012) because teachers exercise individualized agency as curriculum developers and make decisions that negotiate the various influential structures of schooling. The constant interaction between agency and structure forces teachers to make classroom decisions that can characterize them in a binary sense as either agents of change or socialized agents of the status quo (Kincheloe, 2001).…”