Teacher Agency in Context: Examining Teachers' Narrations of Curriculum Change in the Republic of Cyprus

• In Event: 47.077 - Teacher Agency as a Complex and Emergent Phenomenon: International Perspectives

Abstract

1. Objectives
In this paper, we examine teachers’ agency as construed in their narrations, drawing on life history research that allows the description of teachers’ lives within changing institutional contexts. Narrations were collected across four cohorts of elementary teachers, roughly corresponding to each of four decades (late 1970s-2010s). Focusing on the 3rd cohort as the generation who entered the profession the years between 1996 and 2004, and experienced the first comprehensive curriculum reform in the Republic of Cyprus, we discuss how they negotiated changes mandated from the top down, and particularly the introduction of new curricula and related instructional materials.
2. Perspective(s)
This study takes an ecological understanding of agency, highlighting teachers’ agency as emergent, contingent and dependent upon various interconnected fields of action, as those may be mediated by teachers’ past and present experiences as well as aspirations for the future, “constrained and supported by cultural, structural and material resources available to actors” (Priestley et al., 2016, p. 192). In this paper, we focus on the social resources (relationships, roles, power and trust) which shaped enactment of a comprehensive curriculum reform in the early 2010s.
3. Mode of inquiry
This paper draws from life history research to explore how teachers’ sense of professionalism is at interplay with local institutional and broader socioeconomic changes. Interviews involved a three-step process that combined interviewing and reporting back to each of the 30 study participants, so that they fed back into the construction of their life histories (Goodson, 2008), providing the basis for cross-case analyses within and across teacher cohorts.
4. Data sources and analysis
Interviews were complemented by analysis of documents circulated around significant time periods, enabling the interpretation of teachers’ agency within context. From the 3rd cohort, 8 life histories were constructed and thematically analysed. Cross-case analysis was based on axial coding of emic codes that adhered to how teachers described hierarchies, autonomy/guidance, change, and the institutional context.
5. Results
In teachers’ narrations, particular roles and relationships emerged relating to their own and others’ subject positions in the process of curriculum change. Others included school inspectors, subject area counsellors, and the ministry of education as a unified entity. While those were constituted as having power over teachers, such power was concurrently subverted as teachers raised questions of trust and expertise, drawing on their own knowledge of how curricula should be enacted.
6. Significance of the study
The study shows the parallel inter-play of the macro- and micro-politics of curriculum change, as teachers negotiate their professional role, including notions of curriculum-making, by being subjected and subjecting others in the process. Theoretically, the study highlights how notions of power may be theorized as productive, even when top-down mandates of curriculum change are studied.
References
Goodson, I. (2008). Investigating the teacher’s life and work. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Priestley, M., Biesta, G.J.J., Philippou, S. & Robinson, S. (2016). The teacher and the curriculum: exploring teacher agency. In D. Wyse, L. Hayward & J. Pandya (Eds.),The SAGE Handbook of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment (pp.187-201). London: SAGE.

Authors

• Stavroula Kontovourki, University of Cyprus

• Stavroula Philippou, University of Cyprus

• Eleni Theodorou, European University