Conceptualizing teacher agency: A review of international research

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Teaching and teacher education (TETP) round-table 1

Proposal

Purpose
Drawing upon a review of international research, this paper presents a conceptual framework of teachers’ agency. In keeping with that purpose, I organize key factors that research has identified as relevant to our understanding of teachers’ agency in the hopes of providing a resource—and source of critique—for researchers interested in studying teacher agency (Miles & Huberman, 1994).
Relevance & Originality
In the midst of a global standardization and accountability movement often associated with limiting teachers’ flexibility (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2006; Hargreaves, 1994), teacher agency has become a hot topic among researchers around the world. Because teachers are often the agents tasked with carrying out educational initiatives, teacher agency may be a key component explaining the effectiveness and sustainability of our varied attempts to improve instruction (Authors, 2016). For international and comparative education, teacher agency may be a particularly important focus of research because it directs attention to how contexts shape—and are shaped by—teachers’ actions. However, to our knowledge, no systematic reviews of international literature on teacher agency have been conducted. Such a review has potential to grow our knowledge of how teachers in diverse contexts respond to the complex demands of their profession.
Approach
To develop our framework, we reviewed conceptual and empirical identified by a keyword search of the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) database using the search term “teacher agency.” Although we did not limit our search geographically, we were limited by publications in English-language journals. This search yielded 122 articles. After eliminating articles not relevant to our focus on teacher agency, we were left with 111 articles representing research on teachers in 21 countries. After reading abstracts to determine the main focus of articles, we identified three broad themes that we used to code article content: 1) factors influencing teachers’ agency, 2) ways that teacher agency manifests, and 3) outcomes/effects of teacher agency.
Conceptualizing Teacher Agency
In our conceptual model, we show that research has identified a variety of factors that influence teachers’ agency. These include policies at all levels and teachers’ professional learning, individual dispositions, and professional networks, as well as curriculum, materials, and technologies. The effect of these influences is revealed via teachers’ perceptions of reform, talk about teaching and learning, leadership, actions, and teaching. In turn, teachers may use their agency to resist or accept change, expand possibilities of action, assume leadership, improve teaching, or create shared knowledge products.
Implications
Our purpose is not to offer a new definition or theory of teacher agency, but rather to synthesize what is currently known and identify relationships between the key factors studied thus far in order to inform future research on teachers’ agency. We see the framework in its current state as a starting place for more detailed and theory-rich conversations about the linkages between the factors identified and invite critical conversations about the assumptions underlying the framework and what may be missing from our current understanding of teacher agency.

Author

• Cassie Howard, Florida State University