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Juck, Matthew Anthony. "Exploring how coteaching impacted beginning science teachers' agency." Access to citation, abstract and download form provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company; downloadable PDF file 2.66 Mb., 181 p, 2006. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:1435858.
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Song, Minjeong. "Beginning teachers' identity and agency : a case study of L2 English teachers in South Korea." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2017. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:920f7cf5-c02f-4205-90a7-bca08c7095cb.
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Beginning teachers' first years of professional teaching have been extensively researched as a transformative time with a focus on their coping with praxis shock. Whilst the subtext of the literature often positions entrant teachers as in need of support and guidance at large, little research has concerned their agency at work, that is, how they create and recreate their opportunities for learning and development. The present study follows four beginning L2 English teachers' first year of teaching in two public high schools in South Korea and aims to understand how they navigate, make sense of, and act in and on the materialised worlds of teaching. To be specific, the study explores the thesis that beginning teachers' progression from university to work brings about their experiencing of consequential transition (Beach, 1999), that is, reshaping of identity, knowledge and skills. Drawing on Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner and Cain (1998), the study posits one's identity as objectified self-images which organise the person's actions in and on practices, hence a tool of agency, and applies the concept of identity as an analytic tool to examine the dialectic of person and practices. Also, Hedegaard's (2012) model, especially the notions of a social situation of development and an activity setting, is utilised to further delineate the dynamics entailed in beginning teachers' emergent identity and practices. The participants were interviewed prior to and at multiple time points throughout the school year 2013. Classroom observation was used to capture their emergent identity and practices and informed the interviews. The findings revealed some embedded contradictions which fuelled the beginning teachers' ambivalence towards how to objectify themselves as professionals. Their access to the world of teaching was granted based on the cultural logic that to be a teacher is to be proficient in subject matter, whilst their knowledge of pedagogy was almost ignored. In the classroom, however, their linguistic competence, that is, the core of their identity, was almost dismissed as irrelevant, since the virtue of subject teaching was gauged by its utility for test performance and achievement. Such a forceful motive of teaching to the test meant that the novice teachers all had to acquire the new identity of an exam coach. They also had to cope with other institutional demands, for which they had no prior formal training and structured guidance or support on site. They thus had to become self-reliant to improvise the kind of school identity expected of them. Especially, homeroom care duties were experienced as a make-or-break challenge for the new teachers. The findings point to suggestions for how to assist beginning teachers' transition to professional teaching in the South Korean context. First, the nation's initial teacher education (ITE) should expand how teaching and learning to teach are conceptualised in order to enhance the relevance of beginning teachers' initial identity to what happens in school practices. Second, ITE should incorporate more practice-oriented pedagogy to assist student teachers' development of true concepts for resilient initial identity. Finally, schools should promote teachers to engage with relational work (Edwards, 2010a) so that schools could create a culture in which inquiry and collaboration are nurtured for sustained professional dialogue and interaction, where new teachers also are invited and supported to question and clarify what matters in practices and pave their ways to become resilient professionals.
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Noonan, James. "Teachers Learning: Engagement, Identity, and Agency in Powerful Professional Development." Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:32663230.
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Professional development (PD) is seen by a broad cross-section of stakeholders — teachers, principals, policymakers — as essential for instructional improvement and student learning. And yet, despite deep investments of time and money in its design and implementation, the return on investment and subjective assessments about PD’s effectiveness remain uneven. In this thesis, I focus in-depth on professional development experiences that teachers identify as their most powerful and ask what these experiences could suggest toward improving PD design, policy, and research. Specifically, drawing on 25 in-depth accounts of powerful professional learning, I analyze PD across three papers, each of which applies a distinct analytical lens. First, using self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan, 1985, 2000), I explore the extent to which powerful learning experiences help to satisfy the three basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Second, using the growing body literature on professional identity (e.g., Beijaard et al., 2004), I posit that teachers may be motivated to pursue professional learning experiences that align with their core beliefs and identity. Extending this literature, I elaborate three distinct conceptions of how identity interacts with PD: an affinity for the what (content), the who (facilitation), and the with whom (community). I similarly discuss ways that powerful learning may help to form or transform teacher identity. Third, observing a pattern in the data and drawing on emerging literature on teacher agency (e.g., Priestley et al., 2015), I define teacher agency in professional learning as a multi-dimensional construct – agency over, during, and emerging from PD – and analyze the extent to which each dimension was evident in powerful and contrastingly negative professional learning experiences. I conclude that increasing dimensions of agency may be a promising lever for improving professional learning at both an individual and system level.Finally, by privileging teachers’ unique perspectives and emphasizing the deeply subjective nature of learning, this thesis aims both to complement and complicate the existing research on PD design and effectiveness and the policy imperative for scale.
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Peng, Suhao. "Novice Teachers’ Voices on Professional Agency and Professional Identity in Finland and China." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för pedagogik och didaktik, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-157206.
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Research in novice teachers has been wide and rich because they are experiencing a special period in their career life after spending their childhood in school and freshly graduating from teacher education. At the workplace, novice teachers might be specially treated because they are the newcomers, but they may want to realize some professional ideals. Research in novice teacher’s professional agency and professional identity needs to be enriched. Professional agency can be understood as initiatives taken at the workplace, and professional identity can be a “self” as a professional. Both professional agency and professional identity are complex when socio-cultural contexts and subjective factors are intertwined. However, they are related and interdependent—professional agency externalizes and negotiates professional identity, whereas professional identity internalizes and influences professional agency. By comparing ten novice teachers from China and Finland, the overall aim of this thesis is to investigate the degree of professional agency as well as professional identity from a developmental perspective so that the socio-cultural contexts, especially the education systems in Finland and China, and subjective factors can be understood. In this thesis, five novice teachers from China and five novice teachers from Finland were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews. By adopting thematic analysis, the author has found that how those novice teachers’ voices on professional agency and professional identity are similar or different. The result shows that Finnish novice teachers enjoy a relatively higher degree of professional agency at the workplace, and they seem to be more well-prepared by according to the testimonies in the interviews. Early-childhood teachers’ wellbeing in Finland and China need to be considered in the future educational reforms and development.
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Lord, Janet. "Teachers' beings and doings : a study of identity and agency of four teachers in English secondary schools." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2016. https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/teachers-beings-and-doings-a-study-of-identity-and-agency-of-four-teachers-in-english-secondary-schools(ac4bcbab-3dbc-4dff-aaa9-67db439fdf8d).html.
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Teachers' professional lives are situated at the intersection of local, national and global educational policy contexts. What they purposefully do (agency) and how they see themselves and their roles as teachers (identity) dynamically interact with such contexts. This study argues that in order to understand the meaningful professional development work of teachers, it is important to have an understanding of this interplay. Current dominant policy discourses concerning the 'improving teacher' and 'teaching as a craft' are examples of an over-reliant emphasis on more insular narratives of agentic teachers and teaching. As the research in this thesis shows, such narratives fail to take into account the complexities of factors and discourses that impact on the beings and doings of teachers, and are therefore inadequate. Based on an iterative dialogue between particular theoretical ideas and emerging case study data, the study proposes a multi-level integrating framework for understanding the experiences of teachers as they develop and locate a sense of their professional identity. Four teachers, from different types of English secondary schools, participated in the study. Data was generated from timelines, concept maps, lesson observations and interviews with the teacher participants. The case studies were presented as written portraits. Drawing on Archer's work (e.g. 2012) on reflexivity, the ways in which teachers' thinking mediated the links between their agency and structure were considered. The different modes of reflexivity that teachers employ and the ways in which teachers determine and facilitate personal projects of concern to them were found to be important to their professional identity and agency. The findings also suggested that the similarities and differences between the teachers were to do with how intersecting structural and cultural factors at global and local levels are mediated by individual forms of reflexivity. These forms of reflexivity are a reflection of evolving personal and social identities and an emerging social stance on society. The mediation produces particular professional concerns or projects that both suggest similarities that relate to powerful global discourses of education-such as performativity-but also particular types of agency and identity that are specific to those individual teachers' classrooms and general professional stance. The essence of the daily work of teachers appeared to reflect an intersection of personal biography and the situational structures and cultures of schools in which teachers operated, which brought about differences in professional thinking and doing. The thesis contributes to knowledge by adding to theory concerning identity and agency, as well as contributing to methodology by using portraits in understanding the nature of teacher agency and reflexivity. The factors that are identified and an insight into teachers' reflexivity contribute to the development of a toolkit for understanding teachers' identity and agency that may be useful for both teacher educators and policy makers.
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Bountri, Manthoula. "Teachers’ Perspectives on children’s agency and participation in kindergarten in Finland." Thesis, Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för tema, 2020. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-172529.
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The present study aims to explore and delve into early childhood education teachers’ perception and interpretation of children’s agency and participation in the daily routines and planned activities in kindergartens in Finland. The daily established routines and planned activities take a significant amount of time in kindergarten. Therefore, it is essential to scrutinize how teachers engage children’s preferences, opinions, and participation in daily practice. The abovementioned rationale motivates the present qualitative research study. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with five early childhood teachers. Three of them work in international kindergartens and two of them in bilingual kindergartens (Finnish-English). The interview consisted of open-ended questions. They were structured to probe early childhood teachers’ experience in respect of the implementation of children’s agency and participation in the daily practices and the challenges that pedagogical personnel face. The collected data from the semi-structured interview were analyzed through thematic analysis. On one hand, the results showed a none or limited amount of children’s agency and participation in the daily established routines, whereas the amount of agency and participation is increased regarding the planned activities. On the other hand, challenging parameters are the management of the kindergarten and the number of children in a group.
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Fu, Guopeng. "Physics teachers and China's curriculum reform : the interplay between agency and structure." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/50426.
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This study explored how individual and collective agencies among physics teachers in a select high school were enabled and constrained in the context of the on-going curriculum reform in China. Human agency as used in this study was informed by five perspectives: Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory; Giddens’ Structuration Theory; Giroux’s critical pedagogy; Seixas’ historical consciousness; and Davies’ feminist and poststructuralist perspective.
The study employed autoethnographical methods including observation, interviewing, the researcher’s and teachers’ reflective journaling, and data collection through the researcher’s involvement with various school activities which took place in one high school. The analysis of the data corpus employed portraiture and constant comparative method. The portraits of the researcher and selected teachers depicted their agencies in terms of origin, motivation, shape, and negotiation.
The findings included: 1) individual teacher agency was significantly influenced by history, currency, moral standards, and students; 2) collective agency was shaped by structural changes, leadership and modern technology; and 3) collective teacher agency created the demands for individual teachers’ professional development, a conducive culture for teacher collaboration, and concrete examples that teachers could constantly refer to, reflect upon, and learn from for reform implementation.
These results offer important insights for understanding how physics teacher agency is manifest in the on-going curriculum reform in China. Further, the study offers a clear understanding of the influences underlying physics teachers’ agency deployment as they engage with the curriculum reform process. Finally, this study’s findings justify a case for preparing physics teachers on how to deploy both individual and collective agencies in the face of the complicated social structures and ultimately shed light on the desired curriculum decentralization in China.Education, Faculty of
Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of
Graduate
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Huang, Jing. "Autonomy, agency and identity in foreign language learning and teaching." Click to view the E-thesis via HKUTO, 2009. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record/B41757981.
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Francis, D., and Roux A. Le. "Using life history to understand the interplay between identity, critical agency and social justice education." Journal for New Generation Sciences, Vol 10, Issue 3: Central University of Technology, Free State, Bloemfontein, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/11462/605.
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Published ArticleIn this article we use the concepts identity, agency and social justice education as a lens to explore the role of life history research in the study of the interconnection between emerging teacher identities, critical agency and social justice education. By exploring the life history of a white woman pre-service teacher, this study foregrounds the use of life history research to help teacher educators to understand the contexts through which student teachers' identities are constructed, and how these identities feed into agency and a stance to bring about social change.
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He, Peichang, and 何佩嫦. "Learning to teach in school-university partnership: tension, agency and identity." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2013. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B49858774.
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This thesis explores the identity formation of three EFL pre-service teachers during their teaching practicum in a school-university partnership school in Mainland China. Drawing on the sociocultural perspective, learning-to-teach is conceptualized as student teachers participating in and becoming a member of the communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) which consist of boundary-crossing members from both activity systems of the university and the school (Engestrom, 1987, 1999, 2001). Following a poststructural perspective, the student teachers’ learning-to-teach is also conceptualized as a process of “arguing for” (MacLure, 1993) their professional identities under dominant social discourses. Foucault’s (1983, 1985) concept of ethical identity formation elaborated into a framework of four ethico-political dimensions for doing teacher identity (Clarke, 2009) is adopted to further analysethe interactions between social structure and individual identity transformation. An ethnographic qualitative case study approach was adopted. Data collection methods included ethnographic observations of classroom interactions, focus group discussions and routine school activities, semi-structured interviews of student teachers and mentors, and collectioin of documents such as university teaching practicum documents, lesson plans, reflective diaries and newsletters. Both “content analysis” and “modified analytic induction” (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Merriam, 1998; Patton, 2002) were adopted to conduct within-case and cross-case data analysis. The multi-method approach allowed the researcher to collect and interpret data from both holistic and in-depth research perspectives which also enabled triangulations during data analysis.
The analysis indicated that historical, cultural, political and economic forces intertwined and formed general social discourses. Their influences permeated into the discourses of both the university and the school activity systems. Due to the contradictory discourses of ELT education between the two institutions, the boundary-crossing learning-to-teach activities were replete with tensions, asymmetrical power relationships, and interpersonal conflicts, which combined to become driving forces for the different transformations of the three student teachers’ identities within the school-university partnership activity system as a global community of practice (COP). Due to different individual backgrounds, inner tensions and interpersonal conflicts within the COP, the student teachers led dissimilar legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger, 1991)trajectories through identifying themselves with different local sub-cops (T-cop and S-cop) in various modes of belonging. Under the domination of contradictory institutional discourses, the student teachers exercised their creative agencies and managed to find the “spaces” for their own freedom of self-formation via four ethico-political dimensions. Through critical reflection on the relation between the care of self and the care of others, the student teachers clarified, readjusted and reinforced their telos which is part and parcel of the ongoing interactions among the four ethico-political aspects of teacher identity. Based on the contradictions identified in this research, a critical and ethical pedagogy framework for EFL teacher education was conceptualized for ELT and teacher education programmes. This thesis also serves as an attempt to address teacher identity issues from the integrated perspectives of both sociocultural and poststructural approaches (Morgan, 2007) and to introduce the concept of ethico-politics of teacher identity to EFL teacher education.published_or_final_version
Education
Doctoral
Doctor of Philosophy
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Marco-Bujosa, Lisa M. "Becoming an Urban Science Teacher: Beginning Teachers Negotiating Their Identities From Pre-service to In-service Teaching." Thesis, Boston College, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:107923.
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Thesis advisor: Katherine L. McNeillTeacher attrition rates are high in urban schools, particularly for new teachers and science and math teachers compared to other subjects (Ingersoll & May, 2012). Research indicates teachers who remain committed to teaching in high-need schools are unique; they tend to identify not just as teachers, but as teachers devoted to the mission of social justice and working with underserved students (Moore, 2008). Teacher education programs have an important role to play in the preparation of teachers within this social justice framework (Picower, 2012a). But, the transition from university preparation to in-service teaching is difficult (Beauchamp & Thomas, 2011), particularly for science teachers who encounter contradictory contexts in urban schools that undermine the pedagogical practices and mindsets learned in preparation (e.g. Rodriguez, 2015). However, little research has addressed how science teachers can be prepared to effectively bridge the divide between preparation and urban teaching. This dissertation utilizes the theoretical frameworks of identity (Gee, 2000) and agency (Archer, 2007) to address this gap in the literature. I employed a case study methodology of one cohort of four teachers from the Science Educators for Urban Schools (SEUS) program at Boston College, which serves as a critical case of an effective preparation program for urban science educators (Yin, 2013). Data, primarily interviews, surveys, and written reflections, were collected from study participants during preparation and their first year of teaching. The findings indicate the SEUS Scholars expressed a student-centered, inquiry-oriented approach to teaching science for social justice. While the SEUS Scholars struggled to implement their ideal science instruction as first year teachers given the contradictory contexts of urban schools, the social justice ideology of the pre-service program shaped their professional identity and feelings of agency. These findings illuminate the role of teacher preparation to support the development of: 1) a strong educational philosophy grounding their pedagogical approach to science teaching, and 2) pedagogical context knowledge to effectively navigate urban schools
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018
Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education
Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction
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Reinhardt, Kimberly S. "Mentor Teachers: Internalization of Role, Externalization of Practices and the Relational Agency of Preparation." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/556960.
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This study was an investigation of mentor teachers who work in a Master of Education teacher preparation program. It examined mentors who work with teacher candidates to understand their conceptualization of their purpose in teacher education. The teacher preparation program that was the site of this study placed teacher candidates in the classroom for a year-long field experience aligned with the actual teaching calendar in schools and reflective of the clinical-based preparation called for by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE, 2010). Attention to teacher preparation program outcomes has increased significantly in the past few years (Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, 2013; Council of Chief State School Officers, 2013; Greenburg, Pomerance, & Walsh, NCTQ, 2011; NCATE, 2010). Within this focused interest on program outcomes and on the impact well-prepared teachers make on school improvement, field placements are viewed as more essential in the preparation of teacher candidates (Bullough, Draper, Smith, & Birrell, 2004; Korthagen, 2004; Valencia, Martin, Place, & Grossman, 2009; Zeichner, 2010). Therefore, because mentor teachers affect teacher candidates in the field, it is crucial to understand how mentor teachers conceive their role and purpose within teacher preparation, and how they can be supported prior to assuming this responsibility and throughout the time they spend with the teacher candidates. The dissertation research was divided into two major phases: Phase One was a survey administered to all mentor teachers who work with the program (n=54) early in spring, 2014. The analysis of the survey provided the data necessary to use purposeful sampling to select mentors who reported a commitment to diverse mentoring practices. Data was collected on the interview sample (n=6) in Phase Two through interviews and observations to document and analyze how mentors enacted practices that may or may not be consistent with their perceived purpose and role or with the existing literature on mentoring teacher candidates. Considering the importance of this mentoring relationship on the teacher candidates' preparation outcomes, identification of the approaches to mentoring that can be strengthened by preparation are important in order to emphasized these points as part of the development of partnerships that will strengthen the mentoring system. This research offered insight for teacher preparation programs relating to how mentors internalize their role and areas for development that may align mentoring practices with the educative functions that develop responsive teachers. The findings of this study offered suggestions for preparation that target the mentors' professional growth through collaborative and ongoing instructional and personal support.
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Lee, Hilary. "An exploration of the ways in which teachers navigate tensions in their professional lives." Thesis, University of Roehampton, 2018. https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/studentthesis/An-exploration-of-the-ways-in-which-teachers-navigate-tensions-in-their-professional-lives(2291f330-a8a0-43ca-a810-cbf0ba605de9).html.
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Despite the extensive research into teachers’ lives in recent decades, relatively little of it has focused on the experiences of motivated teachers. Past research has tended to focus upon the issue of retention in a profession that is dominated by regulation and performance measures. This thesis offers an original contribution to the field by exploring the experiences of established teachers who consider themselves to be motivated and who successfully navigate the tensions between the current education landscape and their personal values about teaching. The research provides insights into the complex context within which teachers work and the ways in which they manage this complexity. The methodology is grounded in the principles of adaptive theory which enables the analysis of subjective experience alongside analysis of pre-existing theories to reveal links between teachers’ actions and the structures and systems which affect them. As such, the research offers a new lens through which to consider the complex nature of teachers’ professional lives. The research consists of in-depth interviews with six teachers over the course of a year. The research findings reveal how successful teachers are able to adapt behaviours to negotiate tensions and take control of their own practice. The teachers in this study demonstrate curiosity and critical awareness of the issues in education that go beyond their daily practice. They have a deep understanding of their own values and the factors that influence them and are therefore able to position themselves within the profession and the organisation within which they work. This enables them to take positive action rather than merely cope with the challenges they face. The findings have implications for teacher training and development programmes and the ways in which they enable teachers to navigate and shape their own professional lives.
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Nomi, Brionna C. "Moral Professional Agency: A Framework for Exploring Teachers’ Constructions of Professionalism Within a Democratic Space." VCU Scholars Compass, 2019. https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/6040.
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Despite long-standing debates about the nature of professions and professionalism related to teaching, little consensus has been reached due in large part to an ever-changing political climate and a number of competing ideologies and interests (Bair, 2014; Hargreaves & Goodson, 1996). This lack of consensus fosters variable expectations of teachers, creating opportunities for the generation and implementation of initiatives that ultimately control and undermine teachers’ work (Ingersoll, 2003). While the quality of our nation’s education system depends on teachers' capacity to have professional input regarding their work, concepts of teacher agency and professionalism remain ill-defined, and few studies explore teachers’ experiences in spaces where they are asked for such input.
This constructivist study examined teacher agency and professionalism, given the ideal of democracy and the reality of neoliberalism. Utilizing agency theory and participatory democratic theory, this study sought to explore teachers’ perceptions of their professionalism and agency by co-constructing knowledge with 18 members of the Richmond Mayoral Teacher Advisory Council (MTAC). This study took place over seven months and included seven focus group interview sessions, two MTAC meeting debrief sessions, and multiple writing prompts focused on teachers’ narratives of their professional experiences. The study revealed several themes related to teachers’ professionalism, particularly teachers’ focus on student-centered, morally-grounded views of their work. This study’s iterative inquiry process culminated in the development of a Moral Professional Agency framework that may serve useful in future constructivist work with teachers regarding their professional work.
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MacLean, Justine T. "Factors that enable and constrain Physical Education teachers to exercise agency during large-scale educational reform." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/31437.
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Curriculum for Excellence (CfE, 2004), Scotland's most recent curricular reform, adopted in 2010, positions teachers as key stakeholders in the change process where they are not merely regarded as technicians delivering prescribed curricula but rather as designers and co-producers of school-based curriculum. This critical review considers the ways in which teachers engage with and enact this reform using the lens of teacher agency, to provide insight into how teachers relate to policy (Tao & Gao, 2017). Teacher agency has been defined as the ability to act (Bandura, 2001), to critically shape a response to a problem (Biesta & Tedder, 2006), and reflect on the impact of one's actions (Rogers & Wetzel, 2013). This critical review contributes to understanding of the factors that enable or constrain teachers to exercise agency as they enact new policy. Research in teacher agency is important because teachers may use their agency to support new policy, develop a critical stance or oppose educational change altogether (Sannino, 2010). CfE significantly altered the nature and purpose of Physical Education (PE) by relocating PE and dance to the newly created educational domain of 'Health and Wellbeing', but also offering dance as a unique subject within the Expressive Arts domain. The focus on PE is particularly salient, since PE teachers were not only managing the complexities of enacting whole school reform, but at the same time reconstructing the nature of their subject between the two educational domains. Given the complexities of enacting new policy in PE, this critical review examines the tensions, issues and challenges that PE teachers face when exercising agency to enact new curricular policy in their school setting. This critical review draws from three studies presented in six peer-reviewed international publications, analysing 525 Questionnaires and 50 interviews, that trace the policy formation process using Bowe, Ball and Gold's (1992) cycle of policy creation and enactment in practice. The six papers do not follow a linear path but can be read as a set of three interrelated research studies, conducted in 'real time', examining policy processes in practice. The first study investigated the creation of the CfE policy text by interviewing key policy constructors selected by the Scottish Government to create a vision for PE within Health and Wellbeing. The second study surveyed PE teachers in Scottish secondary schools and examined CfE at the implementation stage of the policy process, comparing policy intentions to teachers' translation of the policy text during the early years of policy enactment. The third study analysed PE teachers' perceptions, experiences and provision of dance in the curriculum using a ten-year longitudinal study to explore teacher agency from student through to experienced teacher. The studies identified the practical manifestations of the theoretically complex concept of collective context-bound agency that is exercised through policy enactment in the relational context of schools. The research established that policy enactment and agency were interconnected when actors were able to respond to tasks that involved them in a socially embedded process. Agency was exercised when teachers reflexively deliberated on the meaning of policy for their practice and negotiated the cultural, social and material contextual environment required to support reform. Teacher agency was enhanced by the collective experience in that, as a group, the PE teachers possessed emergent properties not possessed by individuals but by the power of the relationship that bound them together. The findings are relevant and timely in seeking to explore the information that sits beneath the surface of curriculum change by developing an understanding of the ways to support teachers' current and future practice.
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Ticknor, Anne Swenson. "Becoming teachers: examining how preservice elementary teachers use language to construct professional identities, learn within relationships, and take risks in the classroom." Diss., University of Iowa, 2010. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/609.
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This longitudinal qualitative study examined how four preservice elementary teachers used language to construct professional identities, learn within relationships, and take risks in the classroom during their final three semesters in teacher education coursework and field experiences. My female participants were former students of mine in the same section of Methods of Elementary School Reading and Language Arts. We developed rapport and established relationships with each other that revolved around our class experiences, including many critical discussions about teachers, teaching, and literacy. I employed feminist methods to maintain our established relationships by participating in conversations, meeting with small groups of participants, and developing shared meanings of teaching. An over arching question explored in conversations was how preservice teachers negotiated Discourses of teaching when coursework and field experiences offered new and often conflicting examples of teaching and teachers.
The primary data source was conversation transcripts. Secondary data sources included participant generated documents and researcher generated documents for triangulation purposes. Analysis was multi-layered and included content analysis using N*6 computer software and Discourse Analysis questions. Analysis yielded five overarching codes: Nonteacher Identities, Teacher Identities, Relationships with Others, Discourses of Teachers, and Discourses of Teaching. Further analysis included locating I-statements and we-statements to link language with identities and relationships, respectively. Agency Tracing was introduced to historically trace agency in longitudinal language data. These four preservice teachers negotiated nonteacher and teacher identities to construct productive professional identities, learned to become teachers while embedded in relationships during their teacher education coursework and field experiences, and took risks during their culminating field experiences. This study reconceptualized agency to include five elements of rehearsals: hours of talk, supportive listeners, frustration, awareness of educational contexts, and appropriate timing to implement actions.
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Mcintosh, Shona. "Trainee teachers on placement : an exploration of contextual influences on the development of situated agency in the process of becoming a teacher." Thesis, University of Bath, 2012. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.560881.
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Mills, Sara Rose. "Changing direction : trainee teachers' beliefs about, and perceptions of, creative practice." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/15478.
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In recent years there has been increasing interest in developing greater creativity in education. This study focuses on trainee teachers during their initial teacher education and explores their beliefs about and perceptions of developing greater creativity in their practice. The work is located within the context of a school-based initial teacher education course and considers whether and how continuing moves towards school-based training in England can support the impetus towards greater creativity in teachers and their pupils. The study draws from qualitative research undertaken with a small group of trainee English teachers during a one-year School-based Initial Teacher Education course in England. Working from a social constructionist perspective, this research uses the methodology of Action Research. Employing a range of qualitative methods, including discourse analysis of group discussions, individual interviews, a silent discussion, and writing and analysing metaphors, it provides some insight into the trainee teachers’ complex understandings of creativity in the classroom, and how these understandings connect with their developing identity as teachers and with their pedagogy, practice and philosophy. It offers an insight into the trainees’ beliefs about and perceptions of moving towards creativity in their teaching, and the barriers and supports to such practice they encounter, both within the training course and in the partner schools. Reviewing a range of approaches to teaching and learning and considering the trainees’ beliefs and perceptions, the study suggests that agency is central to creativity, and that approaches which support the agency both of trainee teachers and of pupils are most likely to result in greater creativity in the classroom. The study regards creativity as a situated and highly contextual quality, and discusses practical approaches to teaching and learning, gathered under the term Creative Practice, which may be most likely to occasion greater creativity in the classroom. It offers suggestions for teacher educators as to how to better support trainee teachers in moving towards Creative Practice.
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Leksander-Hayes, Aneta Maria. "Students' and teachers' views of transition from secondary education to Western-medical university in Bahrain." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/13927.
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This research focuses on the transition of Bahraini students to a Western medical university which has been ‘transplanted’, with its values and context of practice, to the culture of Bahrain. A socio-cultural model of Communities of Practice was adopted as a theoretical framework in this research for it linked in well with the personal context of this study which suggested that students’ transition could be related to the practices in Bahraini schools associated with science and English education, as well as general school pedagogy. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore how different participants perceive the role of school practices, as well as science and English education in transition. In order to explore these different understandings, a case study methodology was adopted and insights into the practices of students’ school and university community were gained through the use of focus group and individual interviews, as well as a descriptive questionnaire. The data from the qualitative investigation was analysed deductively under the three themes of science background knowledge, the English language and school pedagogy, while the questionnaire data was subject to univariate analysis based on mean responses. The key findings indicated high levels of confidence in students’ science base and approaches to study, which enabled the students to take a number of strategic actions in order to move through the educational outcomes of the university programme. In terms of the English language, a compromised foreign language (L2) proficiency caused by inadequate school practices was perceived not to play an important role in the transition process, which suggested a diminished role of L2 in transitions in the context of language change. As far as school pedagogy is concerned, whilst all participants at the secondary level agreed that general memorisation-based pedagogy in secondary schools could play a negative role in the transition, the participants at the university revealed that rote-based approaches to study formed in school could also be strategically used at university. Hence, the findings from this research have specific implications for the model of Communities of Practice and suggest future work within this theory regarding the role of students’ individual agency. These findings also suggest a new understanding of transitions in the context of language and culture change.
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Forbes, Cheryl A. "Agency, identity, and power bilingual Mexican American children and their teachers talk about learning English in school /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 2008. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p3315926.
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Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2008.Title from first page of PDF file (viewed Sept. 3, 2008). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 229-243).
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Huang, Jing, and 黃景. "Autonomy, agency and identity in foreign language learning and teaching." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 2009. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B41757981.
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Ellison, Bruce. "Te reo o te ākonga me ngā whakapono o te kaiako : Student voice and teachers’ beliefs." Thesis, University of Canterbury. Education (leadership), 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10092/10496.
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The beliefs that teachers have about teaching and learning have an influence on the practices that teachers implement. This is particularly relevant, although not exclusively, to teaching practices that meet the needs of Māori students in our bicultural learning environments of New Zealand. There is a growing amount of research to support the use of student voice data, the benefits of which can be seen at a school level, at the classroom teacher level as well as for the individual students themselves.
This research project focused on exploring the impact of students sharing their thoughts and opinions about their learning, (i.e.: student voice data) on influencing teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning. In doing so it explores effective facilitation of this process in a bicultural learning environment. In particular it investigates the potential of a combination of specific tools, notably student focus groups and coaching conversations with teachers to influence teachers’ beliefs.
This study took place in two low decile schools in Christchurch. It involved focus groups of Māori and non-Māori primary-aged students, alongside teacher reflective interviews being conducted on repeated visits. Its findings identified approaches for accessing authentic student voice in a bicultural learning environment. The thoughts and opinions shared by Māori students highlighted a focus on their own learning as well as celebrating their culture. Teachers reacted to student voice by making connections to their classroom programmes, and by accepting or dismissing more provocative statements. These reactions by teachers helped emphasize the most helpful methods for reflecting on this data. Their reflections, used alongside a specially designed ‘Teacher Belief Gathering Tool’, ascertained that teachers’ beliefs were both reaffirmed and changed through guided reflection and coaching conversations on student voice data. Teachers’ knowledge of effective teaching and learning, their motivation for changing their teaching practices, as well as witnessing success were all considerable factors in teachers changing their beliefs.
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Hayes, Angelyn. "Conditions of Possibility and Agency: A Qualitative Inquiry into the Professional Lives of Three Women in the Liberal Arts Academic Disciplines." unrestricted, 2007. http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04122007-074609/.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Georgia State University, 2007.Title from file title page. Philo A. Hutcheson, committee chair; Donna Breault, Susan Talburt, Benjamin Baez, Elaine Manglitz, committee members. Electronic text (214 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Mar. 26, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-183).
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Hussain, Shah Farwa. "An investigation into lecturers' beliefs and implementation of the English language curriculum change at higher education level in Pakistan." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/24247.
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This thesis describes an exploratory study designed to investigate the beliefs and perceptions of eight English language lecturers about, and their classroom practices in implementing the curriculum change that was enacted in 2010 at the undergraduate level in the public sector colleges in Pakistan. Research indicates that curriculum change is a highly complex and a multifaceted process (Carl, 2009), and its success depends on a number of features. In this respect, it is acknowledged that teachers and their multiple roles contribute significantly to the success or failure of any educational reform or change. Therefore, this exploration focussed on investigating teachers’ implementation of the curriculum change through an analysis of their beliefs about teaching and learning, their perceptions about the curriculum change, and the issues involved in implementation. My approach is interpretive, and thus qualitative research methodology was employed to obtain an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon under investigation. Semi structured interviews and classroom observations were used as data collection instruments. The analysis of the data revealed that, in spite of the lecturers’ generally positive attitude towards the concept of change and their belief in the importance of English for both individual and national progress, there was a limited uptake of the new communicative curriculum. The study indicated that teachers’ beliefs combined with a number of external factors including the student level, educational culture, examination washback, lack of resources and support, and absence of teacher training could be an explanation for contradictions between the intended and the implemented curriculum change. The study concluded that the needs of the teachers must be acknowledged, and measures should be taken to create compatibility between the teachers’ beliefs, contextual factors and the reform policies. Although the study does not provide any explicit solutions to the problem of change and reform implementation, the insights revealed significant implications, clarified some critical issues, and offered some recommendations which might prove beneficial not only for curriculum planning and implementation in the future, but could also be useful in guiding those involved in the present curriculum change. Important areas were also suggested for further research in the field.
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Barbosa, Perla De Oliveira. "Prospective Teachers Dismantling Anti-Bilingual Hegemonic Discourses| Exploring a Pedagogy of Participatory Possibilities for "Political Clarity" and "Political Agency"." Thesis, New Mexico State University, 2018. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10985660.
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The public education system in the U.S. has been under assault with the latest neoliberal education reforms. Those reforms are characterized by their antidemocratic and homogenizing assessment system, which reinforces a banking model of education. Such model goes against teachers and teaching, linguistic and cultural diversity and bilingual education. In order to countervail this reality, this research urged pre-service teachers in a Foundations of Bilingual Education/ ESL college coursework to engage in a problem-posing and emancipatory pedagogy. The main purpose was for them to nurture and enhance political clarity and political agency in issues of bilingual and ESL education. Students not only engaged in dismantling hegemonic discourses in bilingual and ESL education in the U.S., but also went through an epistemological break when the teacher-researcher invited students to become co-researchers in order to co-construct the curriculum and pedagogical realities. Readings, journals, personal narratives, dialogue and theater of the oppressed became the vehicles for engagement. The transformative process of the teacher-researcher and co-researchers occurred when they deliberately transitioned from a pedagogy that promotes passive citizens to a pedagogy that promotes collective emancipation. The research paradigm that aligned with those experiences was Participatory Action Research (PAR). Central to PAR is radical participatory democracy. Through self-collective development and reliance, participants transform themselves and find alternatives to defeat injustices. Pre-service and in-service teachers and teacher education can benefit from the following results: (1) the transformative effect of a dialogic research (2) the lessons the teacher-researcher learned (3) how theater of the oppressed could have been central to the vivencia, instead it was supplementary and still the door for infinite possibilities (4) the viability of PAR as a vivencia embedded in undergraduate education major and (5) the extraordinary case of Sofia's (co-researcher) ongoing advocacy.
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Sisson, Jamie Huff. "Professional Identities: A Narrative Inquiry of Public Preschool Teachers." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent1297272209.
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Glader, Oscar. "The Impact of Extramural English on Students and Teachers : A systematic literature review." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR), 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-105007.
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Sweden is seen as a successful adopter of English as an additional language (EAL) and the country is a frontrunner in the globalization of the English language. Much of the success could be attributed to the large presence of English in Swedish society. Additionally, EAL learners are acquiring the English language out-of-school to a larger extent, often referred to as Extramural English (EE). Therefore, it is important to investigate how EE affects learners, teachers and discuss how it can change education. This has been done by evaluating the current state of research through a systematic literature review. It was found that learners engage in a variety of EE activities, with playing online games and watching movies being the activities with the most English exposure. Learners engage in these activities mostly out of their own interests or because of other socially driven motives. EE affects their opinion of English and could have negative effects on their attitude towards school English. Teachers are aware of the gap between EE and school English and try to integrate activities similar to EE activities in class. However, it is a challenge to find authentic material that fits a large number of learners’ interests. In conclusion, there is a need for more research that could point to a clear cause-and-effect relationship between EE and high proficiency in English. This thesis also calls on teachers, principals, and school leaders to prepare to change education if EE becomes a more widespread phenomenon.
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Aldrich, Debora Lynn Hill. "Heteroglossia and persuasive discourses for student writers and teachers: Intersections between out-of-school writing and the teaching of English." Diss., University of Iowa, 2014. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/5405.
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Research studies have investigated issues in the teaching of writing, particularly at the elementary and university levels. Studies of out-of-school writing done by adolescents have focused on digital contexts and social media. This study examines the intersections of the out-of-school and in-school writing worlds of three high school writers: a poet, a novelist, and a contest essay writer. I use data gathered over seven years from the student writers and four of their English language arts teachers. Research questions focused on how notions of student writers and the teaching of high school English might be informed by the ways student writers described their out-of-class writing and motivation for writing, how their teachers developed and implemented their philosophies and practices in teaching writing, and how the student writers developed their internally persuasive discourses about writing. In analyzing case study data to answer these questions, I used constant comparison analysis and narrative inquiry analysis, drawing upon theories of heteroglossic discourses, figured worlds, and writing identity. My findings show that in the intersections of out-of-school and in-school writing experiences, students select some writing practices and discourses from their teachers to adopt or adapt, such as developing writing processes, participating in writing communities, and caring about writing. They complicate their definitions of writing, however, as they create figured worlds of writing in which they explore identity, navigate and negotiate complex emotions, and receive recognition. The students illustrate their dialogism with writing discourses in stories of improvisation in which they find power and enact resistance. I argue that writing teachers need encouragement, education, and agency to entertain more complex perceptions of student writers and teaching writing to support students for future personal, academic, career, and public discourse worlds.
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Bao, Chiwen. "Within the Classroom Walls: Critical Classroom Processes, Students' and Teachers' Sense of Agency, and the Making of Racial Advantages and Disadvantages." Thesis, Boston College, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/2505.
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Thesis advisor: Juliet B. SchorDespite decades of research and efforts to reform schools, racial disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes, often referred to as the "achievement gap," persist and concerns about students' math learning and achievement continue. Among researchers, educational practitioners, and the wider public, explanations for these ongoing problems usually point to structural influences or individual and cultural factors. For example, structures of schooling (e.g. school funding, organization and curriculum) and those outside of school (e.g. family background and neighborhood characteristics) become focal points for understanding educational inequalities and places for intervention. In terms of explanations that look to individual influences, teachers and students are either targeted for their inadequacies or praised for their individual talents, values and successes. Regarding students in particular, racial inequalities in academic outcomes often become attributed to students', namely black and Latino/a students', supposed cultural devaluation of education and their desires to not "act white" and academically achieve. Together, these explanations lead to the assessment that possibilities of teaching and learning are predetermined by a host of structural and individual influences. But how is the potential to teach and learn at least partially actualized through everyday processes? Moreover, how do these processes, which simultaneously involve structures and individual agents, lead to the production or disruption of racial disparities? To explore these questions, I investigated processes of teaching and learning in one well-funded, racially diverse public high school with high rates of students' passing the statewide standardized test, many students going onto prestigious colleges and universities, and enduring racial inequalities in academic achievement. I conducted fieldwork over three years in 14 math classrooms ranging from test preparation classes to honors math classes and interviewed 52 students and teachers about their experiences in school. Through analyzing the data, I find that what happens within the classroom walls still matters in shaping students' opportunities to learn and achieve. Illustrating how effective learning and teaching and racial disparities in education do not simply result from either preexisting structural contexts or individuals' virtues or flaws, classroom processes mold students' learning and racial differences in those experiences through cultivating or eroding what I refer to as students' sense of academic agency and teachers' sense of agency to teach. For students, that sense of agency leads to their attachment to school, identification with learning in general and math in particular, engagement, motivation and achievement. As classroom processes evolve in virtuous or vicious cycles, different beliefs about students (e.g. as "good kids" or "bad kids") importantly fuel the direction of these cycles. Since racial stereotypes often influence those beliefs, students consequently experience racial advantages and disadvantages in classroom processes. As a result, some students fail to learn and achieve not because they fear "acting white," but because they do not always get to experience classroom processes that cultivate their sense of being agentic in the classroom space, a sense that is distinctly racialized
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Sociology
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Hetherington, Lindsay Ellen Joan. ""Walking the line between structure and freedom" : a case study of teachers' responses to curriculum change using complexity theory." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10036/3868.
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This thesis uses complexity theory to explore education in the context of a changing curriculum called ‘Opening Minds’. This new curriculum was introduced in the case study school in response to a wider curriculum change which emphasised ‘learning to learn’ and the development of ‘skills for the 21st Century’. In this study, a ‘complexity thinking’ theoretical framework was adopted, drawing especially on the work of Osberg and Biesta (Osberg et al., 2008, Osberg and Biesta, 2007, Biesta and Osberg, 2007) and Davis and Sumara (2006; 2007), paying particular attention to concepts of emergence and complexity reduction. Complexity theory, through the ‘logic of emergence’ offers a challenge to mechanistic approaches to understanding the world which, despite the work of postmodern and poststructural scholars in education, remains dominant in educational practice. The Opening Minds curriculum that is the focus of this case study demonstrated the potential to challenge this mechanistic approach, as the teachers expressed a desire to work in different, flexible and creative ways: this thesis therefore explores complexity theory’s challenge to a mechanistic approach in this particular case. It also addresses the relationship between Opening Minds and science education using complexity thinking. To facilitate exploration and analysis of the case, concepts of temporal and relational emergence and complexity reduction to develop a ‘complexity thinking’ understanding of concepts of agency/structure, power, identity and reflexivity. This entailed reconceptualisation of these ideas in a temporal-relational sense that explicitly incorporates a sensitivity to emergence. Specifically, an additional dimension to Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) construction of multidimensional agency was added: that of creative agency. The research was conducted as a case study in which a ‘bricolage’ approach to data collection and analysis was used as part of an explicitly ‘complex’ methodology, addressing questions of the challenge of complexity reduction and ethics in research drawing on complexity theory. The findings indicated a challenge for teachers in negotiating tensions as they attempted to adopt approaches that could be considered ‘emergent’ alongside other ‘mechanistic’ practices. These tensions were explored in detail in relation to the concept of ‘reflection’, and in the interaction between science and Opening Minds. Bringing together the empirical and theoretical work in this study, it is suggested that mechanistic and emergent aspects may helpfully be viewed as a ‘vital simultaneity’ within the educational relationship (Davis, 2008) with the interaction between them facilitated by creative agency within a ‘pedagogy of interruption’ (Biesta, 2006). It was further argued that reflection could be used in responsive and flexible ways to support both learning and assessment as a crucial aspect of a pedagogy of interruption. Such a ‘contingently responsive and creative pedagogy’ may support the interaction between science and Opening Minds productively. It is suggested that complex approach to a pedagogy of interruption could support teachers in engaging with the creative and diverse elements of science or learning to learn curricula whilst maintaining the mechanistic aspects of teaching that support students in learning key concepts and skills.
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Ramahi, Hanan. "Teachers leading school improvement and education reconstruction in Palestine." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/277681.
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This dissertation presents an intervention-based study that aimed to enable teachers to improve teaching and learning in one school in Ramallah, Palestine. The non-positional approach to teacher leadership was adopted as a means to mobilise all teachers in the drive towards bottom-up, participatory school change processes that increase teacher self-efficacy and collaboration, build professional capacity and social capital, and promote sustainability. The Teachers Leading the Way programme provided a contextually tailored strategy, and set of instruments and tools that through reflective exercises and dialogic activities aimed to support teachers to innovate practice, and impact organisational structures and professional culture. This is significant in the Palestine setting for facilitating the building of locally based and sourced knowledge to inform an authentic Palestinian vision and agenda for policy-making and education reconstruction, with implications for countries of the Middle East and North Africa region. In the process, a grassroots change movement is intended to shift historical and continued reliance on foreign intervention and international assistance, and lay the foundation for democratisation and social transformation. The intervention was investigated using a critical action-based, participatory methodology that emphasised context and researcher reflexivity in one school and amongst a cohort of 12 participants. Data were collected using a range of research-designed and programme-based methods and instruments, analysed deductively and inductively, and narrated critically to maintain coherence, and convey experiential and temporal dimensions. The study outcomes indicate that teachers in Palestine are capable of leading school improvement, and impacting school structures and professional culture for system-wide change, when the proper support is provided. Non-positional teacher leadership is the vehicle and can be developed through Teachers Leading the Way. At the individual level, this is enabled through a transformation in teachers’ perspective towards a self-empowered, agential mindset that leads to action on ways to improve practice. The transition process underscores the role of effective facilitation as an enabling condition for developing non-positional teacher leadership in Palestine and similar settings.
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Kileo, Mercy Kansari. "A capabilities analysis of teachers' perceptions of caps in a Cape Town low-income school community in the Western Cape Province." University of the Western Cape, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/11394/6403.
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Magister Educationis - MedSince the dawn of democracy, the South African government has set up different measures to improve education in schools, inter alia the provision of funding, resources, feeding schemes and the introduction and amendment to different curricula. The current education policy, the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS), was adopted in 2012 following three other consecutive education policies that had not delivered to the desired standard in terms of educational outcome. This study focuses on the perceptions of teachers in terms of their freedom to pursue the aims of CAPS in low-income school communities. The teachers' perceptions and freedoms were explored and analyzed using the Capabilities Approach (CA) authored by Amartya Sen which forefronts the capabilities (the ability to achieve) and the functionings (real achievements). Teachers' perceptions were therefore explored and analyzed in terms of freedoms and unfreedoms they enjoy and face in the process of transferring the knowledge to learners. The thesis studied and analyzed the capabilities and perceptions of teachers in terms of their real freedoms through the deconstruction of their experiences.
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Mahmood, Nasir. "A critical ethnographic study of misrecognition of identities, agency and belonging of British Pakistani Muslim teachers in their educational and social contexts." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2017. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/18203/.
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From 9/11 to Cameron’s post multiculturalism (2011), British Asian Muslim identities and belonging have increasingly been questioned, stereotyped and vilified. Historically, their identities, agency and belonging formation have been seen in terms of passiveness and identity conflict, whereas, more recently their identities are coming to be seen in the frames of radicalism, fundamentalism, segregation, and disloyalty. In this research, I critically studied the life histories of four British Pakistani Muslim teachers, both male and female, in their educational and social contexts. Data were collected using four ethnographic ‘problem centred’ interviews for each participant. The study drew on normative ideas from misrecognition theory to build a critical argument about their identities, agency and belonging in Britain. My participants counter performed the naturalised cultural-political, and socio-historical discourses outlined above. Furthermore, I claim that my participants perform multicultural liberal conception of difference about their identities through four specific strategies; performance of interruptive and strategic existentialism; performance of resilience and adaptability; performance of hybridisation and creativity; and the performance of ‘strategic essentialism’. My thesis challenges the dominant Western thinking which mainly views religion in terms of belief. I argue that my participants perform religion as culture and practice. My understanding of the participants’ data is that religion is an identity orientation along with other identities which I reveal through my data analysis. My analysis leads me to a new perception to which I call the participants’ performance of ‘Multilingual social consciousness’. I argue that they perform multilingualism as an engaged plural form of social consciousness that helps them perform their identities in pluralising and synthesising ways, register their belonging in terms of forging and re-forging their cultural and cross-cultural connections, and manifest their politicisation over redistributive justice. I recommend that educators and policy actors should advance civic praxis that opens possibilities for communities and individuals to manifest their belonging in diverse ways.
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Chan, Jessica W. S. "Teachers' understanding of the purposes of group work and their relationship with practice." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:95979f2e-554e-4946-b141-928167392506.
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Group work is commonly recommended as a student-centred instructional strategy which may enhance learning. Research in this area has predominantly used controlled interventions focusing on unproductive teacher assistance or specific strategies of doing group work to be applied by teachers. On the other hand, teachers’ own understanding and uses of group work in classrooms have been under-researched. Drawing on cultural-historical theory, this study scrutinises how and why teachers use group work, and how their enacted understanding is related to the broader contexts of teaching. The present study consists of four teachers of English in two secondary schools in Hong Kong to discern their rationales for and implementation of group work. The analysis delves into the dynamics within the activity of teaching, which comprise the interrelations between teachers' biographies, their purposes for group work in classrooms and what was expected from these teachers within the school practices. The Vygotskian perspective taken by this study entailed an inquiry into the teachers' intentional actions in everyday teaching. Each teacher was interviewed at the outset and end of the school-based fieldwork for their learning backgrounds and beliefs about teaching. In between these interviews each of them was observed in 15 lessons involving group work and undertook five to six stimulated recall (SR) interviews. These lesson video-recordings provided the stimuli for the SR interviews for probing the teacher’s pedagogic decisions while orchestrating students in small groups. The data was analysed by deploying concepts from cultural-historical theory, particularly two organising frameworks developed within the approach. One is a pedagogic sequence proposed by Edwards (1995; in press) as a descriptor to categorise the teachers’ purposes for and actions in group work. The other is an adaptation of Hedegaard's (2012) planes of analysis for identifying the various motives and demands in the multi-layered setting of teaching where group work was located. Group work as a pedagogic tool displayed the intra- and interpersonal dynamics in the activity of teaching. The findings indicate that the teachers' historically-constructed identities as learners of English oriented their intentions for group work and beliefs about teaching the subject. How the schools mediated societal expectations on teaching and learning had a considerable bearing on the teachers enacting their understanding. These institutional objectives and demands in practices created sets of opportunities for group work in the classrooms. The analysis thence was sited at the interface between the teachers' personal pedagogies and the multi-faceted social structure reflected in how education policy was mediated differently in different school contexts. The implications for teacher development are discussed.
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Tracy, Elizabeth Joan. "Innovators in the Classroom: In-service Teachers Creating and Implementing Non-Band, -Choir, and -Orchestra Courses in Their High Schools." Case Western Reserve University School of Graduate Studies / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1523004518027062.
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Barnes, Yvonne Patricia. "Noticing the unnoticed : how can primary mathematics CPD programmes use 'researching from the inside' to develop critical thinking and professional agency for teachers?" Thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University, 2013. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.593887.
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Changing teachers' practice through the CPD process is challenging. Programmes frequently based on centrally devised government interventions and produced on the of a 'one size fits all ' approach. This could be criticised for disempowering teachers they are seen a.5 passive recipients of a system. Programmes may also be ineffective because they ignore the vast range of abilities and backgrounds of the children they originally intended to help. I argue that CPD programmes should facilitate teachers' professional agency and report on how teachers develop and maintain their professional identities despite conflicts between their personal aspirations, programme ' ideals' and the context of perfomativity present within the UK education system. I discuss how a primary mathematics CPD programme applied the 'Discipline of Noticing' in order to facilitate teacher agency and enabled teachers to develop a deeper understanding of their own pedagogical subject knowledge primarily through researching their own practice and developing skills of critical reflexivity. 'Noticing' as a discipline involves practitioners recording salient, micro incidents within their teaching. Subsequent reflection aims to facilitate a drawing back from immediate practice and so enables teachers to see things they have previously overlooked, or have become habituated to see. I report on practitioners who by employing skills of noticing demonstrated an enhanced ability to reflect critically and an increased awareness of their own pedagogical practice. This led to changes in their practice and enabled them to articulate the choices they made within their teaching, thus gaining agency as professional decision-makers. furthermore, I discuss how the Discipline of Noticing facilitated a move into a 'third! space' (Gutierrez, Baquedano-Lopez and Tejeda 1999), characterised by the hybridisation of the roles of practitioner and researcher. I conclude that the potential for real change and teacher empowerment can come about through the dissolution of the boundary between practitioner and researcher.
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Chirume, Erasmus. "A Study of Educational Leadership: The Principals' and Teachers' Perceptions of Teacher Leadership Dynamics in Southeast Ohio." Ohio : Ohio University, 2008. http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/view.cgi?ohiou1214860712.
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Thorgeirsdottir, Hjordis. "Investigating the use of action research and activity theory to promote the professional development of teachers in Iceland." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10871/20529.
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This thesis investigates the use of action research and activity theory to promote the professional development of teachers in an Icelandic upper secondary school. The purpose of the research was to develop a new model to foster professional development through enhancing the participants’ agency to transform their practice. It was carried out with an action research group of twenty-one school professionals and an outside consultant. The group’s aim was to find ways to increase students’ sense of responsibility for their studies. The project combined the ideas behind the Change Laboratory, one of the methods of developmental work research established by Engeström and action research as elaborated by McNiff. I termed our approach the Change Room. There activity theory and the theory of expansive learning provided the participants with a conceptual framework, historical analysis and tools to analyse what changes might be appropriate in our classroom practice. The action research provided the participants with the method and tools to guide the participants when carrying out and evaluating these changes. The research focus was on tensions the participants experienced in their classroom practice. Through creative resolutions of these tensions the intention was to develop better practices and contribute to school development. The research used both action research and case study methodology. The research tools were documentary analysis, interviews, surveys, research diary and observations. The findings were analysed using deductive process based on activity theory. The teachers experienced tensions in their classroom practice between students’ active and passive learning, didactic and dialogic teaching methods, and the requirement to cover the syllabus and to promote deep learning. To resolve these tensions the teachers have developed teaching practices that enhanced active student learning and given more weight to the students’ voices. Participation in the action research group enhanced both individual and collective learning of the school professionals. Their agency to change practice was increased and they also developed more cross curriculum agency. The combination of activity theory and action research in the Change Room provides a new model for enhancing teachers’ professional development and collaboration that has potential to transform classroom practice.
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McIntosh, Shona. "Reframing learning to teach as a social and relational practice : an examination of key influences on the trajectory of professional development of secondary school PGCE trainees." Thesis, University of Bath, 2016. https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.687313.
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The landscape of initial teacher education (ITE) in Britain is changing (BERA Inquiry, 2014). In England, trainee teachers’ routes to professional qualification are subject to assessment against Teachers’ Standards (Department for Education, 2012), which some argue enshrine the competences trainees require for professional life (Cole, 2008). Competence views of teaching are challenged elsewhere as reductive (Stanley and Stronach, 2012) and counter to the view that teaching (Hobson et al., 2008) and learning to teach (Hodgson, 2014) are complex pedagogical activities (Alexander, 2008). Some argue the competence-view of learning to teach reduces teaching to a “craft-based occupation” (Beauchamp et al., 2015), epitomized in entirely school-based training initiatives such as School Direct (National College for Teaching and Leadership, 2014a) with trainee teachers learning “on the job” (Department for Education, 2010, p23). This study aims to contribute to this debate by examining trainees’ professional development within the historical development of the teaching profession. Whilst undertaking a Post-graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE), data on seven trainee teachers’ professional development were gathered throughout three school placements using active interviewing (Holstein and Gubrium, 1998), prior to within- and cross-case analysis (Creswell, 1998). Trainees’ hand-drawn trajectories of professional development show turning points (Vygotsky, 1978) which direct analysis towards key influences on a complex intellectual process of learning about practice (Dreier, 2002), refining indications from earlier analysis using a componential model of professional development (Evans, 2011). Using Vygotsky’s method of developmental study (Vygotsky, 1978), professional development is understood as a historical process whereby practice-related concepts “take shape” (ibid.) and trainees’ learning (about practice) supports their (professional) development. A relational agency interpretation (Edwards, 2007b) emphasises the influence on trainees’ professional development of working jointly with professional colleagues on problem-resolution, contingent on trainees’ learning through tool and sign use during practice (Wertsch et al., 1993). The findings of this small study suggest that trainee teachers’ professional development is only adequately conceptualised as a complex process led by the intellectual activity of learning about practice. The implications of reframing learning to teach as a social and relational practice implies a personalised approach to teacher education which, this study finds, may support the development of responsive practitioners.
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Bukky, Molly B. "Move to the Head of the Class: Teacher Agency in Constructing Student Roles in a Rural Elementary School." Ohio : Ohio University, 2008. http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/view.cgi?ohiou1212777927.
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Pull, Alexandra. "Strategies in use- Theory and practice : A study of teachers’ use of strategies in relation to the guidelines provided by the Swedish National Agency for Education in order to help teachers provide learning strategies for their students." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR), 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-53696.
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The aim with this essay is to examine how relevant the strategies compiled by the National Agency for Education are to English language teachers in Sweden. The main focus is on the area of strategies in general but in order to go further into depth in a specific area, there is a selective focus on vocabulary learning strategies as well. Moreover, this study has been facilitated with the help from teachers. The teachers answered a number of questions through a quantitative questionnaire. The teachers selected to participate in this study all teach at high school level. A total of eight teachers participated as informants. As the main theory, this study used the original classification framework designed by Chamot and O’Malley (1990). The conclusions drawn from the results is that teachers found all strategies listed by the Swedish National Agency for Education to have importance even though some were more important than others. Furthermore, with regards to the vocabulary learning, the conclusion has been drawn that teachers use several techniques in their teaching. However, the summary of the vocabulary strategies shows the importance to vary. Some informants answered that they use the strategies frequently although in quite a few cases they answered that they use them infrequently, which awakens the question of relevance in the daily teaching practice.
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Robson, James. "Teachers' professional identity in the digital world : a digital ethnography of Religious Education teachers' engagement in online social space." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:622a9d6c-0fbf-4eaa-9882-4189f5e99069.
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This thesis presents an ethnographic investigation of teachers’ peer-to-peer engagement in online social spaces, using the concept of teachers’ professional identity as a framework to shape and focus the study. Using Religious Education (RE) as a strong example of the wider phenomenon of teachers’ online engagement, three online social spaces (the Times Educational Supplement’s RE Forum, the National Association of Teachers of RE Facebook Page, and the Save RE Facebook Group) were investigated as case studies. A year was spent in these spaces with digital ethnographic research taking place simultaneously in each one. Data gathering primarily took the form of participant observations, in depth analysis of time-based sampled text (three 8-week samples from each space), online and offline narrative based interviews and, to a lesser extent, questionnaires, elite interviews and analysis of grey literature. The study finds that engagement in the online social spaces offered teachers opportunities to perform and construct their professional identities across a variety of topics ranging from local practical concerns to national political issues. In more practical topics the spaces could often be observed as acting as communities of practice in which professional learning took place and identities were constructed, with such online professional development influencing offline classroom practice. However, engaging across this spectrum of topics afforded users a broad conception of what it means to be a teacher, where professional identity was understood as going beyond classroom practice and integrating engagement with subject-wide, political and policy related issues at a national level. Such engagement provided many users with a feeling of belonging to a national community of peers, which, alongside political activism initiated in online interaction and meaning making debates concerning the future and identity of the subject, provided teachers with feelings of empowerment and a sense of ownership of their subject. However, the study found that teachers’ online engagement took place within structures embedded in the online social spaces that influenced and shaped engagement and the ways in which users’ professional identities were performed and constructed. These structures were linked with the design and technical affordances of the spaces, the agendas of the parent organisations that provided the spaces, and the discourses that dominated the spaces. These aspects of the spaces provided a structure that limited engagement, content and available online identity positions while additionally projecting ideal identity positions, distinctive in each space. These ideal identity positions had a constructive influence over many users who aspired to these ideals, often gaining confidence through expressing such socially validated ideals or feeling inadequate when failing to perform such ideal identity positions. Thus, this study finds a complex relationship between agency linked with active online identity performance and the constructive influence of embedded structures that contributed to the shaping of users’ engagement and their understandings of themselves as professionals and their subject.
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Ståhlberg, Jonathan. "Vocabulary Profiles of Authentic Texts used by Upper Secondary English teachers : A lexical analysis of authentic texts used in EFL classrooms." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR), 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-101171.
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The purpose of this essay is to investigate whether the vocabulary in authentic texts used by upper secondary English teachers teaching the course English 7 reach the expectations set by the Swedish National Agency for Education and the CEFR. This was done by analysing 26 texts contributed from five teachers with vocabulary profile web tools such as Text Inspector and Compleat Lexical Tutor. The analysis focused on word frequency and the CEFR levels.. The word frequency results showed that the vocabulary difficulty of teachers’ texts deviated slightly of being too simple or difficult for English 7 students, while the CEFR results showed that the vocabulary difficulty was too advanced for English 7 students. Although the results deviated from one another, the vocabulary difficulty of the teachers’ texts was often similar to each other. Furthermore, the results showed that the vocabulary difficulty often variated between text genres. The study, therefore, reasoned that the English 7 teachers enact their agency by selecting texts that they not only believe are suitable for their students but also will be suitable for students with different language proficiencies. The study concluded that English 7 teachers select texts of similar vocabulary difficulty and that English 7 students read authentic texts that contain advanced vocabulary that goes beyond the expectations of the CEFR. The study also suggested that further research should investigate how the CEFR should be interpreted and that similar studies should include a closer engagement with the teachers to obtain their views on how and why they select particular authentic texts.
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Albarazi, Raghad, and Besijana Ismajli. "Digitaliseringen av den svenska skolan : En implementeringsstudie om lärarnas förståelse, kunskap och vilja att implementera den nationella digitaliseringsstrategin 2017." Thesis, Högskolan i Halmstad, Akademin för lärande, humaniora och samhälle, 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-45517.
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This study focuses on teachers' implementation work based on the national digitization strategy 2017 in Swedish primary schools. The purpose of the study was to study teachers' limitations and possibilities in the implementation of the digital tools. The study is based on interview responses from five primary school teachers. We have used Lennart Lundquist's implementation theory to analyze our data. The results of the study showed that the teachers had the digital tools that were needed, but what was lacking was time and resources for a successful implementation process.
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Behari-Leak, Kasturi. "Conditions enabling or constraining the exercise of agency among new academics in higher education, conducive to the social inclusion of students." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1020295.
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This study, which is part of a National Research Foundation project on Social Inclusion in Higher Education (HE), focuses on the exercise of agency among new academics, conducive to the social inclusion of students. Transitioning from varied entry points into higher education, new academics face numerous challenges as they embed themselves in disciplinary and institutional contexts. Given the complexity and contested nature of the current higher education landscape, new academics are especially vulnerable. Using Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism as meta-theoretical framing and Margaret Archer’s social realist theory, with its methodological focus on analytical dualism and morphogenesis, this study offers a social realist account of how new academics engage with enabling and constraining conditions at institutional, faculty, departmental and classroom levels. Through an analysis of six individual narratives of mediation, this study explicates and exemplifies the range of agential choices exercised by new academics to mediate their contested spaces. A nuanced social and critical account of the material, ideational and agential conditions in HE shows that the courses of action taken by these new academics are driven through their concerns, commitments and projects in higher education. Yet, despite the university’s espousal of embracing change, the current induction and transition of new academics is inadequate to the task of transformation in higher education. Systemic conditions in HE, conducive to critical agency and social justice, are not enabling. Bhaskar’s Seven Scalar Being, used as an analytical frame and heuristic, guides the cross-case analysis of the six narratives across seven levels of ontology. The findings highlight that, despite difficult contextual influences, the positive exercise of agency is a marked feature of new participants in HE in this study. This has immediate implications for ways in which professional and academic development, and disciplinary and departmental programmes, could create and sustain conducive conditions for the professionalisation of new academics through more sensitised practices. Using alternative research methods such as photovoice to generate its data, this doctoral study proposes that new research methodologies, located in the third space, are needed now more than ever in HE sociological research, to recognise the researcher and the research participants as independent, autonomous and causally efficacious beings. To this end, this study includes a Chapter Zero, which captures the narrative of the doctoral scholar as researcher, who, shaped and influenced by established doctoral practices and traditions in the field, exercises her own doctoral agency in particular ways.
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Hogan, Sharon. "Being ethical : how process drama assists pre-service drama teachers to reflect on professional ethics." Queensland University of Technology, 2008. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/26436/.
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This research thesis focuses on the experiences of pre-service drama teachers and considers how process drama may assist them to reflect on key aspects of professional ethics such as mandatory codes or standards, principled moral reasoning, moral character, moral agency, and moral literacy. Research from higher education provides evidence that current pedagogical approaches used to prepare pre –professionals for practice in medicine, engineering, accountancy, business, psychology, counselling, nursing and education, rarely address the more holistic or affective dimensions of professional ethics such as moral character. Process drama, a form of educational drama, is a complex improvisational group experience that invites participants to create and assume roles, and select and manage symbols in order to create a fictional world exploring human experience. Many practitioners claim that process drama offers an aesthetic space to develop a deeper understanding of self and situations, expanding the participant’s consciousness and ways of knowing. However, little research has been conducted into the potential efficacy of process drama in professional ethics education for pre-professionals. This study utilizes practitioner research and case study to explore how process drama may contribute to the development of professional ethics education and pedagogy.
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Orsak, Rachelle Myler. "Uncovering Transformative Experiences: A Case Study of the Transformations Made by one Teacher in a Mathematics Professional Development Program." BYU ScholarsArchive, 2009. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/1781.
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Effective professional development is vital for improving mathematics teaching (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM], 2007), so studying effective professional development programs is important to the field of mathematics education. This case study presents findings on one teacher, Rebecca, and her experiences in a five-semester mathematics professional development for elementary teachers. The participants in this professional development engaged in collaborative problem solving of challenging mathematical tasks over extended periods of time. I used qualitative research methods based on grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2006) to analyze Rebecca's entrance and exit surveys, video data of Rebecca's individual interviews, and video data of Rebecca and her collaborative group problem solving in the professional development. Analysis shows that through the professional development program, Rebecca had transformative experiences which led to significant changes in her perspectives and practices. This case study contributes to the field of mathematics education a better understanding of the transformations teachers can experience through professional development as well as some particular conditions for professional development programs to be successful in offering teachers opportunities for transformative experiences.
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Zavros, Agli. "Teacher agency : a grounded topology of CARE /." [St. Lucia, Qld.], 2007. http://adt.library.uq.edu.au/public/adt-QU20070727.100709/index.html.
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Kettner, Julian Paul. "Teacher agency, collaborative communities, and school-based change." Thesis, McGill University, 2014. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=121128.
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The study presented in this dissertation examines the process of change in 39 elementary schools as they participated in the implementation of a board-wide balanced literacy initiative. The study focuses specifically on the perspectives of school personnel—teachers, principals, and literacy facilitators—after one year of implementation as staff engaged with the requirements of new pedagogical practices and increased collaboration. The study has several goals: (a) to better understand the nature and role of teacher agency in a change process; (b) to examine the role of professional collaboration in teacher learning and acceptance of change; (c) to add to our understanding of resistance to change processes; and (d) to examine what factors seem to be consistently present in schools that embrace change more easily. The study made use of complexity theory and structuration theory as a way of framing an understanding of the change—or the lack of change—that occurred within the complex social environments of schools. Findings suggest that teacher agency played a notable role in the change process where it occurred, but also demonstrated the need to consider teacher agency in more complex ways. Teacher resistance to the changes that were being implemented was less significant than was expected, but, like agency, showed a complexity that suggests attention to this area is a vital component of school-based change. The study also found that participants felt more positive about change in environments characterized by professional collaboration, and environments in which administrators were active learning partners with teachers.L'étude présentée dans cette thèse porte sur le processus de changement initié dans 39 écoles primaires alors qu'elles participaient à la mise en œuvre d'une initiative en littératie équilibrée lancée par la commission scolaire. L'étude se concentre spécifiquement sur le personnel de l'école – enseignant(e)s, directeur(trice)s et facilitateur(trice)s – à la suite de première année de mise en œuvre de l'initiative alors que le personnel impliqué fait face aux exigences de nouvelles pratiques pédagogiques et aux attentes d'une collaboration accrue. L'étude a plusieurs buts: (a) mieux comprendre la nature et le rôle de l'enseignant(e) en tant que vecteur de changement; (b) examiner le rôle de la collaboration professionnelle dans la formation continue et l'acceptation du changement; (c) parfaire nos connaissances quant à la résistance face aux processus de changement; (d) identifier les facteurs présents dans les écoles qui réagissent mieux au changement. L'étude s'est inspirée de la théorie de la complexité et de la théorie de la structuration pour guider la compréhension du changement – ou l'absence de changement – survenu à l'intérieur du complexe tissu social des écoles. Les résultats suggèrent que les enseignant(e)s, en tant que vecteurs de changement, ont joué un rôle notable là où des transformations se sont produites, mais cela soulignent aussi le besoin de considérer ce rôle de façon plus détaillée. La résistance manifestée par les enseignant(e)s face aux changements mis de l'avant a été moins importante qu'escompté, mais au même titre que le concept de vecteur de changement, elle s'est avérée être un élément essentiel dans le processus de changement en milieu scolaire. L'étude a aussi démontré que les participant(e)s réagissaient de façon plus positive face au changement dans des milieux où la collaboration professionnelle était présente et où les administrateur(trice)s participaient au processus d'apprentissage, aux côtés de leur enseignant(e)s.
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Parker, Gemma Louise. "Teacher agency : curriculum development in English primary academies." Thesis, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/3975.
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The genesis of this study was the confluence of the Academies Act (2010), which legislated academy status and disapplied the statutory nature of the National Curriculum (DfE, 2013), and the finding that primary schools’ curriculum capacity was a cause for concern (Alexander, 2010). This concurrence seemed to make apparent a serious gap between intentions of teacher autonomy conveyed through policy (DfE, 2010; DfE, 2016a) and the capacity for teacher agency. This was compounded by a context of teachers’ professional environments characterised by long-standing statutory (Education Act, 1988) and non-statutory curriculum guidance (DfEE, 1998; DfEE, 1999) and stringent accountability measures (Hammersley-Fletcher and Strain, 2011; Ball, 2003; Ball, 2016). My own professional experience of primary schools and university initial teacher education departments reinforced this concern, which was heightened by its context of curriculum as the pre-eminent element of education (Young, 2014). The focus of the study is the achievement of teacher agency, regarding curriculum development specifically. It draws upon the ecological approach to teacher agency (Priestley, Biesta and Robinson, 2013) in order to explore the causal influence of the interplay of personal capacity and ecological conditions. Twenty-two primary academy teachers, across six primary academies, participated. A critical realist approach governs the study, thus the search for causal mechanisms considers structures at the real ontological level and the manner in which they are actualised by conditions. The methodology aligns with this philosophical paradigm and through a case study design, a deep understanding of participants’ realities is facilitated. This interpretivist, qualitative approach means theorised trends are strongly rooted in the data. Ultimately, the study’s key finding is that teachers’ personal capacity is the defining factor for their achievement of agency due to the way in which it affects their perception of their working environment. The study also posits that it is key professional learning experiences which are a principal influence upon teachers’ personal capacity to achieve agency. This develops the existing ecological approach to teacher agency (Priestley, Biesta and Robinson, 2013) by adding detail regarding the nature and impact of important past experiences. Recommendations regarding teachers’ professional learning experiences are made.