Teacher Agency in Curriculum Making: Agents of Change and Spaces for Manoeuvre
By Mark Priestley, R. Edwards, A. Priestley, Kate Miller. 2012
620 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract In the wake of new forms of curricular policy in many parts of the world, teachers are increasingly required to act as agents of change. And yet, teacher agency is under‐theorised and often misconstrued in the educational change literature, wherein agency and change are seen as synonymous and positive. This article addresses the issue of teacher agency in the context of an empirical study of curriculum making in schooling. Drawing upon the existing literature, we outline an ecological view of agency. These insights frame the analysis of a set of empirical data, derived from a research project about curriculum making in a school and further education college in Scotland. Based upon the evidence, we argue that the extent to which teachers are able to achieve agency varies from context to context based upon certain environmental conditions of possibility and constraint, and that an important factor in this lies in the beliefs, values and attributes that teachers mobilise in relation to particular situations.
Subfields: Education, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9b4b6941d41468f5f928a139a69e96cd9cd3224
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Citations in the corpus
- Language and literacy (2009, neutral): “In this section, we argue that not only should older adults be included in future literacy policymaking, but that to do so meaningfully means reimagining how literacy is defined.”
- Teacher Agency : What Is It and Why Does It Matter? (2015, positive): “For instance, recent research (Priestley et al., 2012) suggests that teachers with significant experience of working in other professions might have a wider repertoire for manoeuvre when faced with the challenges and ambiguities of the teacher’s day to day work.”