Constructing teacher agency in response to the constraints of education policy (original) (raw)
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Curriculum Journal, 2012
Drawing on agency literature, this paper demonstrates how teachers' professional agency emerged when seemingly conflicting strategies were imposed on them in policy reform. Policy discourse is often linked to performance and accountability measures, which teachers respond to in a number of ways. Some education researchers identify tensions caused by such strategies; others warn that if outcomes are defined by mechanical techniques that are practised and imposed rather than constructed and negotiated then there is a danger that teachers will be reshaped as technicians. A number of debates discuss de-professionalism, the erosion of status and new definitions of the role of the teacher. This ethnographic study examines how the implementation of policy requirements for writing student reports, stipulated by two levels of government, emerged through the practices of the teachers in an Australian non-government school. The analysis of the data is located within the policy in/as practice literature. The evidence illustrates that, despite the strategies of performance, accountability and control mechanisms in policy text, the presence of strong collegial relationships enabled the teachers to construct their professional agency by adaptation and adoption of policy requirements to fit some practices and reshape others.
Politics, policy and teacher agency
Exploring Education and Childhood, 2015
This chapter looks at a case of teacher decision-making and how it is influenced by politics and policy. The case is embedded in early literacy teaching and contrasts policy approaches that empower the teacher to make strong links between theory and practice, and those which disempower the teacher, creating a less coherent approach to teaching negatively influenced by prevailing policy decisions. This chapter argues for teacher autonomy in raising standards of attainment. It suggests that professional autonomy is underpinned by both effective initial teacher preparation and continuing professional learning that include explicit discussion of interactions between student 1 , syllabus, curriculum and policy.
Policy actors: doing policy work in schools
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2011
This paper considers the 'policy work' of teacher actors in schools. It focuses on the 'problem of meaning' and offers a typology of roles and positions through which teachers engage with policy and with which policies get 'enacted'. It argues that 'policy work' is made up of a set of complex and differentiated activities which involve both creative and disciplinary relations between teachers and are infused with power. This is the paradox of enactment. The teachers and other adults here are not naïve actors, they are creative and sophisticated and they manage, but they are also tired and overloaded much of the time. They are engaged, coping with the meaningful and the meaningless, often self-mobilised around patterns of focus and neglect and torn between discomfort and pragmatism, but most are also very firmly embedded in the prevailing policies discourses.
2008
This thesis set out to examine how teachers understand, experience and respond to mandated curriculum reforms in English in years 11 and 12 at a Senior High School in Western Australia over the period 2004 – 2005. The time period is significant as it is a halfway point between the commencement of the new policy driving reform of senior secondary education and the partial settlement of the policy and curriculum reform. The research is conceptualised using labour process theory as a means of analysing how teachers are being separated from their intellectual work throughout this curriculum reform process. The methodology chosen to inform this research is a dual approach using critical ethnography of lived individual experiences and critical policy ethnography to analyse the changing landscape of education policy in Australia. This dual approach offers a system level of understanding of mandated curriculum reform with an emphasis on the individual experience of expert teachers implement...
Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 2018
It is widely acknowledged that there is systemic pressure on teachers to enact assessment practices that raise student achievement. In this article assessment related discourses that influence teacher and student classroom practices are examined in relation to initial teacher education. In Australia, preservice teachers (PSTs) are required to demonstrate assessment capability, promote student agency and monitor their practice impact on student learning whilst working in schooling ecologies that are marked by high stakes accountability measures. Processes that bridge university and inschool PST teacher preparation are an important consideration in developing assessment capability. It is argued that there are tensions in the current policy environment associated with distributed classroom power relations that are emblematic of student agency in practice. The socially constituted nature of ecological agency that underpins generative assessment for learning practices is an important consideration for judgement about initial teacher assessment capability and associated graduate impact on student learning.
12 The Teacher and the Curriculum: Exploring Teacher Agency
The SAGE Handbook of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment: Two Volume Set
A key debate in the curriculum field has centred on the extent to which teachers should or could achieve agency over the curriculum they enact. Threats to teacher agency have come from top-down control of curricula, either through input regulation (prescription of content, methods and/or teaching materials) or output regulation (steering through outcomes). Drawing upon an ecological model to explore the concept of teacher agency, this chapter will illustrate through empirical research conducted in Scotland and Cyprus, how it manifests in various ways through teachers' work. The chapter concludes with a discussion of why it is important to understand and take into account teacher agency when formulating and developing curriculum policy.
Understanding Teacher Agency and Organizational Response to Reform Mandates
The New Educator, 2020
This paper reports findings from a study of two beginning English teachers and the relationship between their sense of agency and their respective contexts. The qualitative study followed two teachers through their first year of teaching. How the perception of agency and the role of being a teacher evolved was determined to be related to the organizational behavior and expectations that both teachers experienced in their respective contexts. This study suggests that organizational context matters in the continuing development and maintenance of agency of beginning teachers and the type of agency that teachers might develop is influenced by organizational expectations. Understanding the agency of beginning teachers is a complex undertaking that must account for various contextual nuances and circumstances. This challenge is compounded in the current school accountability era, as beginning teachers may find it difficult to enact their vision of teaching when schools are charged with sanctioning policies that are designed to standardize teaching and learning (Scales, 2013). This is particularly true of beginning teachers of English language arts, as standardized assessments often test practices associated with the latter subject, and "the instruction encouraged by high-stakes tests contradict decades of research on teaching of writing and literature" (Au & Gourd, 2013, p. 17). Olsen and Sexton (2009) maintain that a rigid response to external accountability mandates on the part of school organizations results in "a tightening of educational procedures, outcomes, and teaching models in schools and districts" (p. 25). Having examined how teachers construct an understanding of what it means to be a professional, Buchanan (2015) argues that teachers' responses to accountability mandates are mediated by the context in which they work and their past experiences in the classroom. This study sought to examine contextual factors that support and constrain beginning teachers' agency, which is understood as the ability of teachers to act in ways that shape their work and its conditions (Biesta, Priestly, & Robinson, 2015). The study followed two first year teachers as they worked to enact their CONTACT Ed Bengtson
Making policy in the classroom
Research in Comparative and International Education
The concept of street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky 1980; 2010) examines the form and extent discretion takes in teachers' and other public policy enactors' work and how they negotiate their way through sometimes contradictory policy imperatives. It provides a framework for straddling top-down and bottom-up perspectives on policy making. In this article I argue that comparative education research should take advantage of the analytical framework this perspective offers. It requires, firstly, mapping out policies resulting in the characteristics of teachers' discretion in a particular national or local context and, secondly, to observe how teachers make use of this discretionary space in their daily work. Lipsky has shown strategies employed by street-level bureaucrats to alleviate workload pressures and how they make policy in this way. Applying street-level bureaucracy in comparative education research illuminates why straight forward policy transfer is problematic and how it can be employed to explore practices around inclusion and exclusion.
Thinking Differently About the Effects of Policy upon Teacher Educators in the University
This paper is inspired by and constructed around a number of fundamental questions that are asked by the author, both of himself and of practitioner colleagues in the field of teacher education within the higher education sector in the United Kingdom. Questions such as: 'What is my role as a teacher?', 'In what ways are the subjectivities of teacher constructed?', 'How might these subjectivities shift in the light of recent policy changes?' frequently appear in the narratives of teacher educators within the sector. Their voices speak of attempting to preserve autonomous teaching and research practices within the context of a continually rising tide of government policy initiatives and implementations.
The Teacher and the Curriculum: Exploring Teacher Agency
The SAGE Handbook of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment: Two Volume Set
A key debate in the curriculum field has centred on the extent to which teachers should or could achieve agency over the curriculum they enact. Threats to teacher agency have come from top-down control of curricula, either through input regulation (prescription of content, methods and/or teaching materials) or output regulation (steering through outcomes). Drawing upon an ecological model to explore the concept of teacher agency, this chapter will illustrate through empirical research conducted in Scotland and Cyprus, how it manifests in various ways through teachers' work. The chapter concludes with a discussion of why it is important to understand and take into account teacher agency when formulating and developing curriculum policy.