Search results for "teacher agency"
showing 6 items of 6 documents
Teacher Agency and Futures Thinking
2022
Problems encountered in top-down school reforms have repeatedly highlighted the significance of teachers’ agency in educational change. At the same time, temporality has been identified as a key element in teachers’ agency, with teachers’ beliefs about the future and experiences of the past shaping their agentic orientations. However, research on teachers’ future orientations is typically limited to short-term trajectories, as opposed to long-term visions of education. To address this, we draw on a futures studies perspective to give more explicit attention to teachers’ long-term visions of their work. We argue that the method of future narratives, already well…
Repositioning teachers as assessors : Compromised aspirations and contested agency
2021
The global trend to emphasise assessment for learning brings up the issue of repositioning teachers in assessment. The contemporary curricular policy reforms encourage teachers to take an agentic role in assessment, but multiple dimensions of the environment affect its realisation. Drawing on an ecological approach to teacher agency, this empirical study investigated how Korean secondary English teachers (KSETs) perceive and enact their own teacher agency in assessment within the ecosystem of Korean education. The dataset for the study comprises semi-structured interviews with 15 KSETs. The interview questions involved the main themes such as personal experiences over the life course regard…
CLIL Challenges : Secondary School CLIL Teachers’ Voices and Experienced Agency in Three European Contexts
2020
This qualitative interview study focuses on CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) teacher agency in three European contexts, Austria, Finland and Andalusia, Spain. The aim of the study is to understand how individual CLIL teachers experience their agency when encountering challenges in their work and to demonstrate the multifaceted quality of their agency. The study employs the Listening Guide method (Gilligan, 2015) to listen to the voices of three secondary school subject teachers from three diverse contexts. The analysis shows that CLIL challenges both empowered and disempowered the teachers depending on how meaningful they found their work and what their possibilities to act w…
Two languages in the air : a cross-cultural comparison of preschool teachers’ reflections on their flexible bilingual practices
2016
Bilingual preschool education is under researched compared with bilingual school education. There is also a lack of research on bilingual preschool teachers’ agency and how they negotiate between two languages in the classroom. We examined the language practices of five bilingual preschool teachers working within three different socio-linguistic settings, in Finland (Finnish–Swedish and Russian–Finnish contexts) and Israel (an Arabic–Hebrew context) and interviewed the teachers about their use of languages in the classroom. We found that in each context the teachers reported modifications to an initial bilingual education model over time: from a strict separation of languages, to flexible b…
Teacher agency within the Finnish CLIL context : tensions and resources
2017
Recent discussion indicates that the initial enthusiasm of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) teachers can be undermined by the demands of foreign-language mediated education. However, there is a lack of research on the resources and tensions that respectively support or limit the professional agency of CLIL teachers. By means of semi-structured interviews with fourteen participants, this study seeks to better understand how teacher agency is experienced by CLIL teachers working in Finnish primary schools. To examine tensions and resources in CLIL teachers’ work lives, a holistic and dynamic theoretical conceptualization of teacher agency is suggested, paying particular attenti…
Two languages in the air: a cross-cultural comparison of preschool teachers’ reflections on their flexible bilingual practices
2020
This book article was originally published as a special issue of International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. doi:10.1080/13670050.2016.1184615 Bilingual preschool education is under researched compared with bilingual school education. There is also a lack of research on bilingual preschool teachers’ agency and how they negotiate between two languages in the classroom. We examined the language practices of five bilingual preschool teachers working within three different socio-linguistic settings, in Finland (Finnish-Swedish and Russian-Finnish contexts), and Israel (an Arabic-Hebrew context) and interviewed the teachers about their use of languages in the classroom. We fou…