Mechanisms generating societal change inevitably include agents constantly manoeuvring between certain degrees of freedom and ‘stringency of constraints’ being either transformative or ‘trapped in the replication’ of their schemes of perception and action (Archer, 2013). The education system, like all institutions in the transition period, deal with controversially intended actors – some who tend to ‘elaborate and change systems’ (Archer, 2013, 3), others who persevere in preventing any change being seen as ‘displacement’ (Archer, 2013). The most influential agents in transition in education systems – teachers – have been studied extensively in recent decades. Their professional agency as an act, a mechanism or a disposition (Hodkinson & Hodkinson, 2004; Vähäsantanen et al., 2017; Evans, 2007) could be placed fairly unambiguously in one of the discourses about how teachers reframe their habitual practices, reconstruct contingent meanings, reconfigure professional identities and through the changed ‘self’ change institutional landscapes.

However, institutions comprise various levels, including the ‘cultural-cognitive’ dimension (Scott, 2013) or ‘webs of beliefs’ (Bevir & Rhodes, 2006) described by neo-institutionalists as cognitive templates that define our practices and are the most influential in the processes of institutional reproduction and maintenance. It is worth noting that teachers’ ‘agentic orientations’, which may be described as choosing ‘alternative paths of action’ in any given situation (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, 1007) are not only able to reconstruct or reproduce institutional contexts but are themselves equally socially constructed (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) by the ‘webs of beliefs’ (Bevir & Rhodes, 2006) within their society. The institutional context of post-Soviet Estonia has shown unambiguously how being ‘mediated ideationally’ institutional mechanisms may reproduce a ‘vicious circle’ (see also Loogma et al., 2019) in which the agency of teachers may not only be ‘path-shaping’ but more crucially ‘path-dependent’ (Bevir & Rhodes, 2006). Having undergone drastic structural reforms after 1991, the education system of the newly-independent Estonia headed towards the de-ideologization after the Soviet regime (Loogma et al., 2019), humanisation and re-creation of a national school, cleft into two contradictory streams representing quite different ‘frameworks of meanings’ (Scott, 2013): the ethnic majority were intent on the grassroots transformation of institutions, while members of the largest minority group in Estonia (in this study, schools with Russian as their instructional language – hereinafter, Russian schools) by inertia resisted it. Consequently, the Estonian school, which had historically been represented by two drastically opposite ideologies, has become completely diverged into two contextually, culturally and conceptually different parallel education systems (Lauristin and Heidmets, 2002). The aim of this study was to understand the institutional context and its mechanisms, including its socially mediated ‘cultural-cognitive’ filters (Scott, 2013) through which teachers in Russian schools may exercise agency as a potential tool for inertia or transformation.

Facets structuring the professional agency of teachers on different levels were extensively explored in relation to ‘work-related learning’ (Vähäsantanen et al., 2017; Biesta & Tedder, 2007) ‘teacher practices, identity and motivation’ (Vähäsantanen et al., 2008), emphasizing the influence of structural resources and constraints on teachers’ emotions and freedom to ‘act differently’ in both a creative and rebellious way (Priestley et al., 2015; Hökkä et al., 2017). The agency of teachers in post-Soviet Estonia has been extensively explored in studies related to teacher professionalism and professional well-being not directly comprising the topic of agency (Loogma, 2014). Although the mentioned rich body of research does not address the agency of minority teachers. The study contributes to the discussion on how different institutional contexts may support or be conducive of the professional agency of teachers as a means of ‘transition behaviour’ (Evans, 2007) in choosing their life strategies

To explore and give meaning to the context in which teachers in Russian schools choose agentic orientations, the author took experts’ opinions as a vantage point. The initial list of respondents included stakeholders from non-profit organisations, government bodies and politics; scholars from education, sociology, and language policy; and school leaders from different regions of Estonia. Snowball sampling was applied as a sampling strategy. Ultimately, 14 expert interviews with representatives from the mentioned fields were conducted. School heads were interviewed in the last round and the resulting themes made it possible to assume that data collection had reached ‘saturation point’ (Charmaz, 2006). As the interviews were held mostly during the COVID pandemic – 11 out of 14 were conducted via Skype or Zoom at the convenience of the experts. The interviews were held in English or Russian depending on the experts’ own preferences. Each interview lasted from 25 to 80 minutes and was recorded on a voice recorder or a Macintosh hard disk. Not being guided by some pre-existing theoretical framework, the author first applied an inductively-led text analysis with open coding and no predefined categories. Each interview text was (1) transcribed and repeatedly read in search of patterns; (2) this resulted in initial codes, which seemed the most relevant for the aim of the study; (3) codes were put into broad categories and each interview resulted in 6–9 categories; (4) all categories were analysed, compared and distributed into broad final themes dedicated to the experts views on a particular angle of the context. In addition, following the guidelines from Charmaz (2006) for a ‘delayed literature review’ while interpreting the results, the author conducted a comprehensive review of the literature on ‘agency-structure’ (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998) as it applies to different contexts of teachers’ work-related practices (Hökkä et al., 2017; Biesta et al., 2017, among many others). This created broad themes labelled nominally as ‘facets of context’. Finally, the empirical data earlier inductively organised into five themes was distributed among these broad theoretical ‘facets’ emerging from the literature review. The dimensions of the ‘temporal-relational context’ (see also Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Biesta & Tedder, 2007) structuring the agentic orientations of teachers in Russian schools in Estonia is represented through four broad synthesized themes: (1) ‘Institutional landscape’ (2) ‘Individual resources and learning opportunities’ (3) ‘Collective identity and work-related meso-level’ (4) ‘Webs of beliefs and future horizon’.

The multidimensional context for the agency of minority teachers as evidenced through expert interpretations emerged as a heterogeneous space encapsulating temporal processes, such as various macrosocial, educational and language policy reforms, whereby teachers directed their ‘social-biographical journeys’ (Evans, 2017, 66). This space was largely described as demanding and highly constraining, where two communities separated by language are striving to find common ground on the one hand, and balance their tensions on the other. Teachers in Russian schools are portrayed as biographically embedded in their ‘Soviet past’ composing a distal but meaningful part of their identity, which consistently shapes their ‘internal resources’, such as teaching methods and approaches. Despite 30 years having passed since fundamental societal transformations in Estonia were set in motion and institutional frameworks of meanings having undergone consequential change, the position of minority teachers is still perceived as quite ‘liminal’, ‘betwixt and between’ (see also Gennep, 1960), while their previous fixed role, status, or identity has been lost and the acquisition of new roles and statuses has not occurred. At the ‘resources’ end of the continuum for the professional agency of minority teachers, there are mostly internal factors associated with the capability to ‘read the situation’ (Evans, 2017) and act through the given environment in a resourceful way. From the experts’ narratives, we can draw evidence that not only are the minority teachers seen as constantly reproducing their distinct ‘cultural schemas’, which irrevocably leave them bounded in a social limbo, but it is through ‘cultural-cognitive’ (Scott, 2013) frames, as an element of the institutions through which the teachers as professionals may be agentic, that they are constrained. As a result, on the one hand, teachers as agents may resist transformation, while on the other hand, the cultural-cognitive level may not provide for the psychologically comfortable occurrence of it.

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