Objective

University teaching demands lecturers to continuously develop their teaching practices, and therefore university lecturers need to continually innovate and enrich their curricula and develop new teaching methods. To do so, they need a sense of professional agency. This professional agency means that university lecturers feel that they can influence work, develop work practices, and negotiate their professional identity in their work. The objective of the current study is to contribute to insights into university lectuers’ professional agency. Therefore, the research question is: Which characteristics of teacher agency do lecturers identify in the academic teaching practice?

Theoretical framework

In a generic study among different professional fields, Vähäsantanen et al. (2019) infer that the broad concept of professional agency consists of three dimensions: Influencing at work, Developing work practices, and Negotiating professional identity. Although it remains to be seen to what extent the broad concept of professional agency is comparable to the focused concept of teacher agency, we assume that the three broad dimensions can also be recognized in the university teaching profession.

Influencing at Work

‘Influencing at work’ consist of two overlapping subdimensions: ‘decision making at work’ and ‘being heard at work’. ‘Decision making at work’ refers to how decision making is conducted, how work is conducted, how it is regulated, how it is resourced, and how it is reformatted. By making decisions at work, professionals are able to influence their work preferably from their own professional beliefs. In the second subdimension, ‘being heard at work’, agency involves putting forward ideas that are truly heard and acknowledged. Such actions may include expressing opinions and taking positions on both individual and shared work practices. The dimension ‘influencing at work’ thus includes being able to make decisions to ensure that one’s own work and one’s own opinion is considered in the workplace.

Developing Work Practices

The dimension ‘developing work practices’ consists of two overlapping subdimensions: ‘participation in shared work practices’ and ‘transforming work practices’. ‘Participation in shared work practices’ can take the form of commenting and expressing one’s views in the working community or of collaborating and participating in the organisation’s development actions. ‘Transforming work practices’ might refer, for example, to actions that question and problematize the status quo at work, or to, more proactively, the generation of new ideas and practical suggestions for changing the way people work. The dimension ‘developing work practices’ thus includes trying out new ideas at work and making suggestions to improve collective work practices.

Negotiating Professional Identity

‘Negotiating professional identity’ consist of two overlapping subdimensions: again ‘negotiating professional identity’ and ‘constructing a professional career’. Professionals with a sense of professional agency believe that their choices are driven by their goals and interests and have control over their choices. As working conditions change, there is a special need to re-evaluate professional identities in light of altered tasks. Professionals are also expected to show agency by acting on their career-related decisions and thus shaping their own career paths. The dimension ‘negotiating professional identity’ therefore includes the ability to act according to one’s own values and to advance one’s career.

Teacher Agency in the University Context

The unique feature of academic work practice is that employees fulfil multiple roles, namely conducting research, teaching, and conceivably also working in a clinical situation or practice context. In addition, they often have to deal with administration or management roles. These multiple roles have implications for the interpretation of the three dimensions of professional agency, namely that different academic tasks may be strongly intertwined or may influence each other (e.g., in terms of time and task preference).

Methods To gain insight into the ways in which university lecturers influence their work, develop their work practices and negotiate their professional identity, lecturers were interviewed Participants of the study This paper focuses on a group of lecturers who have stipulated teaching duties in their employment contracts next to their research including assistant professors, associate professors, and to full professors. Interviews were conducted with 35 lecturers (15 female, 20 male) from seven departments of Leiden University, the Netherlands (see Table 1). The criteria for participation were lecturers with a PhD and working as a researcher and teacher at this university. Two doctoral students at the end of their doctoral studies with explicitly defined teaching tasks in their employment contracts also participated. Data collection Each interview took place online, lasted 40-60 minutes, and was recorded with the academic’s permission. Ethical approval was given by the faculty’s ethical review committee. Open-ended questions were asked in order to extract as much information as possible from the interviews, such as "How does your teaching come about?" and "Can you direct your teaching practice?". If the interviewee did not give a detailed account, follow-up questions were asked. Data analysis As a theoretical basis for teacher agency is missing, this study applied an exploratory and data driven approach. The principal investigator transcribed the interviews and then analysed them in Atlas.ti in collaboration with the other authors. In the coding process, we started with open coding of the first four transcripts to get an overview of content of the data. Each event (i.e. question asked by the interviewer until the end of the interviewee's response, including any follow-up questions) was summarised as a label. Some labels could be merged into new codes and these codes were used again for the first four transcripts. Once the codes fitted the data, they were tested on a new transcript and adjusted.

Conclusions Lecturers are supposed to develop to possess the ability to critically examine the curriculum and suggest modifications. The results show that the lecturers in this study feel they have influence in their individual teaching practice. They could make decisions regarding their own teaching, more than on departmental level. Agency is experienced when lecturers believe they can bring about change in the university, the classroom, and the institution. Indeed, the feeling of being able to bring about change requires wanting to change work practices and having influence to make it happen. Lecturers mention that in order to develop education and thus bring about change, collaboration with colleagues is essential. However, they mention that constructive collaboration hardly ever takes place because of a lack of time and attention to the development of teaching. For universities to improve lecturers’ professional agency, rethinking the organization is necessary to help lecturers find time to meet regularly and converse about teaching and learning. Collaboration with colleagues, according to the lecturers, benefits the improvement of teaching and professional learning processes. Additionally, lecturers should be provided with choices in their professional learning, the people they work with, and the areas they focus on. Communities enabling lecturers to solve practice issues and share responsibilities should be established. The paper focused on lecturers’ professional agency and showed the characteristics that characterize their sense of agency in teaching practice. The study contributes to our understanding of professional agency. Now that we better understand how the three dimensions of professional agency are expressed in university teaching practice, this concept can be applied in this context. These results add to the growing body of research indicating that it is becoming possible to recognize and thus influence the development of teacher agency.

Akkerman, S. F., & Bakker, A. (2011). Boundary crossing and boundary objects. Review of educational research, 81(2), 132-169. Alasoini, T. (2011). Workplace development as part of broad-based innovation policy: Exploiting and exploring three types of knowledge. Nordic journal of working life studies, 1(1), 23-43. Altbach, P. G. (2001). Academic freedom: International realities and challenges. Higher education, 41(1), 205-219. Annala, J., Lindén, J., Mäkinen, M., & Henriksson, J. (2021). Understanding academic agency in curriculum change in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 1-18. Biesta, G., Priestley, M., & Robinson, S. (2015). The role of beliefs in teacher agency. Teachers and teaching, 21(6), 624-640.Durrant, J. (2019). Professional development, identity, and agency. Teacher Agency, Professional Development and School Improvement, 41-61. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315106434-4 Edwards, A. (2015). Recognising and realising teachers’ professional agency. Teachers and Teaching, 21(6), 779-784. Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency?. American journal of sociology, 103(4), 962-1023.Eteläpelto, A., Vähäsantanen, K., Hökkä, P., & Paloniemi, S. (2013). What is agency? Conceptualizing professional agency at work. Educational research review, 10, 45-65.Goller, M., & Harteis, C. (2017). Human agency at work: Towards a clarification and operationalisation of the concept. In Agency at work (pp. 85-103). Springer, Cham. Goller, M., & Paloniemi, S. (2017). Agency at work. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Harteis, C., & Goller, M. (2014). New skills for new jobs: Work agency as a necessary condition for successful lifelong learningKerosuo, H. (2017). Transformative agency and the development of knot working in building design. In Agency at Work (pp. 331-349). Springer, Cham. Ketelaar, E., Beijaard, D., Boshuizen, H. P., & Den Brok, P. J. (2012). Teachers’ positioning towards an educational innovation in the light of ownership, sense-making and agency. Teaching and teacher education, 28(2), 273-282. Lipponen, L., & Kumpulainen, K. (2011). Acting as accountable authors: Creating interactional spaces for agency work in teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 27(5), 812–819. Toom, A., Pyhältö, K., & Rust, F. O. C. (2015). Teachers’ professional agency in contradictory times. Teachers and Teaching, 21(6), 615-623.Vähäsantanen, K., Paloniemi, S., Räikkönen, E., & Hökkä, P. (2020). Professional agency in a university context: Academic freedom and fetters. Teaching and Teacher Education, 89, 103000. Vähäsantanen, K., Räikkönen, E., Paloniemi, S., Hökkä, P., & Eteläpelto, A. (2019). A novel instrument to measure the multidimensional structure of professional agency. Vocations and Learning, 12(2), 267-295.