A for-profit education industry has emerged in Sweden during the last decades, enabled by reform decisions and policies entailing extensive marketisation and privatization in Swedish compulsory and upper secondary education. A trend is also that some of the largest Swedish free school companies have started to export their services abroad (Rönnberg et al., 2022). This paper focuses on one of these companies; LearnyComp (pseudonym) operating in India.  Despite there being a global growing market for private ‘international’ primary and secondary education - and in certain geographic locations in particular (Gibson and Bailey, 2022; Gorur and Arnold, 2022; Bunnell, 2019), we still have limited knowledge on how the recent expansions and commercially-driven developments affect this sector and with what consequences (c.f. Parreira Do Amaral et al., 2019; Yemini, et al., 2022).  In crossing borders, education companies enter different terrains that define and regulate schooling in very national terms. They adapt to regulatory frames around curricula, assessment, ways of organizing schooling, and traditional practices hence, operating in ‘third spaces’ they differentiate their educational offer (Hartmann, 2021, p.368). In this process, when international companies bring their own culture, ideas about teaching, and products in the form of curricular and pedagogical approaches, they disrupt in potentially significant ways the local practices of schooling and local teachers’ work (c.f. Friend, Mills and Lingard, 2022; Poole, 2022; Winchip, 2022).

Drawing on ideas of teacher agency as an active dimension of professional practice, this paper aims to analyse the capacity of the Indian teachers who work in LearnyComp to shape their practice, in their interactions with the school environment as constructed by principals, company representatives, and wider school discourses. We address the following research questions: 1) What are the conceptions of educational purpose that teachers and principals promote as important in their work and what discourses do they use around teaching, learning and pupils? 2) What perceptions do the teachers and principals have of the changes that they, as professionals, need to perform to adapt to the Swedish company ‘philosophy’? 3) What are the company discourses articulated by company representatives and company documentations, around teaching, learning and teachers, and how do they frame and shape the teachers’ work and teachers’ agency?  

We draw on theoretical work that defines the dimensions of agency as relevant to teachers and their work environment (Biesta, Priestley & Robinson, 2015) and frames agency through an ecological (Biesta & Tedder, 2006) and relational approach (Pantić, 2017). Grounding agency within concrete possibilities for action, this approach allows for a nuanced analysis of teachers’ discourses around their practices, their capacity for constructing and changing practice, the beliefs and values that underpin them. The extent to which teachers are capable to autonomously design their practice, to draw on their expertise and judgement, and “to make active use of their professional space” reveals their agentic capacity and the range of their professional action (Oolbekkink-Marchand et al., 2017, p.37) and these aspects are further elaborated analytically in the paper.

The study is part of the research project Going Global (VR 2018-04897; Rönnberg, 2018) and involved extensive fieldwork at three LearnyComp schools in India, preceded by preparatory work before the on-site fieldwork as well as interviews with six high-level LearnyComp representatives in Sweden and in India. These preparations enabled an ethically-sensitive, informed access and consent for the on-site research in India. Each of the three schools was visited for two days, during which formal interviews were conducted with school principals (one former and the three active ones), and 11 teachers across the sites. To have a comprehensive overview of the schools, documents from the parent company in Sweden, and the Indian schools, from schools’ online presentations and brochures, were also collected and included in the study. Throughout, the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet, 2017) ethical guidelines were carefully followed. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed, analysed though a combination of inductive and deductive processes, framed by the ecological and relational perspectives on teachers’ practice and agency, and our focus on the interaction between teachers and contexts. In this case, ‘context’ refers to the company discourses manifested in documentations, interviews with principals and company representatives. Through a thematic coding of all interview material (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005), we analysed the emerged categories from the perspective of the narratives the participants employ to describe work practices and their environment, and we then examined those against the wider discourses used in the schools’ documentation.

The analysis identified some tensions in the ways in which their agency is defined and constrained in the context of international education where various commercial actors offer alternative pedagogies. The teachers employed in the schools of our sample are Indian, with a teacher education and/or teaching experience in the Indian school system. The interviewees describe a working environment regulated by the LearnyComp educational program and the associated the Learning Platform. As a result, not only the overall goals, but also the more detailed routine objectives of teaching are largely prescribed in advance, limiting agency. Given the teachers’ enthusiastic adoption of the LearnyComp ‘philosophy’, our data suggests that LearnyComp, as a company, has been very effective in breaking what Emirmayer & Mische (1998) identify as a continuing temporal dimension of agentic action where the past informs present educational engagement in various ways. The teachers are constructed, and construct themselves, largely as receivers of knowledge and expertise, and tend to refrain from their past histories of professional experience, urged not slip back to their old-fashioned professional practices; “we have to unlearn a lot to learn this”, as one teacher said - and embrace the given pedagogy and futuristic international discourses, limiting and restricting teacher agency in particular ways. We finish by arguing that the ways in which international education companies downplays situated and local contexts raise important questions of educational purpose and values.

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