Teachers' daily work with chemistry teaching involves a range of everyday decisions about the content and how to organize the teaching. This study is a pilot study of professional agency in teachers' work with teaching middle school chemistry using curriculum units and resources from Naturvetenskap och teknik för alla (NTA) [in English Science and Technology for All]. TheNTA curriculum resources can be described as a Swedish equivalent to the US program “Science and Technology for Children” (STC). The NTA resource provides a basis for elementary school science teaching in many Swedish schools and is intended to support science teaching and continuous professional development of science teachers including those with a limited science education background. Previous research has pointed to that NTA has a positive effect on student achievements on national tests concerning the aspect of planning and conducting investigations compared to teachers who do not use NTA in their teaching (Mellander & Svärdh, 2015). Thus, the NTA resources appear to have an impact on chemistry education and the aims achieved (cf. Johansson, 2012).

Teachers interpret and enact policy from steering documents as well as curriculum resources such as NTA or resources produced by other actors seeking to influence how the school subjects are constituted in practice (cf. Andrée & Hansson, 2021). Thus, even when teachers work with relatively structured teaching units such as NTA their enactment of teaching can be seen as part of the transposition of Chemistry as a school subject.

Within the Swedish school system, teachers are considered to have a high degree of autonomy with opportunities for their own beliefs to shape their teaching (cf. Eteläpelto, Vähäsantanen, Hökkä & Paloniemi, 2013). How teachers approach the transformation of policy intentions in shaping middle school chemistry instruction becomes intertwined with the space for professional autonomy. As teachers approach different visions of the purpose of science education, they orient themselves in different ways as to what knowledge is considered to be important. This study zooms into how teachers make use of their professional space in the transformation and enactment of chemistry as a school subject, in spite of various forms of increasing standardization (Oolbekkink-Marchand et al., 2017) and other restricting factors.

In this study, we draw on an ecological model of teacher agency by Priestley, Biesta, and Robinson (2015) to shed light on the professional agency achieved by middle school teachers in the transformation and forming of chemistry education when they work with NTA curriculum resources. Here, agency is seen as an emergent phenomenon that is achieved with “continually shifting contexts over time and with orientations towards past, future, and present” (op cit p. 25). The model is based on a temporal-relational view of agency highlighting three dimensions of teacher agency; as informed by the past (iterational), as orientated to the future (projective), and as acted out in the ‘here and now’ (practical-evaluative).

The aim is to contribute to an understanding of the agency achieved by middle school teachers in the forming of chemistry teaching with NTA curriculum resources. Thus, the presentation zooms into teachers’ histories and beliefs concerning the teaching of Chemistry, their ability to visualize alternative ways of teaching Chemistry with NTA and their day-to-day navigation of practical conditions for chemistry teaching.

The research question is: How do middle school teachers achieve agency in chemistry teaching built on the use of NTA curriculum units?

This study is a pilot study conducted with three teachers working with NTA curriculum units. For the study, middle school teachers working with the NTA box Chemical Experiments were invited to participate. The data collected include field notes from classroom observations and audio-recorded interviews. The observations were open-ended and conducted adjacent to the interviews. Three lessons were observed with the first teacher and two with the other two teachers. To guide the observations auxiliary questions were used. For example: How does the teacher introduce chemistry experiments? What are the students doing? The interviews were conducted as semi-structured follow-up conversations evolving around the teachers' reflections on situations or events during the observed lessons. Primarily, open-ended questions were asked focusing on the teachers’ planning and implementation of the NTA units. During the interviews, the teachers were also asked to complete a storyline concerning changes in their perceived professional spaces during the course of their professional careers. This part of the interview was inspired by the methodology proposed by Oolbekkink-Marchand et al. (2017). The lesson field notes were transcribed on a computer. A summary of the observed lesson was then written in a narrative form and the teachers were given an opportunity to read through and comment on the summaries. This part of the analysis functioned as a form of respondent validation. It also provided an opportunity for the teachers to reflect upon the lessons to prepare for the follow-up conversations (where the observations were carried out in sufficient time before the interview to allow the observation to be transcribed). The teachers' ways of talking about chemistry teaching with NTA were analyzed using the ecological model of agency (cf. Priestley, Biesta & Robinson 2015; 2015b, Biesta, Priestley & Robinson, 2017) in order to provide insight into teachers' transposition work in middle school chemistry.

The teachers in this study describe different conditions to shape Chemistry teaching with the use of NTA units. In one of the schools, the use of NTA units is decided by the teachers but in another school, the principal and the college decide which NTA boxes are to be used. In yet another school, the specific units to teach are decided at a municipal level. The use of NTA thus poses constraints along the practical-evaluative dimension of teacher agency (see for example Priestley, Biesta & Robinson, 2015b on how an ecological approach to teacher agency can be characterized). Thus, agency is achieved along the iterational dimension. This is done, for example, by relating Chemistry to their own previous experiences; bringing in personal stories and experiences into their classroom practice. The teachers also express agency within the projective dimension by linking their chemistry teaching to their own goal formulations. One example is the need to practice searching for and evaluating information. In conclusion, it is clear that although the three teachers in this pilot study use the same curriculum resource, NTA, they design and enact their teaching in different ways. For example, one of the teachers describes how the instructions from the NTA training guide the teaching very precisely, while the other two teachers describe how they change the structure to a greater extent based on what they themselves want to bring into the teaching. All three teachers in the study describe that despite a fairly guided framework, they find that teaching the same NTA box results in very different lessons in different groups depending on the composition of the groups.

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