Teacher agency has become an increasingly common focus for research across Europe in the past 10 years (Cong-Lem, 2021; Deschêne & Parent, 2022) where it is viewed as ‘an influential factor for teacher professional learning, school improvement and sustainable educational change’ (Cong-Lem, 2021, p. 718). It is considered as a desirable and potentially powerful means of teachers working to improve the educational experiences of typically underserved communities; such contexts can be extremely demanding, contributing to teacher stress, burnout and high staff turnover (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2020; Santoro, 2018).

Teacher agency is almost unilaterally positioned as a ‘good thing’, or a desirable state: something to be ‘achieved’ (Rushton & Bird, 2023). We contend that agency is not necessarily in and of itself a ‘good thing’, or at least, that this has not been sufficiently justified in the literature to-date. This paper therefore seeks to foreground a more nuanced and multifaceted view of agency than is typically found in the literature on teachers and teacher education with a view to more accurately encompassing the various ways in which teachers enact (rather than achieve) agency. We offer an alternative and more encompassing means of understanding how teacher agency might be exercised in the lives of teachers committed to working in underserved communities in this age of uncertainty. This conceptualisation offers the possibility of understanding all presentations of teacher agency rather than valorising only the agentic action that is seen to contribute directly and positively to educational change.

Teacher agency is most commonly viewed through an ‘ecological’ perspective (Priestley et al, 2015) which derives from sociocultural thinking. In contrast, and to counter this tendency towards a singular or monolithic view of teacher agency, we locate our paper within a psychosocial approach that draws on sociology, critical and poststructural theories and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (Frosh, 2010, Lacan, 2007, Verhaeghe, 1995). We are interested in the tension between discourses presenting teachers as heroic agents of individual emancipation and social transformation, such as those found in recruitment campaigns and Hollywood films, and the erosion of spaces for professional agency brought about by the dominance of discourses and practices of standards and accountability in schools. In order to explore these tensions, we draw on the conceptual resources of Lacanian discourse theory and particularly on recent work in this field articulating agency as something manifesting in multiple modalities (Bunn et al., 2022). Bunn, et al. (ibid.) present a study of students’ learning journeys in higher education, and drawing on Lacan’s (2007) four discourses (the master, the university, the hysteric and the analyst), they identify four modes of agency being exercised, namely subservient, subsistence, subliminal and sublime. The students in the study do not, however, only demonstrate one mode of agency, rather they demonstrate major and minor tendencies towards different modes, evident in different contexts at different points in their ‘journeys’.

This paper explicates this conceptualisation of agency with reference to the experiences of early career teachers who have committed explicitly to wanting to teach in typically underserved communities. We explore how this conceptualisation might help us to understand where and how these early career teachers exercise different modes of agency. In so doing, we seek to normalise a range of agentic behaviours rather than support a discourse which valorises the narrative of the heroic teacher, or ‘teacher as agent of change’ (Rushton & Bird, 2023, p. 3).

The paper is conceptually driven in the first instance, although we then test our thinking out on interview data. We were driven by an initial research aim to investigate how early career teachers committed to working in underserved communities managed the emotional, practical and educational challenges associated with working in what are often described as ‘high needs’ contexts. We engaged in dialogue as method. The argument presented here was developed over a series of dialogues between the authors, interspersed with reading and writing. These dialogues were intentionally aimed at knowledge creation rather than simply knowledge depositing or sharing. As Freire (1970) put it, ‘dialogue is the encounter between men [sic], mediated by the world, in order to name the world’ (p. 69). Dialogue, in Freirean terms, is an ethical practice; it requires mutual respect and humility. We worked with openness to different theoretical perspectives, constantly testing out our thinking on real world context, offering tentative explanations and prompting each other to share and interrogate our own thinking. Our reading of Bunn et al. (2022) turned out to be a pivotal point and we began to explore their conceptualisation of modes of agency in relation to the existing literature on teacher agency. We developed a clear sense that their conceptualisation could be applicable to teacher agency, and more importantly, that it might offer a more expansive and authentic way of understanding the different ways in which early career teachers were able to exercise agency in what were often quite challenging and restrictive contexts. The capacity to use this conceptualisation in relation to teachers was attractive and we then sought to investigate how we could apply it to interview data with early career teachers. Interview participants were early career teachers who had graduated from an initial teacher education programme explicitly designed to provide teachers for underserved communities. The programme was an innovative two-year Masters-level initial teacher education programme, underpinned by an explicit social justice philosophy, that acknowledges that ‘preparing teachers is a necessarily and thoroughly political and ideological [process]’ (Beyer & Zeichner, 1987, p. 299). Interview data from 11 graduates, then in their third or fourth year of teaching, were analysed deductively to identify examples of each of Bunn et al’s (2022) four modalities of agency.

Through a review of existing literature on teacher agency, the paper reveals a tendency tin the existing literature to view teacher agency from a sociocultural perspective, positioning it as a wholly desirable phenomenon. While a majority of literature supports Priestley et al’s (2015) view of agency as ‘ecological’, i.e. as a phenomenon that is enacted within a particular context, rather than an innate capacity that teachers possess, there is confusion around whether this is something to be ‘achieved’ or whether it implies a constant state of emergence. The literature also reveals an almost wholly positive orientation towards teacher agency, positioning agentic teachers within a heroic narrative. Using Bunn et al’s (2022) four modes of agency as a deductive analytical construct for the graduate interviews reveals that while all 11 demonstrated examples of more than one mode of agency, they had different profiles in terms of the selection of modes of agency shared in the interview conversation. We contend that all four modes of teacher agency are important in understanding how teachers negotiate their professional lives, particularly in meeting the demands of working in high-needs contexts. Our theorisation offers several advantages. First, it supports, through application to empirical data, the view of discourse as a form of social link and hence sees agency as a socially situated phenomenon, rather than as a personal attribute. Second, and perhaps more uniquely, it enables us to go beyond reading agency in dualistic terms and instead to see it as adopting multiple modalities within the affordances and constraints of particular discourses. This reading, we argue, provides a more complete understanding of the various ways in which teacher agency can be enacted.

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