Teacher agency, a key focus in recent educational research, receives considerable attention due to its vital role in teachers' professional development. This attention stems from the understanding that agency is intricately linked to various factors, including past professional milestones, personal beliefs, and contextual influences (Priestley et al., 2015; Tinn & Ümarik, 2021). Recognizing that agency is not inherent in every action, this research emphasizes the need to explore and understand the diverse expressions of teacher agency within the work process. The goal is to identify and recognize teacher agency as a habitual or intentional action reflecting genuine professional agency.
Teacher agency encompasses influential factors such as the general context, including social and educational changes, identity, and professional knowledge leading to different discourses. Specific impacts of various aspects can be investigated using Piestley and Robinson's three-dimensional model, connecting iterational, projective, and practical-evaluative dimensions (Piestley & Robinson, 2015). There is a growing body of research on what influences the emergence and development of agency and how to sustain and support its growth (Eteläpelto & Vähäsantanen, 2008). However, with the diversity of influencing factors, it can be assumed that agency may not always come into action in the same manner. This paper focuses on the different expression possibilities of agency – agency in action – and the factors that impact these expressions.
While numerous articles discuss what influences the emergence and development of agency and how to support it, this paper examines how agency is specifically expressed, in what ways, and how uniform its realization is in a teacher's lived educational actuality.
We observe that educational changes are a significant influencer of agency (Tinn & Ümarik, 2021). This empirical study aims to understand how different conditional factors are related to enabling or disabling agency, moving on to examine the specific forms that agency in action takes.
Selected teachers, whose careers began in the 60s-70s, yielded limited insights into the Soviet era during life history interviews. The scarcity of material is evident in the resulting typology and narrative portrayals. Rich data emerged primarily in the late 80s, amidst significant societal upheaval leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Estonia's independence restoration in 1991. These transformative times profoundly impacted society, with the education sector at the forefront of conscious change. The analysis reflects these historical dynamics, and life history interviews from the past 30 years provide a robust foundation for the study.
At the core of teacher agency is the ability to imagine alternatives, capturing the possibility of different alternative ways of acting. This is precisely why agency manifests itself in different ways, as different paths are inherent. How agency in action can take different forms and find alternative paths, while essentially sprouting from the same basis, is mapped in detail in the typology and described in four portrayals to unlock these types for a reader.
The typology is based on the theory-based analysis of the ecological model of agency (Priestley et al., 2015), which has three dimensions: iterational, projective, and practical-evaluative. In the analysis process, we also considered an addition suggested by Leijen et al. (2019) to add a feature of personal long-term purpose-making to the model.
The main themes from the analysis were accountability, efficiency, knowledge base, professional identity, perceived autonomy, short-term goals, long-term purposes, and school culture. All these themes were more or less influenced by another factor that surfaced in the analysis process – teacher nostalgia. Likewise, it was found that agency can also manifest as a toxic agency – a phenomenon whose connections with certain types of nostalgia were particularly strong.
