Recent educational reforms in many countries herald the return to the centrality of the teacher at the heart of their implementation (Evans, 2022). In most cases, this renewed emphasis on teachers is explicitly tied to the internationalisation of policy agendas, with teachers primarily described as agents of change at the micro-practice level (Holloway, 2020). It is no surprise that much of teachers’ professional lives—what they purposefully do (agency) and how they see themselves and their roles as teachers (identity)—are often influenced by this constant interplay of local, national, and global policy contexts (Priestly et al., 2015). From a critical realist standpoint, dominant discourses such as those of Bhaskar (1975, 1989) and Archer (1995, 2000, 2012) suggest that in order to understand the complex lives of teachers and how teacher agency is exercised (or underplayed) at the grass-roots level, it is first central to have an understanding of how the mechanisms behind this interplay operate (Munby & Fullan, 2016; Wynn & Williams; 2012). The study seeks to answer the following question: how did teachers enact their agentive roles, facilitating individuals’ professional development while adapting to the needs of learners during curricular reform?

Framing Bhaskar’s stratified ontology of reality (1975) as the key philosophical conceptualisation, the study reflects on the implementation of one of the curriculum reforms in Malaysia and discusses the extent to which institutional structures (Scott, 2005) can influence teacher agency in teaching and learning at micro-level practices. This inquiry, being a part of a wider ethnographic doctorate study, aims to situate teacher agency within a larger scope of practice (i.e., educational system or institutionalisation). Five secondary schoolteachers involved in the reform of new curriculum were interviewed, and the data was audio-recorded, transcribed, and cross-checked by the participants before being imported into NVivo 12 where an iterative analysis was employed. Participatory observation, conversations with school administrators, and analysis of pertinent school and policy documents served as supplements to the primary data.

Drawing on Archer’s (2012) modes of reflexivity, the study considers the ways in which teachers’ thinking navigates the link between agency and structures. The results suggested that how teachers performed and projected their agentry had to do with how different forms of reflexivity mediate intersecting structural and cultural factors at the local and global levels. The different modes of reflexivity that teachers employed and the ways in which they determined and facilitated tasks that were important to them were found to be key to their professional identity and agency. The study concludes that while performativity as traces of situational structures brought about some differences in professional thinking and doing, individuals' reflexivity is what influences agentive mediation. This helps teachers navigate the conflicting needs brought about by their multiple roles.

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