It has been a decade since the publication of ‘Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach’ (Priestley, Biesta & Robinson, 2015), building upon earlier work by the same authors (e.g. Biesta & Tedder, 2007; Priestley et al., 2012). This book, along with parallel work in Finland (e.g. Pyhältö et al., 2012, 2014), heralded the start of an explosion of interest in the concept of teacher [professional] agency. While the concept had been used in earlier research, it tended to be poorly conceptualised and under-theorised.

At the core of the Priestley, Biesta and Robinson book is an ecological understanding of agency. This views agency as not something that people have or possess (although clearly there are high-capacity individuals), but instead as something that is achieved. Agency in this view is an emergent phenomenon, something that happens through an always unique interplay of individual capacity and the cultural, structural, discursive and material conditions by means of which people act. This view sees agency has having three temporal dimensions. First, agency is rooted in past experience; and individuals with a wide repertoire of experience to draw upon may achieve agency more readily than those with a less rich reservoir of experience. Secondly, agency is always oriented to the future through the setting of goals and the ability to envisage future possibilities; in this case, people who are able to imagine multiple trajectories are likely to achieve agency more readily than those who are limited in their aspirations. Third, agency is always enacted in the present. There are two aspects to this dimension: the practical (i.e. what is actually possible given existing resources and in the face of existing constraints); and the evaluative (e.g. judgements about what is desirable in the given situation, but also judgements about risk). To this comes the fact that the situations in and through which agency is achieved also have histories and orientations towards desirable and possible futures.

In this presentation, we reflect upon the development of thinking about teacher agency since the publication of the Priestley, Biesta and Robinson book. In doing so, we draw upon 10 years of literature which uses the concept of teacher agency in a substantive way. We start by considering how scholars have conceptualised teacher agency, or in other words how they define what it is. We then explore some of the ways in which agency has been theorised and understood, considering how scholars have tried to use agency as a concept to explore educational issues, and the insights they offer to educational research. Thirdly, we consider how the ecological approach to understanding agency has been [mis]represented in the literature, for example exploring misconceptions, and the coherence of accounts using the approach (for example, to what extent they combine agency with conflicting approaches to understanding the concept). Here we will also clarify the ways in which our approach is distinctively different from the structure-agency discussion in sociology. Finally, we reflect upon implications for the field of teacher research and teacher education.

This paper is essentially a review of literature pertaining to teacher agency, published between 2015 and 2025. The following methodology was utilised: 1. Literature search of potentially relevant peer reviewed papers (and where applicable chapters), using recognised search tools (e.g. British Education Index, ERIC, Google Scholar) 2. Close reading of abstracts to ensure relevance 3. Close reading of relevant articles to address the following questions: a. How is agency conceptualised? b. How is agency theorised and understood? c. Where the article draws upon an ecological understanding, how has this been represented?

From our existing readings of teacher agency literature, we expect to find that teacher agency has been conceptualised in different ways. In some cases, this will draw upon particular conceptions in a coherent way, where appropriate elaborating existing theory and/or using compatible theories in a complementary manner. We also expect to find literature that uncritically utilises two or more existing conceptions of teacher agency, with the potential for tensions and ambiguities in analysis. We anticipate that while some literature uses an ecological approach coherently, other writing will misrepresent the theory. As teacher agency has become an important and well-used concept in educational research, we conclude that it is important that the concept is articulated and utilised coherently, avoiding ambiguities, tensions between different theoretical standpoints and weak theorisations that potentially distort analysis of research data.

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