Overview: This study examines how Irish primary teachers experience, make sense of, and enact agency amidst ongoing curriculum reform, with a specific focus on the Primary Language Curriculum (PLC). While research on teacher agency has developed rich sociocultural and ecological accounts, the existential and affective dimensions of agency - how teachers feel and attune to change, and how they navigate responsibility, freedom, and constraint - remain comparatively under-theorised. Addressing this gap, the paper advances a conceptual account of agency grounded in phenomenology and supported by qualitative evidence from interviews with twelve primary teachers. Drawing on interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), it uses vignettes as interpretative exemplars to illuminate the lived textures of agency as teachers negotiate uncertainty, accountability, and professional values in the PLC’s implementation. Research Question: 

How do Irish primary teachers enact and experience agency during the implementation of the Primary Language Curriculum, and what existential–affective dynamics (e.g., attunement, responsibility, (in)authenticity) shape their practical deliberations and curricular judgment?

Conceptual Framework:

The framework integrates phenomenology of existence with contemporary accounts of teacher agency to foreground the lived dynamics of change.

1. Existential Attunement (Heidegger’s Unheimlichkeit):
   Unheimlichkeit—often rendered as “not‑at‑homeness”—captures an existential mood of dislocation that surfaces when familiar practices and meanings are unsettled. In curriculum reform, teachers can experience the new landscape as simultaneously compelling and estranging. The study treats attunement not merely as emotion, but as a world-disclosing condition that shapes perception, salience, and readiness-to-act. Analytically, this sensitises the coding to moments of rupture (e.g., uncertainty, anxiety, ambiguity) and to how teachers re-establish bearings through collegial sense-making, practical reasoning, or the re‑articulation of professional purposes.

2. Responsibility and (In)authenticity (Sartre’s Good vs. Bad Faith):
   Sartre’s distinction helps parse how teachers relate to their freedom under constraint. “Good faith” is not naive voluntarism but a lucid acknowledgment of one’s situated agency - owning choices within limits, accepting ambiguity, and acting with integrity. “Bad faith” involves self-deception (e.g., collapsing agency into external mandates or, conversely, denying constraint) that obscures responsibility. This lens enables an analysis of professional judgment as ethical–practical discernment: how teachers name and own what they are doing, justify it, and navigate tensions among policy demands, local contexts, and pupil needs.

3. Bridging to Sociocultural and Ecological Accounts:
   The framework complements, rather than replaces, sociocultural/ecological perspectives by showing how attunement and responsibility mediate the well-known components of agency - iterational (past experiences and dispositions), practical–evaluative (present judgments among options), and projective (orientations to possible futures). Existential–affective dynamics thus become mechanisms of mediation that explain why similar structural conditions can yield divergent enactments of agency across teachers and contexts.

This study adopts a qualitative, interpretative design to explore Irish primary teachers’ lived experiences of engaging with the Primary Language Curriculum (PLC). Data were generated through in‑depth, semi‑structured interviews with twelve practicing primary teachers sampled across a range of school contexts. Interviews focused on teachers’ sense-making, everyday enactment of the PLC, and the professional and emotional dynamics shaping their curriculum work. An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach guided both data generation and analysis. IPA’s commitment to exploring the meaning-making of participants, while acknowledging the researcher’s interpretative role, provided a suitable lens for examining teacher agency, professional judgement, and experiences of curriculum change. Following IPA conventions, transcripts were analysed iteratively: initial noting, development of experiential themes, interpretative cross‑case analysis, and construction of higher‑order concepts relevant to the evolving conceptual framework. To illustrate the analytic propositions advanced in the paper, interview vignettes are used as interpretative exemplars. These vignettes do not serve as case studies but as situated windows into teachers’ lived experiences, highlighting the affective, epistemic, and structural dimensions of agency in the context of the PLC.

The paper argues that reform routinely precipitates Unheimlichkeit, which conditions, rather than merely constrains agency. Whether this anxiety becomes paralysing or generative hinges on how actors negotiate two proximal mediators: knowledgeability and accountability. We develop four propositions linking these constructs to orientations of agency (good versus bad-faith enactment).We show how facilitative accountability and domain-specific knowledgeability enable teachers to dwell productively within Unheimlichkeit, re-authoring practice rather than retreating into performativity. Conceptually, we recast agency as existentially attuned, ethically oriented, and socio-materially mediated. Practically, we advocate for reform designs that normalise ambiguity, build knowledgeability, and co-professionally enact accountability. The article thus positions anxiety not as the antithesis of agency but as a precondition whose trajectory can be shaped towards good-faith curriculum-making.

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