Introduction

University teaching is a purposeful practice in which academics make judgments about what counts as knowledge, how it should be taught, and how students are invited into disciplinary ways of thinking (Barnett, 2021). These judgments are made in institutional environments shaped by competing priorities (e.g., research expectations, quality assurance, workload pressures), shifting student needs, and evolving professional relationships. In these conditions, academics must act deliberately to shape teaching practices and their working conditions. Teacher agency – understood here as the capacity to act purposefully and make informed choices within particular practices – offers a lens for examining how academics navigate, negotiate, and direct these complexities (Kusters, 2025).

A prominent conceptualisation of teacher agency is the ecological approach, which frames agency as an emergent achievement shaped by past experiences (iterational), present judgments (practical-evaluative), and future aspirations (projective) (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Priestley et al., 2015). While this approach has advanced understanding of how agency is achieved, there is less empirical insight into what agency is for: the purposes, motivations, and value-laden orientations that guide academics’ agentic work. Furthermore, relational and emotional dimensions of teaching – such as care, collegial connection, and ethically charged interactions – are often treated as contextual influences rather than constitutive processes through which agency is formed (Rushton & Bird, 2024).

The question guiding this study
For what purposes do academics exercise teacher agency, and how are these purposes constituted through iterational, practical-evaluative, and projective dimensions, with particular attention to relational aspects?

The question is designed to surface in addition to decision-making in constrained environments, the educational and professional goods academics seek to realise (e.g., what they protect, pursue, prioritise, or refuse) and how these orientations are sustained – or disrupted – through relationships with students, colleagues, and institutional actors.

Theoretical framework
This study combines the ecological approach to agency with an interpretive account of meaning-making to explain both purpose and relationality in academics’ agentic work. We draw on the ecological approach to conceptualise teacher agency as a situated and time-sensitive achievement: academics’ actions are informed by professional biographies and accumulated commitments (iterational), involve practical judgment amid material, structural and cultural conditions (practical-evaluative), and are oriented by imagined futures for students, disciplines, and selves (projective). The framework also foregrounds relational and emotional dimensions of teaching as constitutive. Following Rushton and Bird (2024), relationships are approached as sites in which purposes become visible and are negotiated – through care, fairness, inclusion, and collegial responsibility – and where agency is enacted through ethical and affective judgments. To address the question of “agency for what?”, we further bring a hermeneutic perspective to the ecological approach, emphasising how academics’ professional actions are grounded in meaning-making, self-understanding and value-informed judgment (cf. Kögler, 1996). Hermeneutic reflexivity helps account for how academics interpret what is at stake, justify and revise decisions in dialogue with others, and critically engage with dominant institutional narratives about quality, responsibility and “good” teaching.

European and international dimension
This framework speaks directly to European and international debates about higher education teaching because the tensions that make agency consequential – quality assurance regimes, intensified performance logics, widening participation, internationalised classrooms, shifting professional identities, and the relational labour of teaching – are widely experienced across national systems, though differently configured locally. By focusing on purpose-driven agency and its relational constitution, the study offers concepts that travel across contexts and helps clarify what kinds of institutional cultures and professional learning spaces are needed to sustain meaningful teaching in contemporary universities.

Method To explore the purpose-driven dimensions of teacher agency, we employed a scenario-based interview design, which is well-suited to eliciting value-laden interpretations and decision-making in authentic professional dilemmas. The interview protocol drew on a set of 23 validated teaching scenarios (Kusters et al., 2024). These scenarios were constructed from “critical moments” reported in interviews with university lecturers across seven European research-intensive universities, capturing recurring challenges such as student preparedness, workload tensions, conflicting expectations, pedagogical dilemmas, online interaction, and curriculum coherence. They were refined through review by expert panels in higher education and teacher agency (assessing recognisability, clarity of dilemma, and capacity to elicit multiple legitimate responses) and further supported through piloting with university lecturers. Data collection Data were collected through individual interviews with 12 academics from the Education Division of a Scottish university. Participants were recruited via a voluntary departmental call and contacted the first author directly. Each participant selected scenarios in advance that they found most relevant to their teaching; interviews were then structured around three pre-selected scenarios and lasted up to 60 minutes. For each scenario, participants were invited to explain how they would respond and, crucially, why: how they interpreted what was at stake, what options they perceived, what action(s) they would take, and what considerations (e.g., student needs, collegial relationships, institutional expectations, values, anticipated consequences) shaped their judgment. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Transcripts were shared with participants for review and amendment; two participants provided additional comments by email, which were incorporated into the dataset. Ethical approval was obtained, written informed consent collected, confidentiality and anonymity procedures followed, and participants were reminded of their right to withdraw within four weeks; participants were also informed about potential indirect recognition within their institutional context. Data analysis Analysis followed reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019). We treated scenario selection as an inherent feature of the interpretive dataset: rather than analysing the scenarios themselves, we analysed how participants reasoned through and interpreted the dilemmas. We familiarised ourselves with the transcripts, generated inductive codes attentive to expressed purposes (why actions were chosen, desired outcomes, positioning in relation to students/institutions), developed and collaboratively reviewed themes, then defined and named themes and produced a synthesis of purpose-driven agency. Priestley et al.’s (2015) ecological dimensions (iterational, practical-evaluative, projective) were used as a sensitising lens during theme refinement and synthesis – supporting, but not pre-structuring, interpretation.

Findings and conclusions Analysis of academics’ scenario responses identified five interrelated purposes for exercising teacher agency in university teaching: 1) responsive adaptation to contextual structures, 2) moral and ethical reasoning, 3) negotiation between personal values and institutional goals, 4) self-directed professional growth, and 5) care and connection. Across these purposes, agency was shown to emerge through ongoing negotiations with students, colleagues, institutional cultures, and disciplinary communities, aligning with a relational understanding of agency as coordinating action with others in order to interpret and respond to complex situations. Participants’ accounts also demonstrated that what can appear as ad hoc decision-making is typically underpinned by accumulated experience and values (iterational), context-sensitive judgments in the moment (practical-evaluative), and future-oriented aims for teaching, learning, and professional identity (projective). Taken together, the themes portray agency as a deliberate, relational, and interpretive act of meaning-making, rather than a simple response to constraint. This study contributes to a university-specific elaboration of the ecological approach by demonstrating that teacher agency in higher education is fundamentally relational and purpose-driven. Academics do not merely react to institutional demands; they exercise agency as purposeful professional judgment, shaped by professional histories, pedagogical values, and aspirations, and mediated through relationships that carry ethical and emotional weight. Relational dynamics – collaboration, emotional labour, ethical commitments, and care – are not peripheral influences but key spaces in which teacher agency is constituted and enacted. Practically, this implies that supporting teacher agency requires more than skills training: institutions should cultivate collegial spaces for reflective dialogue, scenario-based deliberation, mentoring, and recognition of the relational work that sustains meaningful university teaching.

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