The last ten years have witnessed the development of a new breed of national curriculum in a range of countries. Such curricula seek to combine what are claimed to be the best features of top-down and bottom-up approaches to curriculum planning and development, providing both central guidance for schools (thus ensuring the maintenance of national standards) and sufficient flexibility for practitioners to take account of local needs. Intrinsic to these developments is a renewed vision of teachers as developers of curriculum and as agents of change (Fullan, 2003). The concept of teacher agency thus lies at the centre of these initiatives. There has, however, been little explicit research or theory development in this area (Priestley et al., 2012a, b; Vongalis-Macrow, 2007).

This paper draws upon an ethnographic study of teachers’ work in three schools. This research explored teacher agency in the context of the implementation of Scotland’s new Curriculum for Excellence. The study aimed to develop an understanding of key factors that impact upon teacher agency in contexts of educational change and trial a set of methodologies for identifying the factors that impact upon teacher decision making. Our study draws upon an understanding of agency rooted in pragmatism (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998) where agency is not seen as residing in individuals as a property or capacity, but rather as an emergent phenomenon of the ecological conditions through which people act, subject to human reflexivity and the ability to manoeuvre between repertoires (Archer, 2000). Thus, even if teachers have some capacities, whether they can achieve agency depends on the interaction of the capacities and the ecological conditions of their actions. Such an ecological view of agency (Biesta & Tedder, 2007) renders the question ‘What is agency?’ sterile, replacing it the question ‘How is agency achieved?'. Achievement of agency by teachers involves personal reflexivity and personal choice, but is tempered by their iterational pasts (prior working and life histories), their projective futures (for example aspirations about their students) and the practical/ evaluative demands of their present contexts.

Previous research (e.g. Coburn & Russell, 2007) has suggested that both the strength and span of relationships fundamentally affect the ways in which teachers are able to achieve agency in their professional lives. Our paper focuses on various types of relationship experienced by teachers in their school settings. These include formal and informal relationships within school, as well as relationships with external actors and bodies. We examine, for example, whether relationships are asymetric, reciprocal and/or sustained. Finally we show how the nature and scope of relationships shape the teachers’ agency, and impact upon their curriculum-making practices.

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