Between school and working life: Vocational teachers’ agency in boundary-crossing settings

Abstract

This paper investigates agency among vocational teachers with reference to boundary-crossing between school and working life. Our study utilised interviews with sixteen Finnish vocational teachers. Adopting a narrative analysis approach, we found that the teachers had a variety of forms of exercising agency in terms of decisions deliberately taken, and the discourse and actions following these decisions. These forms were: (i) restricted agency, (ii) extensive agency, (iii) multifaceted balancing agency, (iv) situationally diverse agency, and (v) relationally emergent agency. The exercising of agency was intertwined with the main resources and constraints emerging from the teachers’ sense of their professional self, their awareness of their relationships to workplace personnel, and their views of the professional tasks determined by the school. Depending on its nature and direction, agency appears to create diverse conditions for teachers’ productive work in boundary-crossing settings, for developing education and for remaking the work practices of workplaces.