Abstract
Problems encountered in top-down school reforms have repeatedly highlighted the significance of teachers’ agency in educational change. At the same time, temporality has been identified as a key element in teachers’ agency, with teachers’ beliefs about the future and experiences of the past shaping their agentic orientations. However, research on teachers’ future orientations is typically limited to short-term trajectories, as opposed to long-term visions of education. To address this, we draw on a futures studies perspective to give more explicit attention to teachers’ long-term visions of their work. We argue that the method of future narratives, already well-established in the field of futures studies, is a fruitful methodological framework for studying these long-term visions. In this paper, we first show that the futures studies approach is theoretically compatible with the ecological model of teacher agency. We then outline the method of future narratives to point out the possibilities it offers. Finally, we illustrate our approach with an exploratory analysis of a small set of future narratives where teachers imagine a future workday. Our analysis reveals that the narratives offer a rich view of teachers’ longer-term visions of education, including instances of reflecting on the role of education in relation to broader societal developments. Our study suggests that this novel approach can provide tools for research on teacher agency as well as practical development of teacher education, addressing long-term educational issues and policies.
Highlights
IntroductionDuring the first decades of the new Millennium, research interest in teachers’ agency has rocketed
We illustrate the opportunities offered by the futures studies approach with the help of two images of a future workday drawn from the teachers’ writings. We chose these two writings to exemplify the key orientations of teachers’ futures thinking we identified through our analysis
In response to the first analytic question, “What kind of chronotope/s manifest in teachers’ images of the future?”, our analysis revealed a chronotope that was remarkably unified throughout the data
Summary
During the first decades of the new Millennium, research interest in teachers’ agency has rocketed. Teachers’ agency emerged as a key concept following problems that were encountered with top-down educational reforms [8–10] One example of such earlier approaches to educational reform is the literature on teachers’ professional development. Most teachers’ professional development programmes and courses aim at diffusing educational innovations, and research-based development of such programmes has typically addressed teachers’ beliefs, attitudes and concerns facilitating or hindering that diffusion [11–13]. These studies tend to focus on teachers’ adoption of a reform/innovation, several studies on teachers’ professional development have acknowledged teachers’ role, in putting an innovation into operation and changing and refocusing it [12,14]. The key idea is that teachers matter, in terms of their fidelity—or lack thereof—to the reform, and by being creative agents who give shape and content to the reform [8,9]
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