Teacher subjectivities and multiplicities of enactment: Agential realism and the case of science teacher learning and practice with multilingual Latinx students

Abstract

ABSTRACT The case of two middle school science teachers engaged in a long-term professional learning project is used to complicate the story of teacher change and agency and the presumed relationships between teacher knowledge and practice. Becky and Kelly were highly participatory in all aspects of a multi-year professional learning project, yet, when observed in their classrooms, they did not seem to enact project practices in robust ways during their instruction. Framed through the dominant professional development literature, our project would seem to be a ‘failure’ at promoting teacher change. However, using a post-qualitative framing of our ethnographic fieldwork, an alternative storyline emerges, involving the intricate negotiations of power dynamics, competing discourses, assemblages of multiple entities and relations that Becky and Kelly navigated. These complex assemblages shaped the teachers’ understandings of their multilingual Latinx students as science learners in ways that often ran contrary to what they learned during the project professional development. In this retelling, drawing on the notion of agential realism, we show how teachers’ knowledge and subjectivities were dynamically reconfigured in relation to local sociopolitical, material, and discursive assemblages shaping their practices in what we have framed elsewhere as multiplicities of enactment.