Teachers' Professional Agency and School Reform

Abstract

In response to the demands of the global knowledge economy, current international school-based reforms draw on a range of top-down and bottom-up approaches to change. Devolving decision-making to the level of local schools may be one way to give teachers the opportunity to exercise professional agency. International literature exploring teachers’ professional agency largely centres on top-down approaches to reform based on national initiatives or frameworks and in reference to secondary school settings. However, there is little understanding of how primary teachers in Australia experience professional agency to make decisions and choices in relation to their work in top-down, bottom-up curriculum reform contexts. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how primary teachers experienced professional agency in a school-based curriculum reform context and to consider what teachers reported as the enablers and constraints on professional agency in such a unique context. The ecological conceptualisation of professional agency (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Biesta & Tedder, 2007) formed the basis of the theoretical framework for this study, enabling an exploration of how teachers’ professional agency could be experienced in relation to individual capacity, available resourcing and structural and contextual factors.