27. Didactics - Learning and Teaching
Paper
Higher Education Teachers’ Identity and Agency in Disrupted Contexts of Teaching
Maria Hvid Stenalt1, Mette Krogh Christensen2
1Aalborg University, Denmark; 2Aarhus University, Denmark
Presenting Author: Stenalt, Maria Hvid;
Christensen, Mette Krogh
Discussions of higher education teaching are often shrouded with narratives highlighting common and regular teaching obligations and situations rather than extreme and spectacular examples. However, as seen during the pandemic, teaching in times of crisis moves beyond what is needed in times of stability. Indeed, the pandemic reminds us that it is pivotal for teachers to be able to navigate different and sometimes unknown contexts (Christensen et al., 2022; Jung et al., 2021) while at the same time adding, what to some may come across as something extra to teaching in terms of caring about, and for, others (Tronto, 2010). This paper moves beyond the Covid-19 pandemic as a point in time to the pandemic as a case of disrupted education involving sudden changes to the educational framework (García-Morales et al., 2021). Our paper focuses on what we might learn from the pandemic in terms of ways to support teachers in times of disrupted teaching. This paper is written to directly respond to the NW27 call for studies of ’teaching and learning in diverse contexts’.
Studies of higher education teaching and learning during the Covid-19 pandemic have produced substantial accounts that address broad issues of digitisation of higher education teaching and learning. Transitioning to remote emergency teaching was, by large, seen as an organisational and technological accomplishment. However, as adapting to and appropriating new contexts cannot take place independently from human thought and actions, this paper seeks to rehumanise transitions by focusing on the role of teachers’ identity and agency. Whereas identity refers to teachers’ identification with a specific group or as a self-image we construct (Kreber, 2010) and involves an emotional attachment to particular roles intertwined with sociality, culture and power relations (Elliott, 2019), agency comprises humans’ capacity and willingness to act and cause actions or changes (Goller & Harteis, 2017). While teacher agency is expected, it is rarely explored or supported in ways that move beyond didactical decision-making. In that sense, then, narrow accounts of teachers’ agency and identity signal a trend of approaching teaching as an individual construct and teachers individually responsible for making teaching work “no matter what”.
From the outset, this paper discusses what is needed to navigate new and disrupted teaching contexts from a teacher's perspective and what higher education can do to support teachers. In particular, the present paper presents findings from a study of teachers’ identity and agency in higher education in times of disrupted education, which explores the following research question: What supports teachers’ agency and identity in complex interventions and times of disrupted education?
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThe paper addresses the question through an examination of Covid-19 and teachers’ transition to remote emergency teaching. Our method can be described as a review based on two review approaches: The systematic review and the realist review. First, the systematic review informed our review screening strategy, involving the identification of a broad search strategy and inclusion and exclusion criteria for subsequent screening of the retrieved studies. For our review, we targeted studies focused on teachers in higher education, identity or agency, and Covid-19. We included studies published between January 2020 and 2022 in various formats, such as journal articles, conference papers, and reports. Next, we used an analytical approach inspired by realist reviews (Pawson, 2002) for data extraction, interpretation, and synthesis of included studies. Generally, realist reviews are explorative rather than judgemental in focus. Rather than seeking evidence that interventions works (Wong, 2011), they aim to identify significant mechanisms underpinning how interventions work and what works. Realist reviews are also characterised by seeking to uncover underlying theories that explain patterns of human behaviour identified in the studies included in the review (Pawson, 2002). The studies included in this paper pointed to a pattern of a strong relationship between external interaction processes and internal psychological processes. Based on this, Illeris’s (2018) model of adult learning in working life was used to synthesise findings.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsUsing 27 included studies as the backbone, our review sheds light on some underpinning dynamics affecting higher education teachers’ identity and agency when transitioning to new and uncertain teaching contexts. By attending to these dynamics, we raise three broader concerns: (a) our study suggests that the way teaching in new contexts ’comes together’ is a nuanced process involving a complex interplay between teachers’ knowledge and skills, emotions and motivation, and the space for integration and cooperation. Not all these dimensions are successfully supported or cultivated in higher education. In particular, the interest of universities appears to be on learning new content and skills and less on emotions and the space for integration. (b) As we examine what needs to be learned to appropriate a new teaching context, we find the competences and knowledge needed are diverse and highly situated. This invites us to question the current role of mainstream competences frameworks in higher education, such as digital competences, comprising fixed dimensions unrelated to the specific situations in which they should be adopted. (c) There is a tendency for regular teaching and stable contexts in higher education to occupy a symbolic space where uncertainty has little bearing on the development of teaching. This study raises the challenge of how we can ’think and do otherwise’ concerning this issue. Based on the study conducted, it seems pivotal to keep in mind that preparing for disrupted teaching requires a different set of competences than the competences necessary for teaching in regular teaching contexts. In other words, practices based on stability may not be sufficient to support teachers’ practices in times of disruption. Moreso, it requires universities to adopt a more holistic approach to teachers. In conclusion, we raise the challenge of how higher education teaching and teaching as work may be organised differently.
ReferencesChristensen, M. K., Nielsen, K. S., & O’Neill, L. D. (2022). Embodied teacher identity: a qualitative study on ‘practical sense’as a basic pedagogical condition in times of Covid-19. Advances in Health Sciences Education, , 1-27.
Elliott, A. (2019). The rise of identity studies: An outline of some theoretical accounts. Routledge.
García-Morales, V. J., Garrido-Moreno, A., & Martín-Rojas, R. (2021). The transformation of higher education after the COVID disruption: Emerging challenges in an online learning scenario. Frontiers in Psychology, 12.
Goller, M., & Harteis, C. (2017). Human agency at work: Towards a clarification and operationalisation of the concept. In M. P. Goller Susanna (Ed.), Agency at Work - An agentic perspective on professional learning and development (1st ed., pp. 85-103). Springer.
Illeris, K. (2018). A comprehensive understanding of human learning. Contemporary theories of learning (pp. 1-14). Routledge.
Jung, J., Horta, H., & Postiglione, G. A. (2021). Living in uncertainty: The COVID-19 pandemic and higher education in Hong Kong. Studies in Higher Education, 46(1), 107-120.
Kreber, C. (2010). Academics’ teacher identities, authenticity and pedagogy. Studies in Higher Education, 35(2), 171-194.
Pawson, R. (2002). Evidence-based policy: The promise ofrealist synthesis'. Evaluation, 8(3), 340-358.
Tronto, J. C. (2010). Creating caring institutions: Politics, plurality, and purpose. Ethics and Social Welfare, 4(2), 158-171.
Wong, G. (2011). The internet in medical education: a worked example of a realist review. Synthesizing Qualitative Research: Choosing the Right Approach, 83-112.
27. Didactics - Learning and Teaching
Paper
Phenomenological Research in Education - Considering Multimodal "Texts"
Annie O Breachain
Dublin City University, Ireland
Presenting Author: O Breachain, Annie
Phenomenological research approaches whilst well-established in the health sciences, have only recently begun to be applied in educational research. Farrell (2020) finds the underrepresentation of phenomenological research in education surprising, given that, as she says, 'education is founded on attending to and building upon the knowledge and experiences of others'. As phenomenological research gains momentum in the educational domain, researchers will seek to understand how it can be applied. Those undertaking phenomenological research are cautioned to familiarise themselves with its origins as a philosophy rather than a methodology (Farrell, 2020, p.1) wherein principles rather than methods are outlined. Despite the lack of prescription by way of methods, as research practice in the field has developed, it is apparent that studies that adopt phenomenological approaches depend, almost exclusively, on data generated through in-depth interviews. This is unsurprising given the focus on description in phenomenological inquiry but it opens up the question of what experiences might remain untold in the dissemination of findings from phenomenological studies.
In this paper, the richness of possibilities to illuminate lived experiences using multi-modal data generation tools is discussed. The paper draws on a hermeneutic phenomenological inquiry into the nature of the lived experiences of upper primary school teachers’ and pupils’ relationships with one another. Hermeneutic “texts” were generated using embodied methods, visual methods and artefacts. In this paper, I suggest that inviting participants to describe their experiences through a variety of modes constituted an inclusive research design and offered the potential to unearth experiences that might otherwise have been inaccessible. In this study, teacher participants were invited to bring three artefacts, which helped them to describe their relationship with the children in their classes, to an in-depth interview. The use of the artefacts created an inclusive interview dynamic giving a degree of control of the interview to the participants and allowed both myself as researcher and the interview participants to have an ‘effective joint referent’ (Westcott and Littleton, 2005, p. 148). Further, using the artefacts as part of the conversational interviews enhanced the depth of descriptions of the child-teacher relationship.
Finally, in the context of an increasing recognition of children’s participation in research from a rights perspective (UNCRC, Article 12), and mindful that oral language can present a barrier, I share my experiences of using embodied drama research methods in the exploration of children’s experiences of the child-teacher relationship. I argue for the generative potential of inviting children to ‘show’ as well as to ‘tell’ in phenomenological inquiry honouring the sometimes neglected idea of corporeal knowledge.
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedHermeneutic phenomenology describes the methodology underpinning this enquiry into teachers’ and students’ ‘lived experiences’ of the student–teacher relationship in an Irish upper primary school context.
Following Van Manen (1990, 2014) this study focused on five fundamental life-world themes used in phenomenological inquiry namely lived space (spatiality); lived body (corporeality); lived time (temporality) , lived relation (relationality) and lived things (materiality). ‘Lived body’ relates to the ‘felt sense’ dimension of bodily experience (Finlay, 2011) which, in this study, related to how it feels to be part of the child-teacher relationship. ‘Lived time’ concerns not clock time (van Manen, 1990) but how we experience time such as how time might seem to pass slowly or quickly in school. Likewise, ‘lived space’ relates to the way in which place is experienced such as the way in which a classroom can feel inviting or hostile. ‘Lived things’, van Manen (2014, p. 307) explains, incorporates physical objects as well as ‘thoughts, deeds, experiences, events and discoveries’ and in this study was concerned with teaching and learning episodes and experiences.
The element of lived experience in focus in this study was teachers’ and children’s ‘lived relation’ with one another and whilst the five existentials, described above, unify in the form of the life-world ‘we can temporarily study the existentials in their differentiated aspects whilst realising that one existential always calls forth the other aspects’ (van Manen, p. 105). Therefore the five existentials were drawn upon during participant interviews to provide a starting point for discussing the child-teacher relationship where participants needed a concrete point of departure.
Research participants included three teachers and five students from each of those teachers’ classes. Data generation featured the use of protocol writing and conversational interviews following van Manen (2014). Data were also generated, somewhat experimentally, through embodied drama methods and through using artefacts and visual methods drawing on the work of Mitchell (2011), Tinkler (2015) and Chappell and Craft (2011).
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsPhenomenological enquiry is gaining popularity in educational research particularly by those interested in first person experiences (Stolz, 2022) Data are almost exclusively generated using in-depth interviews. As phenomenological enquiry gains traction as a methodology in the field of educational research, where there is increasing necessity for inclusive practice, there may be a need to consider methods that move beyond dependence on oral language.
The findings of this study reveal that using multi modal methods, specifically visual and embodied methods:
1. contributed to creating a more inclusive research design through affording choice in the generation of hermeneutic texts
2. enabled unexpected aspects of the life-worlds of participants to surface
3. afforded greater depth of description of the phenomenon under scrutiny (in this case the child-teacher relationship)
These findings will be shared and supported with examples that will serve as a guide to others who wish to conduct phenomenological enquiry in educational research and to address a gap in the methodological literature with respect to conducting phenomenological research in education in general and with children, in particular.
ReferencesEdwards R, I'Anson J. Using Artifacts and Qualitative Methodology to Explore Pharmacy Students' Learning Practices. Am J Pharm Educ. 2020 Jan;84(1):7082. doi: 10.5688/ajpe7082. PMID: 32292182; PMCID: PMC7055407.
Farrell, E. (2020). Researching Lived Experience in Education: Misunderstood or Missed Opportunity? International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 19. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406920942066
Finlay, L. (2013). Unfolding the phenomenological research process. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 53(2), 172-201.
Gadamer, H-G. (1989). Truth and method. London, UK: Sheed and Ward.
Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Mitchell, C. (2011). Doing visual research. London, UK: Sage.
O’Brien, M. (2014). Leaping ahead of Heidegger: Subjectivity and intersubjectivity in Being and Time. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 22(4), 534-551, doi: 10.1080/09672559.2014.948719
Stolz, S. (2022) The practice of phenomenology in educational research. Educational Philosophy and Theory 0:0, pages 1-13.
Tinkler, P. (2015). Talking about photos: how does photo elicitation work and how can we use it productively in research. Paper presented at the Atlas TI Webinar, University of Alberta, Canada.
United Nations (1989). United Nations convention on the rights of the child. Geneva, Switzerland.
van Manen, M. (1990). Researching lived experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
van Manen, M. (2007). Phenomenology of practice. Phenomenology & Practice, 1(1), 11-30.
van Manen, M. (2014). Phenomenology of practice: meaning-giving methods in phenomenological research and writing. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press
Westcott, H. L., & Littleton, K. S. (2005). Exploring meaning in interviews with children. In S. Greene & D. Hogan (Eds.), Researching children's experiences: Approaches and methods (pp. 141-157). London: Sage.
27. Didactics - Learning and Teaching
Paper
Language Arts Teachers adaptive agency in the USA, England and Australia, committed to equity.
Andy Goodwyn
University of Bedfordshire, United Kingdom
Presenting Author: Goodwyn, Andy
English Language Arts [English/literacy] teachers in the main anglophone countries experience extreme pressures on their teacher agency, especially in England, Australia and the USA. The curriculum has narrowed, accountability is extreme, tests are high stakes and many teachers are leaving. Our research, involving four, projects, from USA, England and Australia analyses these issues and reveals a desperate situation. Certain teachers have developed ‘adaptive agency’, a powerful aspect of such which is their retention of loving literature and profound belief that all students can still love and enjoy literature, passionately believing that the curriculum/test combination is ruining this fundamental element of professional lives. They express hope, drawing on long experience, that reforms may bring about a time of more equitable opportunity.
Purpose and context
Around the world teachers have been experiencing strong external pressures on their work, reducing their autonomy, constraining creativity [Author 1., 2013, 2016, 2020], especially true of a subject area like Language Arts [English/literacy – see note below] where teachers have deep convictions about the vital importance of engaging students in local and immediate ways, untrammelled by nationalistic agendas. The identity of Language Arts teachers in the USA, Australia and England has marked similarities, characterised by a passionate attachment to teaching literature [Author 1. et al, 2015], a student centred ideology often constructed around a Personal Growth model of the subject and strongly inflected by a view of students as agents in meaning making who adopt a critical literacy perspective on texts and language [ Author 1., 2004, 2005].
Another common factor is what is happening to the subject of English/Language Arts in schools and universities, less students choose to study it at school and numbers on degree programmes are rapidly reducing. It is becoming more difficult to recruit LA teachers onto teacher preparation programmes coupled with the remarkable increase in LA teachers leaving either during their first 5 years of teaching or at a later stage taking early retirement or making a career change.
Conceptual framework
Teacher agency is important in all curriculum subjects but we argue it has an additional element in Language Arts [LA] because of the centrality of literature to teachers own lives and to their teaching. In former times of more ‘harmonious practice’ there was an alignment between the kind of literature teachers themselves wanted to teach and the curriculum and modes of assessment.
Adaptive agency can be first defined in a simple way as: The evolving agency of the individual teacher within the power matrix of external and internal regulation. When viewed in more detail its components are: [1] Agency this relates to the individual’s degree of control over classroom practice and curriculum design at the point of the present tense, that is when ‘English’ is happening in a classroom (Author 1., 2019). [2] The external matrix has many elements, some are subject documents [like a curriculum definition or an examination specification], teacher standards, inspection frameworks, these documents are pervaded by principally neoliberal discourses [3] the internal regulations are those elements where the teacher behaves in alignment with the documents and the ideology that pervades them. The adaptive quality relates to the Darwinian characteristic (Darwin, 1869) of surviving and coping in a difficult environment but also to adaptive expertise (Author 1., 2016) where the agent can still exert some power and control in a skilled and personal manner. Inevitably this set of factors creates a very tense and conflictual strain on the teacher’s personal and professional identity, too much strain for some teachers to bear, the emotional toll is too high and many leave the profession [certainly in England].
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThe authors have engaged and continue to be engaged with several qualitative projects, four are drawn on here and the data synthesised to focus on teacher agency and the importance of literature. The projects are [1] Teachers literary knowledge (2015-17)[2] Contested Territories (2017-18) [3] The literary knowledge of early career teachers (2017-2021)[4] The Professional Lives of English Language Arts Teachers (2019-202) Projects [1] and [2] were conducted across England and Australia, [3] only in Australia [4] USA, Australia and England.
In summary the projects are:-
[1] A study of experienced ELA teachers in England [ 8 from London and Reading] and Australia [8 from Sydney and Melbourne]. This year long project was partially a pilot for project [3]. The focus was on their own literary knowledge and how they were approaching teaching literature at that time.
[2] This was an investigation of teachers’ current experiences of teaching LA generally and literature in particular in schools around Sydney [16 teachers] and across England [16 teachers] – research was conducted over 12 months.
[3] This project is an ongoing investigation of early career LA teachers and what they consider to be ‘literary knowledge’ as it exists for them as individuals, as it is defined in society, and as it operates currently in schools as a teachable and assessable concept.
[4] This project is an ongoing study [affected by Covid] of the Professional lives of 50 English teachers in the USA, England and Australia.
All the projects are qualitative inquiries using in-depth semi-structured interviews to create rich data, interviews typically lasting 45-60 minutes and being fully transcribed. The total number of teachers participating so far is 120 over a period of 4 years. All teachers are volunteers and provide a valuable range of levels of experience offering a strong degree of professional representation.
It is a shared belief amongst the very experienced research team that LA is severely affected by neoliberal policies at governmental and state level [in Australia and the USA] having ‘reductive effects’ on teachers’ autonomy and agency, the place of literature is absolutely reduced and diminished. All the projects have investigated the truth of this belief by asking teachers to explain how they see the current situation, where relevant [depending on their years of service] how it compares to former periods and how they see the future.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsOne major finding is that the hypothetical characteristics outlined above - 1 to 8 – are all present in the views of current LA teachers to such an extent, with minor differences, that they can be considered the reality of current teachers’ lives. Those teachers with considerable years of experience reflect on this as a steadily increasing state of affairs. The most experienced – minimum 20 years – recall periods that were so different that we have categorised them as a period of ‘harmonious practice’ when teachers’ beliefs and way LA was defined and assessed were in alignment. This finding also influenced their view of a potentially better future.
A second key finding was that literature teaching remains central to the concerns of all the teachers, despite the issues discussed above. In general they strive to maintain a student centred pedagogy that privileges personal response above what we term ‘easily assessable literary knowledge’.
A third finding is that ‘easily assessable literary knowledge’ [EALK] has mostly replaced ‘personal literary knowledge’ [PLK] in the later years of high school. EALK is knowledge about texts, often factual and contextual and where there is an implied ‘right answer’ about the author’s meaning and literary importance. PLK is what the teachers themselves believe they have and retain, they may well have ‘literary readers’ training, through university study and so understand literary criticism, but their relationship to literature is one of love and engagement. Literature matters to them personally more than because any text belongs to the literary canon.
A fourth major finding is that texts have become ‘officialised’, diminished into artefacts of state sanctioned property.
A fifth finding is that the majority of the experienced teachers [our definition is simply 5 years of teaching or more] have developed adaptive agency, especially when it comes to literature teaching.
ReferencesAuthor 1., (September 2018a) The Highly affective teaching of English: a case study in a global context. The Annual Conference of the British Educational Research Association. The University of Northumbria.
Author 1., A & Author 2, (June 2018b) How English teachers in England and Australia are remaining resilient and creative in constraining times. The International Federation for the Teaching of English. Aston University, Birmingham, UK.
Author 1. & Author 2, (September 2018c) Contested territories: How English teachers in England and Australia are remaining resilient and creative in constraining times. The Annual Conference of the British Educational Research Association. The University of Northumbria.
Author 1., A., Durrant, C., Author 3, W., Zancanella, D. & Scherff, E. (2018d). (Eds.). The Future of English teaching worldwide and its histories: celebrating 50 years from the Dartmouth conference. London, Routledge. Author 1., A. (2017). From Personal Growth (1966) to Personal Growth and Social Agency – proposing an invigorated model for the 21st Century, English in Australia, 52(1), 66-73.
Author 1., (2017). And now for something completely different … A Critique of the National Curriculum for English in England: a new rationale for teaching literature based on Darwinian Literary Theory. The Use of English, 68(2), 9-22.
Author 1., (2016). Still growing after all these years? The Resilience of the ‘Personal Growth model of English’ in England and also internationally. English Teaching, practice and critique. 15(2), 7-21.
Author 1., Durrant, C., Scherff, E. & Reid, L. (2016) (Eds.). International perspectives on the teaching of Literature in schools; global principles and practices, London, Routledge.
Author 1, Durrant, C. & Reid, L (Eds.). (2014) International perspectives on the teaching of English in a Globalised World. London, Routledge.
Author 1., & Fuller, C. (Eds.) (2011) The Great Literacy Debate,. London, Routledge.
Author 1., (2016). Expert Teachers: an International Perspective. London, Routledge.
Author 1., (2010). The Expert Teacher of English. London, Routledge
Harding, D. W. (1962) ‘Psychological processes in the reading of fiction’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 2 (2), April:133-147.
Holland, N. (1975) 5 Readers Reading, New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
Author 3. (2019) Literary sociability: a transnational perspective. English in Education. 53.
Author 3. (2018) Blowing and Blundering in Space: English in the Australian Curriculum. The Australian Curriculum Promises, Problems and Possibilities. Australian Curriculum Studies Association.
Author 3 (2018) Growing the nation: The influence of Dartmouth on the teaching of literature in subject English in Australia. The Future of English Teaching Worldwide. Routledge. 2018
27. Didactics - Learning and Teaching
Paper
Teacher Agency in Transforming Hands-On Chemistry Curriculum Units to Middle School Chemistry Teaching Practices
Charlotte Dunne, Maria Andrée
Mälardalen University, Sweden
Presenting Author: Dunne, Charlotte
Teachers' daily work with chemistry teaching involves a range of everyday decisions about the content and how to organize the teaching. This study is a pilot study of professional agency in teachers' work with teaching middle school chemistry using curriculum units and resources from Naturvetenskap och teknik för alla (NTA) [in English Science and Technology for All]. The NTA curriculum resources can be described as a Swedish equivalent to the US program “Science and Technology for Children” (STC). The NTA resource provides a basis for elementary school science teaching in many Swedish schools and is intended to support science teaching and continuous professional development of science teachers including those with a limited science education background. Previous research has pointed to that NTA has a positive effect on student achievements on national tests concerning the aspect of planning and conducting investigations compared to teachers who do not use NTA in their teaching (Mellander & Svärdh, 2015). Thus, the NTA resources appear to have an impact on chemistry education and the aims achieved (cf. Johansson, 2012).
Teachers interpret and enact policy from steering documents as well as curriculum resources such as NTA or resources produced by other actors seeking to influence how the school subjects are constituted in practice (cf. Andrée & Hansson, 2021). Thus, even when teachers work with relatively structured teaching units such as NTA their enactment of teaching can be seen as part of the transposition of Chemistry as a school subject.
Within the Swedish school system, teachers are considered to have a high degree of autonomy with opportunities for their own beliefs to shape their teaching (cf. Eteläpelto, Vähäsantanen, Hökkä & Paloniemi, 2013). How teachers approach the transformation of policy intentions in shaping middle school chemistry instruction becomes intertwined with the space for professional autonomy. As teachers approach different visions of the purpose of science education, they orient themselves in different ways as to what knowledge is considered to be important. This study zooms into how teachers make use of their professional space in the transformation and enactment of chemistry as a school subject, in spite of various forms of increasing standardization (Oolbekkink-Marchand et al., 2017) and other restricting factors.
In this study, we draw on an ecological model of teacher agency by Priestley, Biesta, and Robinson (2015) to shed light on the professional agency achieved by middle school teachers in the transformation and forming of chemistry education when they work with NTA curriculum resources. Here, agency is seen as an emergent phenomenon that is achieved with “continually shifting contexts over time and with orientations towards past, future, and present” (op cit p. 25). The model is based on a temporal-relational view of agency highlighting three dimensions of teacher agency; as informed by the past (iterational), as orientated to the future (projective), and as acted out in the ‘here and now’ (practical-evaluative).
The aim is to contribute to an understanding of the agency achieved by middle school teachers in the forming of chemistry teaching with NTA curriculum resources. Thus, the presentation zooms into teachers’ histories and beliefs concerning the teaching of Chemistry, their ability to visualize alternative ways of teaching Chemistry with NTA and their day-to-day navigation of practical conditions for chemistry teaching.
The research question is: How do middle school teachers achieve agency in chemistry teaching built on the use of NTA curriculum units?
Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources UsedThis study is a pilot study conducted with three teachers working with NTA curriculum units. For the study, middle school teachers working with the NTA box Chemical Experiments were invited to participate.
The data collected include field notes from classroom observations and audio-recorded interviews. The observations were open-ended and conducted adjacent to the interviews. Three lessons were observed with the first teacher and two with the other two teachers. To guide the observations auxiliary questions were used. For example: How does the teacher introduce chemistry experiments? What are the students doing? The interviews were conducted as semi-structured follow-up conversations evolving around the teachers' reflections on situations or events during the observed lessons. Primarily, open-ended questions were asked focusing on the teachers’ planning and implementation of the NTA units. During the interviews, the teachers were also asked to complete a storyline concerning changes in their perceived professional spaces during the course of their professional careers. This part of the interview was inspired by the methodology proposed by Oolbekkink-Marchand et al. (2017).
The lesson field notes were transcribed on a computer. A summary of the observed lesson was then written in a narrative form and the teachers were given an opportunity to read through and comment on the summaries. This part of the analysis functioned as a form of respondent validation. It also provided an opportunity for the teachers to reflect upon the lessons to prepare for the follow-up conversations (where the observations were carried out in sufficient time before the interview to allow the observation to be transcribed).
The teachers' ways of talking about chemistry teaching with NTA were analyzed using the ecological model of agency (cf. Priestley, Biesta & Robinson 2015; 2015b, Biesta, Priestley & Robinson, 2017) in order to provide insight into teachers' transposition work in middle school chemistry.
Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or FindingsThe teachers in this study describe different conditions to shape Chemistry teaching with the use of NTA units. In one of the schools, the use of NTA units is decided by the teachers but in another school, the principal and the college decide which NTA boxes are to be used. In yet another school, the specific units to teach are decided at a municipal level. The use of NTA thus poses constraints along the practical-evaluative dimension of teacher agency (see for example Priestley, Biesta & Robinson, 2015b on how an ecological approach to teacher agency can be characterized). Thus, agency is achieved along the iterational dimension. This is done, for example, by relating Chemistry to their own previous experiences; bringing in personal stories and experiences into their classroom practice. The teachers also express agency within the projective dimension by linking their chemistry teaching to their own goal formulations. One example is the need to practice searching for and evaluating information.
In conclusion, it is clear that although the three teachers in this pilot study use the same curriculum resource, NTA, they design and enact their teaching in different ways. For example, one of the teachers describes how the instructions from the NTA training guide the teaching very precisely, while the other two teachers describe how they change the structure to a greater extent based on what they themselves want to bring into the teaching. All three teachers in the study describe that despite a fairly guided framework, they find that teaching the same NTA box results in very different lessons in different groups depending on the composition of the groups.
ReferencesAndrée, M., & Hansson, L. (2021). Industry, science education, and teacher agency: A discourse analysis of teachers' evaluations of industry‐produced teaching resources. Science Education, 105(2), 353-383.
Biesta, G., Priestley, M., & Robinson, S. (2017). Talking about education: Exploring the significance of teachers’ talk for teacher agency. Journal of curriculum studies, 49(1), 38-54.
Braun, V., & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative research in psychology, 3(2), 77-101.
Bryman, A. (2016). Social research methods. Oxford university press.
Eteläpelto, A., Vähäsantanen, K., Hökkä, P., & Paloniemi, S. (2013). What is agency? Conceptualizing professional agency at work. Educational research review, 10, 45-65.
Mellander, E., & Svärdh, J. (2015). Tre lärdomar från en effektutvärdering av lärarstödsprogrammet NTA. Nordina, 13(2), 163-179.
Johansson, A. M. (2012). Undersökande arbetssätt i NO-undervisningen i grundskolans tidigare årskurser (Doctoral dissertation, Stockholm University).
Oolbekkink-Marchand, H. W., Hadar, L. L., Smith, K., Helleve, I., & Ulvik, M. (2017). Teachers' perceived professional space and their agency. Teaching and teacher education, 62, 37-46.h in mathematics education (pp. 1254-1263). Barcelona: Fundemi IQS–Universitat.
Priestley, M., Biesta, G.J.J. & Robinson, S. (2015). Teacher agency: what is it and why does it matter? In R. Kneyber & J. Evers (eds.), Flip the System: Changing Education from the Bottom Up. London: Routledge.
Priestley, M., Biesta, G., & Robinson, S. (2015b). Teacher agency: An ecological approach. Bloomsbury Publishing
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