Conference Agenda

Teacher agency, a key focus in recent educational research, receives considerable attention due to its vital role in teachers' professional development. This attention stems from the understanding that agency is intricately linked to various factors, including past professional milestones, personal beliefs, and contextual influences (Priestley et al., 2015; Tinn & Ümarik, 2021). Recognizing that agency is not inherent in every action, this research emphasizes the need to explore and understand the diverse expressions of teacher agency within the work process. The goal is to identify and recognize teacher agency as a habitual or intentional action reflecting genuine professional agency.

Teacher agency encompasses influential factors such as the general context, including social and educational changes, identity, and professional knowledge leading to different discourses. Specific impacts of various aspects can be investigated using Piestley and Robinson's three-dimensional model, connecting iterational, projective, and practical-evaluative dimensions (Piestley & Robinson, 2015). There is a growing body of research on what influences the emergence and development of agency and how to sustain and support its growth (Eteläpelto & Vähäsantanen, 2008). However, with the diversity of influencing factors, it can be assumed that agency may not always come into action in the same manner. This paper focuses on the different expression possibilities of agency – agency in action – and the factors that impact these expressions.

While numerous articles discuss what influences the emergence and development of agency and how to support it, this paper examines how agency is specifically expressed, in what ways, and how uniform its realization is in a teacher's lived educational actuality.

We observe that educational changes are a significant influencer of agency (Tinn & Ümarik, 2021). This empirical study aims to understand how different conditional factors are related to enabling or disabling agency, moving on to examine the specific forms that agency in action takes.

Selected teachers, whose careers began in the 60s-70s, yielded limited insights into the Soviet era during life history interviews. The scarcity of material is evident in the resulting typology and narrative portrayals. Rich data emerged primarily in the late 80s, amidst significant societal upheaval leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Estonia's independence restoration in 1991. These transformative times profoundly impacted society, with the education sector at the forefront of conscious change. The analysis reflects these historical dynamics, and life history interviews from the past 30 years provide a robust foundation for the study.

At the core of teacher agency is the ability to imagine alternatives, capturing the possibility of different alternative ways of acting. This is precisely why agency manifests itself in different ways, as different paths are inherent. How agency in action can take different forms and find alternative paths, while essentially sprouting from the same basis, is mapped in detail in the typology and described in four portrayals to unlock these types for a reader.

The typology is based on the theory-based analysis of the ecological model of agency (Priestley et al., 2015), which has three dimensions: iterational, projective, and practical-evaluative. In the analysis process, we also considered an addition suggested by Leijen et al. (2019) to add a feature of personal long-term purpose-making to the model.

The main themes from the analysis were accountability, efficiency, knowledge base, professional identity, perceived autonomy, short-term goals, long-term purposes, and school culture. All these themes were more or less influenced by another factor that surfaced in the analysis process – teacher nostalgia. Likewise, it was found that agency can also manifest as a toxic agency – a phenomenon whose connections with certain types of nostalgia were particularly strong.

In Switzerland, almost one teacher out of five leaves the profession within the first five years (OFS, 2022). One of the factors behind this phenomenon is the difficulties encountered by teachers in dealing with difficult pupils’ behaviour (Høigaard et al., 2012; Montague & Kwok, 2022). Thus, the development of good classroom management skills, particularly the ability to deal with difficult pupils’ behaviour in an educational manner, is an issue in teacher training (Gaudreau et al., 2012). However, this ability is linked to teachers' self-efficacy for classroom management (Gaudreau et al., 2015). Teacher effectiveness is notably impacted by empowerment, of which self-efficacy is one of the dimensions (Hemric et al., 2010). However, there seems to be little systematic research on the relations between the concepts of self-efficacy for classroom management and empowerment among trainee teachers. Thus, the problem lies in the lack of knowledge of the relation between self-efficacy in classroom management among student teachers and their empowerment. Empowerment can be defined as "[a] process by which a person or a community frees itself from a state of subjection, acquires the ability to use its full rights, and frees itself from a social, moral or intellectual dependency" (Maury & Hedjerassi, 2020, p.3). In relation to the educational sciences, it appears that teacher empowerment has a positive influence on their decision-making capacity, their professional learning and their impact on pupils’ success. Empowerment is also central to improve teaching (Veisi et al., 2015). Moreover, self-efficacy appears to be one of the constituent dimensions of empowerment that proves to be one of the most reliable predictors of a teacher's professional commitment (Bogler & Somech, 2004). Bandura (2007) defines self-efficacy as the individual's belief in his or her ability to organise and carry out the course of action required to produce desired results. Thus, teachers’ self-efficacy is their belief in their own ability to play a key role in the success of their pupils. It is also their belief that they can bring their students along with them in their teaching project (Brown et al., 2015). Studies show that teachers with a high self-efficacy are more involved in the running of their institution, more open to pedagogical developments and more pugnacious when faced with difficult situations (Veisi et al., 2015). With regard to classroom management, teachers who can rely on a strong self-efficacy to face difficult pupils’ behaviour are more inclined to develop educational practices tailored to pupils' aspirations. As a result, pupils develop more positive attitudes to learning and development. This has a positive impact on their school experience and success (Gaudreau et al., 2015). Empowerment is thus considered by Bandura (1997) to be generated by the development of self-efficacy. However, from a systemic perspective, it seems appropriate to question the interaction between these two concepts in the development of teachers' skills, particularly in regard to classroom management (Nazari et al., 2021).

The literature suggests that self-efficacy for classroom management may be related to empowerment. Indeed, some studies indicate statistically significant relationships between self-efficacy and empowerment (Hemric et al., 2010; Veisi et al., 2015). The aim of this study was therefore to verify the existence of a relation between these two concepts. The results of this study show relations between certain dimensions of self-efficacy for classroom management and certain dimensions of empowerment. These results are discussed in light of Gaudreau’ (2017) self-efficacy for classroom management and Maury and Hedjerassi’ (2020) empowerment process theories.

The work ability (WA) construct was proposed to identify whether individuals are able to continue to meet the physical and psychosocial requirements of their profession. Perceived teacher work ability (PWA) refers to the teachers’s subjective assessment of their individual physical and mental capacity to perform the required job tasks and successfully cope with the physical, emotional, and organizational demands associated with the current teacher roles (Hlaďo et al., 2020; McGonagle et al., 2022).

The role of self-rated health in the relationship between burnout and perceived teacher work ability

In light of previous research, the teaching profession is widely acknowledged as one characterized by substantial stress levels. Teacher stress primarily emanates from the high job demands and the demanding work conditions inherent to the teaching profession. The JD-R model and previous research findings showed that ineffectively managing job demands and persistent work-related stress may result in teacher burnout (Schaufeli & Taris, 2014; Hakanen et al., 2006). For instance, Hlaďo et al. (2020) among aging upper secondary school teachers found that burnout is a significant predictor of WA with a strong negative effect. More frequently than other occupational groups, teachers suffer from diseases that develop from mental and emotional stress (Freude et al., 2005). Relying on the JD-R model, it can be concluded that burnout may lead to adverse outcomes for the individual, including impaired employee health (Schaufeli & Taris, 2014). On the other side, physical and mental health affects an individual’s capacity to perform job demands, and health conditions can be considered an antecedent of PWA. However, limited research has examined the relationships between burnout, health status, and WA in teachers simultaneously. In the JD-R model, physical and mental health is harmed by burnout (Taris et al., 2017), and impaired health can be regarded as contributing to reduced WA among teachers (Cadiz et al., 2019). Thus, physical and mental health may intensify the adverse effect of burnout on WA. Thus, we hypothesize:

- H1: Self-rated physical health and self-rated mental health serve as mediators for the relationship between burnout and PWA among lower secondary school teachers.

The role of burnout in the relationship between self-efficacy and perceived teacher work ability

Previous research has shown a positive relationship between self-efficacy and WA in different occupational groups. Among primary and middle school Italian teachers, Guidetti et al. (2018) found that teachers’ self-efficacy significantly and positively influences PWA. In their systematic review, Mijakoski et al. (2022) identified low teacher self-efficacy as a detrimental determinant of teacher exhaustion. The research findings suggest that teacher burnout is reduced or mitigated when teachers positively perceive their self‐efficacy. The revised JD-R model (Taris et al., 2017) posits a mediating role of burnout in the link between personal resources and work outcomes. Drawing on the research findings outlined above, we can infer that higher self-efficacy among teachers may result in lower levels of burnout and, consequently, a higher level of WA. As stated above, teachers with high self-efficacy demonstrate lower burnout since self-efficacy is associated with more effective coping strategies, allowing teachers to focus on finding solutions to the problems. Thus, higher self-efficacy prevents teacher burnout, and lower burnout levels promote higher WA. However, to our knowledge, no study has explored the mediating effects of burnout in the relationship between self-efficacy and WA. Therefore, we hypothesize:

- H2: Burnout acts as a mediator between self-efficacy and PWA among lower secondary school teachers.