Conference Agenda

Participatory approaches to curriculum reform, in which teachers and other actors are involved, are becoming increasingly common (Kneen et al., 2023; Kontovourki et al., 2021). This development reflects an increasing recognition that teachers are essential actors in curriculum reform. Policymakers have come to recognize the challenge of creating change in schools without involving teachers in reform processes (Priestley et al., 2016). Thus, making use of teachers’ skills, knowledge, and experience has been identified as important (Alvunger et al., 2021). It has further been argued that teachers need ownership of the curriculum in order to implement it in their practices (Kirk & MacDonald, 2001), and that creating shared understandings of the curriculum among different actors is important when aiming for coherent, system-wide change (Soini et al., 2017). Therefore, rather than being considered only curriculum implementers, teachers are increasingly portrayed as curriculum developers, invited to participate in national curriculum-making and expected to take an active part in local curriculum work (Kneen et al., 2023).

This literature review is theoretically grounded in the work of Priestley et al. (2021), in which curriculum making and reform are understood as social practices involving a variety of activities and actors across the supra, macro, meso, micro, and nano sites of the education system. The study aims to collate and present current knowledge on teacher involvement in curriculum development and reform, focusing specifically on involvement at the supra, macro, and meso sites. These sites have been selected because they lie outside teachers’ day-to-day classroom work.

The study employed a scoping review design following the methodological framework proposed by Arksey and O’Malley (2005). The purpose was to map the breadth and nature of existing research, identify knowledge gaps, and clarify directions for future inquiry regarding teacher involvement in curriculum development and reform. Systematic searches were conducted in Google Scholar, ERIC, and Web of Science, complemented by targeted searches in leading journals and backward snowballing (Randolph, 2009). Included studies were peer-reviewed empirical research published in English before February 2026.

The review shows that little is known about teacher involvement in the supra site. In the macro and meso sites, teacher involvement in curriculum development and reform varies considerably between countries. Involvement may take the form of narrow consultation, for example through questionnaires (Humes, 2013), or large-scale systemic approaches in which teachers collaborate with other actors across sites (Soini et al., 2021). The purposes of involving teachers are often linked to strengthening teacher professionalism, fostering agency, and facilitating the introduction of new curricula into schools (Kneen et al., 2023; Kontovourki et al., 2021; Theodorou et al., 2017). However, some studies show that these purposes are not always achieved (Theodorou et al., 2017).

Moreover, few studies explicitly examine teachers’ influence in curriculum reform processes. While some research indirectly indicates that teachers may be overruled by other actors (Sivesind & Westbury, 2016; Theodorou et al., 2017), their influence has rarely been studied directly (Finnanger & Prøitz, 2024). The review also reveals that much of the research on teacher involvement at macro and meso sites comes from a small number of countries, notably Wales, Finland, and Cyprus. Since curriculum reform is embedded in national contexts, traditions, cultures, and forms of governance, there is a need for studies from a wider range of countries that explore how teachers are involved in reform efforts across system sites.

Overview: This study examines how Irish primary teachers experience, make sense of, and enact agency amidst ongoing curriculum reform, with a specific focus on the Primary Language Curriculum (PLC). While research on teacher agency has developed rich sociocultural and ecological accounts, the existential and affective dimensions of agency - how teachers feel and attune to change, and how they navigate responsibility, freedom, and constraint - remain comparatively under-theorised. Addressing this gap, the paper advances a conceptual account of agency grounded in phenomenology and supported by qualitative evidence from interviews with twelve primary teachers. Drawing on interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), it uses vignettes as interpretative exemplars to illuminate the lived textures of agency as teachers negotiate uncertainty, accountability, and professional values in the PLC’s implementation. Research Question:

How do Irish primary teachers enact and experience agency during the implementation of the Primary Language Curriculum, and what existential–affective dynamics (e.g., attunement, responsibility, (in)authenticity) shape their practical deliberations and curricular judgment?

Conceptual Framework:

The framework integrates phenomenology of existence with contemporary accounts of teacher agency to foreground the lived dynamics of change.

1. Existential Attunement (Heidegger’s Unheimlichkeit):
   Unheimlichkeit—often rendered as “not‑at‑homeness”—captures an existential mood of dislocation that surfaces when familiar practices and meanings are unsettled. In curriculum reform, teachers can experience the new landscape as simultaneously compelling and estranging. The study treats attunement not merely as emotion, but as a world-disclosing condition that shapes perception, salience, and readiness-to-act. Analytically, this sensitises the coding to moments of rupture (e.g., uncertainty, anxiety, ambiguity) and to how teachers re-establish bearings through collegial sense-making, practical reasoning, or the re‑articulation of professional purposes.

2. Responsibility and (In)authenticity (Sartre’s Good vs. Bad Faith):
   Sartre’s distinction helps parse how teachers relate to their freedom under constraint. “Good faith” is not naive voluntarism but a lucid acknowledgment of one’s situated agency - owning choices within limits, accepting ambiguity, and acting with integrity. “Bad faith” involves self-deception (e.g., collapsing agency into external mandates or, conversely, denying constraint) that obscures responsibility. This lens enables an analysis of professional judgment as ethical–practical discernment: how teachers name and own what they are doing, justify it, and navigate tensions among policy demands, local contexts, and pupil needs.

3. Bridging to Sociocultural and Ecological Accounts:
   The framework complements, rather than replaces, sociocultural/ecological perspectives by showing how attunement and responsibility mediate the well-known components of agency - iterational (past experiences and dispositions), practical–evaluative (present judgments among options), and projective (orientations to possible futures). Existential–affective dynamics thus become mechanisms of mediation that explain why similar structural conditions can yield divergent enactments of agency across teachers and contexts.

The topic of curricular equality has received attention in recent years as processes of education decentralization, marketization and privatization increase disparities between schools and communities. All students should have the same opportunity to encounter a broad, relevant and high-quality curriculum (Priestley, 2025; Riddle et al., 2025). However, we still have little knowledge about how geography influences curricular opportunities, especially at the primary or lower secondary level. This study contributes to the understanding of spatial and social factors influencing access to the foreign language curriculum at the lower secondary level in a Central European country.

While the requirement for equity of educational outcomes may be a maximalist concept, equality of access to various learning opportunities is perceived as a minimalist requirement. In this sense, geographically oriented studies in particular focus on spatial inequalities in the availability of post-compulsory schools or qualifications of various types and/or of different quality (Bueno & Bonal, 2023), using concepts of supply of schooling or learning opportunities that differ depending on the place where a student lives. Geography of curriculum opportunities in primary or junior secondary schools is a relatively under-researched area as previous studies has focused on a few mainly English-speaking countries (Dean et al., 2023; Grant, 2022; Perry & Southwell, 2014). Here we address the spatial patterns of opportunities for foreign language (FL) learning in lower secondary school, i.e. for students in early adolescence. Arguments for FL learning can be primarily economic (preparation for jobs), or more humanistic and academic – as an important way to learn about different cultures. FL knowledge significantly facilitates the mobility of young people during their study course and expands the possibilities of school graduates to find employment on the labour market. In this way, language instruction mitigates the negative effects of family background and contributes to reducing inequalities in education.

Modernity’s educational projects often aimed at the unification of the population of nation states and therefore preferred a decontextualized curriculum not accounting for local specificities (Barthes et al., 2018). The education systems in most countries under communist rule, as a specific case of modernization, were characterized by a high degree of centralization and standardization. The compulsory foreign language taught in all comprehensive schools was Russian, which was generally unpopular. Other foreign languages at this level were only extra-curricular options (if any). The transformation processes of society and economy after the fall of the communist government and the liberalization of education brought or reinforced spatial differences between the contents of education (curriculum), processes and conditions in schools, and student outcomes. Today, European education policy pursues the “Mother Tongue + 2” policy. In Czechia, this practically means that a student takes one foreign language (usually English) from primary grades. In lower secondary school, student is obliged to start studying Other Foreign Language (OFL), and almost 90% of Czech students study either German or Russian, and about 10% of students learn French or Spanish. Only a quarter of a percent of students learn Italian, Polish, Slovak, Ukrainian or Hebrew.

The main objective of the study is to determine spatial factors influencing the availability of a broad and high-quality language curriculum, and their interaction with the social and ethnic background of the student. We further describe the changes in these factors over time and, in particular, how educational peripheries are formed as places where negative factors accumulate (Robertson, 2021).