Conference Agenda

Globally, curriculum reforms spotlight teacher agency as pivotal to educational change, yet how it is dynamically enacted in everyday practice and over time remains underexplored. A persistent puzzle emerges: within the same reform context, why do some teachers actively innovate and adapt their teaching, while others respond passively or revert to routines? Such divergence points to teacher agency as situated action—achieved through ongoing interactions with resources, constraints, and demands embedded in working environments. Understanding how agency is achieved and evolves is crucial for supporting teachers as transformative agents in curriculum reform.

This study addresses this issue by examining how high school teachers in Taiwan exercise their agency amid the implementation of the Twelve-Year Basic Education Curriculum Guidelines, a reform that emphasizes student-centered, holistic education and poses substantial challenges to teachers’ professional practice. Beyond subject knowledge and pedagogical skills, the reform requires teachers to navigate new expectations for inquiry-based learning, interdisciplinary integration, and reflective practice. By adopting a multiple-case study approach to explore agency-in-practice within this major policy shift, the study contributes to implementation-oriented scholarship and offers empirically grounded insights into how teacher agency is differentially enacted under shared structural conditions.

Scholars across different disciplines have yet to reach a consensus on the definition and meaning of agency. The concept is frequently conflated with other notions such as motivation, psychological traits, self-direction, resilience, rational choice, selfhood, will, purposiveness, intentionality, initiative, freedom, and creativity—terms that often overlap or even conflict—and is sometimes merely regarded as part of unexplained statistical variation (Hitlin & Johnson, 2015; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998).

This conceptual ambiguity has led to a lack of analytical depth, preventing teacher agency from being recognized as an independent analytical category. Consequently, much research offers only static typologies (“snapshots”) to categorize teachers’ behavioral or emotional tendencies in responding to educational change (e.g., Kang et al., 2022; Tinn, 2024; Pan et al., 2020), failing to capture agency’s fluid, processual nature as constructed through reform engagement (Kang et al., 2022; Robinson, 2012). A shift toward longitudinal, process-oriented perspectives is thus needed (Eteläpelto et al., 2013; Tao & Gao, 2017).

The ecological approach toward teacher agency (Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson, 2015a) addresses these gaps. It transcends the personal-trait versus structural-dualism debate, conceptualizing agency as an emergent phenomenon “achieved” through the interplay of personal capacities and the resources, affordances, and constraints of the action environment (Priestley et al., 2015a). This approach illuminates the core tension teachers face: between performative policies that constrain autonomy (Ball, 2003; Lasky, 2005) and reform demands for critical, innovative professionalism (Schleicher, 2016). In practice, this tension is often worsened by a various of pressures—from policy mandates and accountability to school culture and managerial issues—that can force teachers into compliance, thereby weakening their professional judgment, creativity, and sense of value (Chen, 2000; Richardson & Placier, 2001). Recent work further emphasizes teachers’ subjective perception and exploitation of their professional space (Oolbekkink-Marchand, 2017) and their responses to "affordances" within teaching environments (Aspbury-Miyanishi, 2022). In a crucial refinement, Aspbury-Miyanishi (2022) argues that the core of teacher agency lies not merely in willful action, but in the recognition of affordances. This shifts the analytical focus from labeling “agentic teachers” to examining “moments of agentic practice” within the flow of situated interactions.

Building on this framework, this multiple-case study aims to explore how teacher agency is manifested, developed, enacted, and shaped by ecological conditions. Specifically, this study expected to answer the following questions: (1) How does teacher agency develop and manifest dynamically throughout engagement with curriculum innovation? (2) What ecological conditions (resources, constraints, affordances) enable or constrain its achievement?

Professional relationships among school staff are vital for professional learning and school improvement. Social network analysis research confirms that the structure of staff networks — who turns to whom, how reciprocally, and how centrally — shapes outcomes ranging from inclusive teaching practices to professional wellbeing. Yet, most school network studies examine only a single relational type, typically advice or general collaboration, leaving a gap regarding whether the factors that shape tie formation in one relational domain operate similarly in others. This gap is particularly consequential when expressive ties such as emotional support and inspiration are considered alongside instrumental ones such as advice.

This study addresses this gap by examining three relational types — advice, emotional support, and inspiration — across seven primary and secondary schools in Finland, Scotland, and Sweden. Drawing on the subject-centered sociocultural approach to professional agency (Eteläpelto et al., 2013) and social capital theory (Lin, 2001), we investigate how these three network types relate to one another, how their structures differ, and whether staff members’ professional agency and seniority predict tie formation differentially across these relational layers. By applying exponential random graph models (ERGMs) with meta-analytic pooling across schools in three national policy contexts, this study provides one of the first cross-national, multiplex analyses of staff network tie formation in schools.

The theoretical framework centres on Eteläpelto et al.’s (2013) subject-centered sociocultural approach, which conceptualises professional agency as analytically separable from yet mutually constitutive with the social conditions of work. Building on this framework, Vähäsantanen et al. (2022) operationalised professional agency along three dimensions: Influencing at work (the capacity to participate in decision-making and shape one’s work community), Participation at work (active collaboration and engagement with colleagues), and Negotiating professional identity (the ability to realise professional goals and develop one’s professional self). While this line of work has advanced understanding of what professional agency entails at the individual level, its implications for how staff members interact with one another — that is, for the formation of professional network ties — remain largely unexplored.

The concept of relational agency (Edwards, 2005) provides a theoretical bridge between individual professional agency and network tie formation. Edwards (2005) described relational agency as a professional’s capacity to work with others by recognising what they bring to a joint enterprise. Pantić (2015) extended this to teacher agency, arguing that agency is not only an individual enactment but also a relational accomplishment constituted through purposeful interaction with colleagues. Taken together, these accounts suggest that professional agency and network tie formation are mutually implicated: agentic staff may actively seek professional interaction (a sender mechanism) and simultaneously become visible to colleagues as valuable partners, attracting incoming ties (a receiver mechanism). This dual theoretical possibility motivates testing both sender and receiver effects of professional agency dimensions in our network models.

The following three research questions guide the study:

RQ1: To what extent are ties in staff members’ networks for advice, emotional support and inspiration related to one another in each school?

RQ2: How is the structure of staff members’ networks (dis)similar across advice, emotional support and inspiration?

RQ3: Do staff members’ professional agency and seniority explain their social tie formation in the networks for advice, emotional support and inspiration respectively?

By situating professional agency within a network-analytic framework across three countries, this study extends the agency theory toward more explicit treatment of how agency is perceived and recognised by others in school staff communities.

Teaching is a profession fundamental to a democratic society. In our society, it is essential that teachers develop a strong professional identity and a robust sense of agency to uphold and advance equitable and inclusive educational practice. Yet, across the world, clear and compelling reasons for entering or remaining in the teaching profession are rare, and many teachers may struggle to articulate their own purpose. This lack of a shared sense of purpose can result in teaching practices and reform initiatives that are disconnected from both personal commitment and broader social significance. The growing global challenges of teacher shortages and burnout may, at least in part, reflect this erosion of meaning and purpose within the profession.

To overcome this issue, it would be undeniably essential to improve the socio-economic status of teachers, but this alone would be insufficient. A vital avenue for overcoming the lack of a shared sense of purpose among teachers must lie in collaborative and existential dialogues among teachers aimed at realizing equitable and inclusive practices within the school community (Impedovo, Ferriera-Meyers, & Inoue, 2023). Lesson study, for example, is widely recognized for providing such opportunities for reflective dialogue (Ronda & Danipog, 2022; Stigler & Hiebert, 1999), and numerous efforts have sought to implement and sustain it across the world.

However, if lesson study is not anchored in a teacher's personal sense of significance, it can easily devolve into a routine task—a "fossilized" practice lacking both purpose and sustainability. Indeed, in Japan, where lesson study is deeply institutionalized, the stagnation and fossilization of the practice are reported as persistent challenges (Chichibu, 2005). There, teachers could be easily consumed by non-instructional tasks to meet the accountability demands of parents, the local community, and the government.

This study assumes that teacher agency holds the key to overcoming this problem (OECD, 2025). It investigates the nature of teacher agency among expert elementary school teachers in Japan who have taught successfully for many years, aiming to develop a deep understanding of how such agency is activated and sustained.

1) What characterizes the teacher agency of expert teachers, and how do they embody their teacher agency in their teaching?

2) How do they develop and sustain their teacher agency? What enables them to engage in recursive cycles of practice improvement while navigating the inherent complexities of educational practice to actualize their purposes as teachers?

3) What lessons can be learned for structuring teacher education programs—such as lesson study—more purposefully so that teachers develop and maintain a resilient sense of agency?

The study employs action research as an analytical lens, in which the deconstruction of the “I” across iterative cycles of action and reflection constitutes a key dimension of analysis.(Robertson, 2000; Whitehead & McNiff, 2006). This framework allows for an investigation into how teachers can overcome "living contradictions"—the gap between their educational visions and their actual experiences in classrooms and schools (Whitehead, 2012). Using this framework, the study aims to make sense of how teachers’ lessons reflect their professional missions, as well as their long-term developmental histories and the self-transformation journeys grounded in reflective inquiry into their practice.

The ultimate goal of this study is to point toward new directions for empowering teachers and potentially reversing the widespread disempowerment and burnout affecting the profession globally. It aims to suggest ways to address shared educational challenges—such as teacher shortages and the marginalization of the teaching profession—so that truly equitable and inclusive educational practices can be actualized in schools across the world.

Reflexivity is considered a key characteristic of prospective and practicing teachers (Kobl, 2020). It can promote the development of professional skills and is itself an independent learning objective in teacher training (von Aufschnaiter, 2023). Specifically, reflection is used in the context of school teaching to review pedagogical actions (Krautz, 2016), to prepare and follow up on lessons (Jeschke et al., 2021), or to analyze one's own teaching practice (Richter et al., 2022).

The research project, which is designed as a monographic doctoral thesis, examines reflection in the context of STEM teaching (BMBWF, n.d.). In contrast to subject-specific teaching, STEM teaching is interdisciplinary and project-oriented mathematics, computer science, natural sciences, and technology teaching, which is taught in selected Austrian secondary schools as part of a school trial for two to three additional hours per week (ibid.). A particular focus of interest is to explicate reflection, which usually takes place on a mental level (Dewey, 1933; Nguyen et al., 2014; Lenske & Lohse-Bossenz, 2023), by using the method of "Thinking Aloud" (Konrad, 2010) and, based on this, reconstructing their basic rules (Von Aufschnaiter, 2023). To reconstruct reflection, the paradigm of reconstructive social research is applied using the documentary method (Bohnsack, 2013).

A particular potential of the documentary method is that it can provide access to an individual's habitus. Bourdieu defined habitus as "[...] systems of permanent and transferable dispositions" (Bourdieu, 1980/1999, p. 98 f., quoted from Koller, 2020, p. 146). Dispositions are therefore patterns of thought and perception that are internalized not only based on an individual's social background but also because of their professional experience (Helsper, 2018). Habitus is fundamental to subjective action or behavior in that it reveals the boundaries within which this action or behavior can be located (Koller, 2020). In the PhD project, habitus is explored through individual reflective behavior.

Since there is no uniform understanding of reflection (e.g., Arendt et al., 2025; Wyss, 2018), there is a need to develop a working definition of reflection with the scientific background (Beauchamp, 2015; Nguyen et al., 2014; von Aufschnaiter et al., 2019). Reflection is the "conscious consideration of one's own actions in and around the classroom and the mental derivation of consequences for action" (Heinzel, 2022; Nguyen et al., 2014; von Aufschnaiter et al., 2019). This working definition needs to be reformulated and expanded for the documentary perspective. However, the fundamental aspects contained therein remain valid. Accordingly, from a documentary perspective, reflection is defined as "engaging with self-[…] related ways of thinking and acting in contexts of teacher action" (Hinzke et al., 2022, p. 162). This definition implies the influence of prior knowledge and experience on one's own reflection (Kramer & Pallsen, 2019). Prior knowledge and experience shape the individual practice of reflection without necessarily being made explicit (Nohl, 2017). In the paradigm of the documentary method, these kinds of „meanings“ are called documentary meanings, which are distinguished from immanent or communicative meanings (Bohnsack, 2013). In summary, Mannheim (1980, p. 73) refers in this context to "atheoretical knowledge," which is part of an individual's habitual actions and opens up access to habitus (Bohnsack et al., 1995). Habitus is developed at the individual level and located in the collective, as it is understood as "a kind of mediating link [...] between objective social conditions and subjective individual actions or behavior" (Koller, 2020, p. 146). Habitus in the collective always occurs in the context of a specific field (Rieger-Ladich, 2017). Accordingly, the PhD project refers to the reflexive teacher habitus (Helsper, 2018).