There is a growing body of literature that reconceptualises teacher agency through an ecological lens, encapsulating the temporal, contextual and relational dimensions of agency (see for example Biesta & Tedder 2006; Priestley et al., 2015). This literature indicates the significance of teachers’ professional and personal experiences (past), their contexts and relationships (present), and their aspirations and goals (future) in shaping agency. Although there are theories (Priestley et al., 2015) that promote an ecological perspective on teacher agency, there appears to be limited research on teachers’ life histories, their backgrounds, motivations, beliefs and aspirations, and their achievement of agency: a gap that my PhD research aims to plug.
Under the reformed Curriculum for Wales, teachers are being positioned as agents-of-change. This is a global phenomenon that can be witnessed in neighbouring countries, such as Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, and further afield, such as The New Zealand Curriculum. While curricula policy is changing and providing teachers with increased agency, questions surrounding to what extent teachers’ practice reflects changes in policy and what enables teachers to achieve agency in their practice have been raised (Marsh & Willis, 2006; Deng, 2012; Priestley et al., 2015).
For decades, agency has been conceptualised as a human capacity, as something that agents possess (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Biesta & Tedder, 2006). The conceptualisation of agency as an individual capacity coincides with the structure-vs-agency debate dominating the sociological field of thought (Giddens, 1976; Bourdieu, 1977), where both structuralists (Durkheim, 1973) and interactionalists (Weber, 1946) focus on identifying determinants of social action and using agency as a factor to explain human behaviour. However, the way agency has been conceptualised is being questioned as researchers reconceptualise agency as something agents achieve within their temporal and relational environments.
