Teacher agency for change: Addressing three shortcomings to strengthen the foundations of an (re)emerging research field

Project onder begeleiding van dr. Thibault Coppe (t.coppe rug.nl) & dr. Hanke Korpershoek (h.korpershoek rug.nl)

The recent COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for teachers to be proactive in seeking solutions together to adapt their teaching practices and their schools’ routines (Ehren et al., 2021). Besides this very topical example, recent research showed the crucial role of teachers as change agents for the wider transformative agenda of education (and the challenges associated), including for examples, diversity and inclusion (Pantić et al., 2021), education of refugees (Rose, 2019), and climate change education (Andrzejewski, 2016). As a result, there is a growing interest in teacher agency for change in research and policy discourses and a sense of emergency to promote agency in teachers’ work. Notwithstanding, scholars interested in teacher agency for change highlighted that there is still little clarity on what it means, how it could be measured, and how it could be fostered in schools. These shortcomings impede advancing in understanding this phenomenon and jeopardize efforts toward promoting teacher agency for change. By addressing these shortcomings, the present project pursues the objective of making significant conceptual and empirical contributions to the topic of teacher agency for change. These contributions answer the call for research participating to “flip the system” (i.e., giving back professional autonomy to teachers) by contributing to the definition and the measurement of teacher agency for change and untangling the social mechanisms enacting teacher autonomy and bottom-up teacher initiatives in schools (Biesta, 2015; Evers & Kneyber, 2015).

In plain text, with this project, we aim to develop conceptual and empirical knowledge about the concept of teacher agency for change by addressing three major shortcomings of the current literature about this topic. First, we aim to address the lack of conceptual clarity about the concept of teacher agency for change. Second, we aim to develop and validate a psychometric scale to fill the gap of a quantitative measurement tool of teacher agency for change. Third, we aim to untangle the underlying social mechanisms fostering teacher agency for change in schools.