Teachers' work today, more than ever before, is heavily shaped and constrained by education policies that insist on standardisation and measurability. Some scholars link this with the global neoliberal agenda that seeks to create strong competition among nation states (Spring, 2004: Leung, 2016) which means that teachers' work is becoming more reductive as they respond to the increased administration around testing, and the uniform requirements of teaching mass produced plans and resources. Many teachers are complaining bitterly about increased administrative workloads and less time for the kind of teaching and learning practices which allows their own agency to be actively drawn upon. The high attrition rate from the teaching profession indicates that the satisfaction of being a creative professional among teachers is dwindling rapidly. This would be a grim picture indeed if it were not for the agency of educators who are passionate about teaching and the impact of their work on the lives of their students. There are always competing discourses at play within institutions, and when the standardisation discourse is bearing down, this is where we often find agentive voices rising up to show alternative ways. Research into the teacher agency space is gaining traction globally as educators speak back to the proliferation and intensification of the aspects of teachers' work that take them outside of the classroom and away from creative planning. This special issue on teacher agency will provide a landmark vehicle for sharing the agentive spaces teachers are able to forge, amid the constraints of current education contexts.
In this special issue, we invite literacy scholars and practitioners to submit manuscripts that consider Teacher Agency as a theme in research, theory, practice, and policy. Teacher agency is necessary to realize an empowered position to act in the service of promoting democratic principles. To that end, we offer some provocations for authors to address in their submissions:
Researching teacher agency
- What are the contextual factors that give rise to different forms of teacher agency?
- How do teachers' past experiences, configurations of future goals, and/or present judgements amid contextual constraints inform how agency is realized?
Theorizing teacher agency
- Teachers act "by means of their environment rather than simply in their environment" (Biesta & Tedder, 2007, p. 137). How do the sociocultural environments in which teachers work mediate their agency?
- How do ecological, temporal, spatial, dialogical, mediational, and other models of agency promote a research agenda for teacher agency in neo-liberal, a-critical times?
Teaching with agency
- How can teachers work agentively, in relation to specific curriculum and discipline-related conditions, to establish an ethic of care and humanize education?
- How do English teachers mobilize their beliefs, values, and attributes in relation to their particular contexts to enact a process of agency?
Sanctioning teacher agency in policy
- How do specific educational policies around the world shape teacher agency, identity, and culture in the Engliah classroom?
- What are the local and global consequences for being a teacher with(out) agency?
Submission Details
Please see the ETPC Author Guidelines for guidelines on submissions, including word limits. Submissions for this Special Issue must be made through the ScholarOne online submission and peer review system. When submitting your manuscript please ensure the correct special issue title is selected from the drop down menu on page 4 of the submission process. For more information, the journal website is: http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/etpc.htm
Deadline for manuscripts: November 30, 2018
Publication date: July 2019
For questions, contact Dr Jennifer Alford ([email protected]) or Dr James Chisholm ([email protected])