How Context Matters: Educational Autonomy, Teacher Agency, and the Politics of the Classroom

Teacher agency has usually been researched from two different perspectives. On one side, scholars are concerned with questions of teacher autonomy vis-à-vis specific accountability regimes, and apply, in the broadest sense, a governance framework. On the other, there is a more normatively grounded discussion of teacher autonomy, emphasizing how teachers, due to various new forms of (neo-liberal) governance, become increasingly de- professionalized. While acknowledging both perspectives, this keynote lecture questions the conflation of educational autonomy with teacher agency. Drawing on the concept of the ‘politics of use’, teachers, as street-level agents of the state, are shown to potentially gain more agency when the autonomy of their schools and of the wider education system becomes restricted. The lecture suggests that the ways in which policy implementation processes have been conceptualized need to be reconsidered. Particular attention must be paid to the political-ideological and normative specificities of both the investigated policy system and of the investigator’s own research traditions, to ensure that policy implementation processes can be compared across a broad variety of cases.