Teachers as Agents of Change or Objects of Control? A conceptualization of teacher agency and professional autonomy

Throughout modern history, teachers have been both entrusted with missions of change, and blamed for their failure (or unwillingness) to accomplish these missions, generating the teacher as an ambiguous agent of change (De Saxe & Gourd, 2019; Rury, 2020). Central to this ambiguity – and attempts to impact on it – is what Gieryn (1983) has famously called “boundary-work”: the struggles about what constitutes the teaching profession, including the question of whose, and what kind of, knowledge is legitimate for making what kind of decisions. The educator’s field has been closely interwoven with the field of politics and the state (in particular after the emergence of mass education), as well as with the field of economics (prevalent for example in the call for economically useful graduates). This has led to, on the one hand, considerable pressure on the normative and structural foundations of the teaching profession; and, on the other hand, a complicated tension between teacher agency and professional autonomy when navigating the educational field.
This paper attempts to illuminate the relationship between teacher agency and professional autonomy (cf. Schulte, 2023). It questions the often-practiced conflation of professional autonomy with teacher agency and proposes a framework for conceptualizing autonomy and agency as they operate in and between (educational, political, economic, legal, religious, social, etc.) systems. Using the example of Chinese vocational education as it evolves from the late 19th century through Republican China and finally Communist China, the paper showcases how the interplay of various systems involves and produces different types of agents and knowledge. It thus contributes to a more contextualized and differentiated conceptualization of agency and autonomy, eventually also calling into question the tacit normativities pervading much of educational research.
Bibliography
De Saxe, J. G., & Gourd, J. G. (2019). Radical educators rearticulating education and social change: Teacher agency and resistance, early 20th century to the present. Routledge.
Gieryn, T. F. (1983). Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science: Strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists. American Sociological Review, 48(6), 781–795. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095325
Rury, J. L. (2020). Education and social change: Contours in the history of American schooling (Sixth edition). Routledge, Taylor & Francis group.
Schulte, B. (2023). The policy-practice nexus as ‘politics of use’: Professional autonomy and teacher agency in the classroom. In T. S. Prøitz, P. Aasen, & W. Wermke (Eds.), From education policy to education practice (Vol. 15, pp. 39–57). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36970-4_3