The Policy-Practice Nexus as ‘Politics of Use’: Professional Autonomy and Teacher Agency in the Classroom

This chapter approaches the policy-practice nexus by scrutinizing the relationship between teacher agency and professional autonomy. Teacher agency has usually been researched from two different perspectives. On one side, scholars are concerned with questions of professional 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 professional autonomy, emphasizing how teachers, due to various new forms of (neo-liberal) governance, become increasingly de-professionalized. While acknowledging both perspectives, this chapter questions the conflation of professional autonomy with teacher agency. Drawing on the concept of the 'politics of use' and findings from fieldwork in China, the chapter proposes a framework for conceptualizing autonomy and agency as they operate in and between systems, involving and producing different types of agents.

The chapter's findings suggest 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.