Researching teachers’ agentic orientations to educational change in finnish schools

Abstract

This chapter addresses teacher agency in interpreting an educational change effort within the context of two Finnish schools. Specifically, the study examines the display of agentic orientations in teachers’ accounts while they reflect on the uptake of a new digital learning environment (called the FUSE Studio) at their schools as they adapt to a new core curriculum. Informed by sociocultural theorising, the approach employed in this chapter underscores a temporal perspective to researching teacher agency and agentic orientations in the context of educational reform. The data comprise 23 teachers’ semi-structured interviews after a 2-day in-service FUSE training programme and were analysed using qualitative content analysis. Our analysis revealed four agentic orientations with distinct temporal dimensions of agency that the teachers displayed towards the educational change efforts their schools were undergoing: practical-evaluative, reproductive, critical-projective, and creative-projective orientation. These agentic orientations and their temporal features unpack the dynamic processes of how teachers manage educational reforms to address their personal and local needs. The chapter concludes by discussing future directions for research on teacher agency amid educational change.