Theorizations of teacher agency: in relations, ecologies and immanent events

Abstract The importance of teacher agency has been cited in relation to school reform, professionalism, teacher retention, and the ways in which contemporary ethical issues are addressed. However, teacher agency is often referred to without explicit definition, and different framings appear in the research literature. By exploring the ontological underpinnings of key theorizations, I highlight the need for greater clarity around what constitutes teacher agency and where it is situated. Relational accounts of agency highlight a dialectic of the individual and social in teacher action. This limits analysis and fails to account for how individual action and institutional practice is co-constituted. Indeed, the issue of situating individual judgement within social norms can be traced back to the Enlightenment. Recent attempts to overcome inherent dualisms in describing agency have drawn on pragmatist philosophy, introducing a spatio-temporal dimension to describe the co-evolution of individual action and social norms. The ecological model, drawing on pragmatist foundations, provides analytical power and ontological clarity by characterizing teacher agency as emergent phenomena. Nevertheless, the model retains the centrality of rational human judgement, and I take up the suggestion that teacher agency can be further understood by drawing on new materialist accounts, which decentre the human. Working with Deleuze’s immanent philosophy, I show how situating human thought and action as aspects of an event, opens up consideration of the emergent patterning of educational practice. Attention to immanent difference and repetition provides new ways to consider teacher agency, which do not place the responsibility for change solely on the rational judgement of teachers.