Kyureghyan, Hasmik; (2024) Exploring teacher professional agency in the context of the bottom-up professional development conferences: perspectives and implications. Doctoral thesis (Ed.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis investigates the interplay of teacher agency and bottom-up teacher professional development conferences in Armenia by exploring the types of teacher agency and the potential of bottom-up TPD conferences for practice. While teacher agency is an important phenomenon, it is an under-researched area, particularly in the context of teacher professional development. Nevertheless, the relevant literature suggests that there are two main approaches to the conceptualisation of teacher agency. According to the traditional approach, it is mostly viewed as a possession (Giddens, 1984; Hollis, 1994), an inner capacity. While, according to the ecological approach, agency is understood as an emergent phenomenon of the actor-situation transaction (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998, p.963), concerned with how actors critically alter their responses to problematic situations. The authors define agency as a ‘temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and ‘acted out’ in the present (as a capacity to contextualise past habits and future projects with the contingencies of the moment)’ (ibid., p.963). This research looks at teacher agency through the lens of ecological conceptualisation of the phenomenon of teacher agency. Building on the inductive and abductive approaches and thematic analysis, this qualitative exploratory study addresses the questions of what the relationship between teacher agency and bottom-up TPD is, what agency types can be observed within the bottom-up TPD conference context and what potential the explored context might have for practice. The participants were teachers who participated in the bottom-up TPD conferences for three consecutive years 2019, 2020, and 2021. Three different types of data collection methods were employed to gather rich accounts of data. I collected the data through the survey and semi-structured interviews (for 2019 and 2020) and field notes (for 2021). The study identifies four types of teacher agency: i) enquiring agency: teachers who seek learning opportunities; ii) autonomous agency: teachers who take advantage of their autonomy of choice and decision-making; iii) change-maker agency: teachers who are committed to making change both in their student’s learning and their peers and iv) acknowledging agency: teachers who seek opportunities to be valued and recognised. The results of this study suggest that there is a positive interplay between teacher agency and the bottom-up TPD conference approach. The bottom-up TPD conference features create a favourable environment for teachers to foster and exercise their agency. The relationship between teacher agency and bottom-up TPD conference approach is complex and influenced by characteristics of the education environment, teachers’ past experiences, their orientation for the future and their current capacity to act, as well as their responses to opportunities and constraints. Nevertheless, by problematising teacher agency within the bottom-up TPD conference approach, this study provides insights into understanding the possible features of a model that has the potential to balance individual and system approaches for teacher agency within an alternative TPD context.

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