Hardman, Mark;
(2025)
Theorisations of Teacher Agency: in Relations, Ecologies and Immanent Events.
Journal of Philosophy of Education
, Article qhaf035. 10.1093/jopedu/qhaf035.
(In press).
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Abstract
The importance of teacher agency has been cited in relation to school reform, professionalism, teacher retention and addressing contemporary ethical issues. 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 spatiotemporal 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.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Theorisations of Teacher Agency: in Relations, Ecologies and Immanent Events |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/jopedu/qhaf035 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhaf035 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment > Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10209435 |
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