Re-conceptualising how teacher agency/ies are becoming : Thinking with new materialism

In this thesis, I explore the significance of thinking with new materialism to re-conceptualise how teacher agency is becoming. Teacher agency is considered to be one of the most important factors in education reform, because teachers have the strongest influence on students, and their decision-making practices can determine whether they remain in the profession (Buchanan, 2015; Crandall, 2020; Datnow, 2012). The significance of teachers and their influence on students has been particularly salient during the COVID-19 pandemic and the post-pandemic period (Campbell, 2020; Ehren et al., 2021; OECD, 2023). The novelty of the spatial and temporal re-configurations caused by the pandemic has prompted new materialist discussions on developing novel ways of thinking, including a consideration of how nonhuman matter is also significant to the teaching profession (Heikkilä & Mankki, 2021).

As such, I think with Karen Barad’s agential realism, a new materialist framework, to explore: how teacher agency is becoming through human-nonhuman intra-actions; the significance of the intertwined re-configuration of space, time, and matter when teacher agency is becoming; and implications for power dynamics in the teaching profession. In addition, I explain throughout the thesis how my doctoral journey has been becoming in a nonlinear manner, which was imperative to describe because thinking with new materialism entails acknowledging the nonrepresentational nature of research (Barad, 2007).

I explore how teacher agency is becoming through three boundaries: 1. Exploring how teacher agency is becoming in public school; 2. Exploring how primary teacher agency is becoming; and 3. Exploring how primary teacher agency is becoming in Canada, Australia, and the United States (US). With respect to these bounded areas of inquiry, I employed a qualitative case study approach and generated semi-structured interviews and photo-elicitation data with 10 primary school teachers during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2021. I identified each teacher participant as a case-entanglement which denotes that teachers are not predefined entities because they emerge through their relations with human-nonhuman phenomena. Next, I share the insights that emerged from the interview and photo-elicitation data including: how the COVID-19 pandemic significantly re-configured common temporal, spatial, and material aspects of teaching; how these re-configurations were produced by multicausal human-nonhuman intra-actions and elicited multidirectional effects; and how the research process itself is intra-acting in the entanglement where teacher agency is becoming.

Next, I discuss that the interview and photo-elicitation data, along with insights from the rest of the thesis, illuminate how thinking with new materialism and the usage of teacher agency as a term are incommensurable. I address this incompatibility by re-conceptualising teacher agency into teacher agencies. Teacher agencies diverges from teacher agency, because this notion focuses on the causes AND effects on the outcome of whether possibilities emerge for teachers to shape their practice. Lastly, I explain how thinking with teacher agencies, as an apparatus and other material-discursive practices, has significant implications for understanding and addressing the power dynamics of the teaching profession, including in-justices teachers experience. I detail key implications for policy and practice in addressing such in-justices in the teaching profession including: emphasising relationality, not individuality; acknowledging the significance of space, time, and nonhuman matter; and re-configuring key elements of public school teaching such as teacher accountability practices and curriculum development.

Through this thesis, I make significant theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to knowledge. Theoretically, I think with new materialism and agential realism, which is seldom done to explore teacher agency, and provide a novel re-conceptualisation of teacher agency through the notion of teacher agencies. Methodologically, I re-configure the process of doing research by sharing a nonrepresentational account of writing this thesis. Empirically, I provide novel insights on the temporal, spatial, and material aspects of teaching to re-work teacher policies, practices, and power dynamics.

This work © 2024, Tanjin Ashraf.