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ABSTRACT
Claims about teachers’ potential to influence change tend to overlook that educational outcomes arise from complex, situated practices of many actors including teachers. This article introduces a tool for Teachers’ Reflection on their Agency for Change (TRAC) for empirical analysis of teaching as a collective activity designed to ‘track’ the diverse outcomes of teacher agency, including but not limited to student attainment, while accounting for the relational and institutional contexts. Activity theory is applied to map purposes and contexts of eacher agency. Uses of TRAC in professional development and inquiry are illustrated with an example of one teacher’s reflection during her collaboration with researchers on a change project aimed at ‘closing the attainment gap’. Inclusive pedagogy is used as an interpretative lens to discuss agency in relation to its specific purpose and context. The article offers guidance for future uses of TRAC to consider teachers’ impact on any change agenda.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The project promoted a coherent vision of inclusive practice across communities of schools, teacher educators and policymakers in seven countries in South East Europe. The framework was designed to map university, NGO and school-based teacher development programmes in the region (Hollenweger, Pantić, and Florian Citation2015).
2. A simplified version of the Activity Model was sufficient for the project purposes. The original model developed by Engeström and his colleagues (Engeström Citation1987, Citation2001) is more complex.
3. ESRC Impact Acceleration Award, Making Visible Teacher Agency for Inclusion: https://www.team4change.education.ed.ac.uk/
4. The original version of the log and collaborative methodology are presented elsewhere (Pantić Citation2015b).
5. The web-based log is available at: reflective-teacher.net
6. The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) determines 10 deciles based on pupils’ home addresses classified by the level of deprivation released by the Scottish Government on 18 December 2012.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nataša Pantić
Dr Nataša Pantić is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, School of Education. Her recent research has focused on teachers’ relational agency and collaboration in contexts of educational inclusion and diversity. Her research interests also include educational change and teacher education, as well as links between education and citizenship. She has published extensively in the field’s major international journals, books and other outlets, and regularly engages in collaborative projects with practitioners and consultancies for international organisations.