Learning, unlearning and redefining teachers’ agency in international private education: a Swedish education company operating in India

ABSTRACT

Private international education is on the rise, but we still have limited knowledge on how different commercial actors operate in this field and how it affects local teachers and their work in the schools abroad. Swedish school companies have been active in exporting schooling in the international arena, including “Swedish” education models. In this article, we examine one company and their operations in India. We explore the interpretations of the company education model by teachers in the Indian schools, and how this affects their professional capacity. Mixed qualitative methods of interviews, on-site school visits and documentary reviews, were used to examine the possibilities for teachers to exercise professional agency within their working environment. Our findings show that teachers operate within a highly structured pedagogical environment characterised by a given curriculum, a centralised learning platform and training programme, and a set of dominant discourses around values and teaching practices. Teachers are expected to embrace a new professional identity in a process of discarding past experiences and adopting the new professional language given by the company's particular education model. In willingly embracing the company discourses and expectations, teachers’ agency tends to be constrained.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher agency
• international schools
• local teachers
• private education
• India
• Sweden

Introduction

In this article, we examine how local teachers working in Swedish international schools in India respond to the education model used by their school, and how this shapes their professional agency. During the last decades, a for-profit education industry has emerged in Sweden, enabled by reform decisions and policies that entailed extensive privatisation in compulsory and upper secondary education. Privately owned “free schools”, exclusively funded through taxation, operate as commercial businesses, giving rise to a substantial education industry (Holm et al., 2022; Rönnberg, 2017). Some of the largest Swedish free school companies have begun in recent years to export their services abroad, a largely underexplored trend in research (Rönnberg et al., 2022). Despite there being a global market for private international education fuelled by a growing middle class in emerging economies (Gibson & Bailey, 2022; Gorur & Arnold, 2022), we still know little about how these commercially-driven developments affect the work of teachers and with what consequences (Bunnell, 2022; cf. Yemini et al., 2022).

In crossing borders, education companies enter terrains that define and regulate schooling in very national terms (Parreira Do Amaral et al., 2019). As a result, they adapt to regulatory frames around curricula, assessment, ways of organising schooling, and traditional practices hence, operating in “third spaces” they construct in order to differentiate their educational offer (Hartmann, 2021, p. 369). In this process, when international companies bring their own culture, ideas about teaching, and products in the form of curricular and pedagogical approaches, they disrupt in potentially significant ways the local practices of schooling and local teachers’ work (cf. Friend et al., 2022; Kamenarac, 2022; Poole, 2022a; Winchip, 2022). The process often leads to the internationalisation of (non-international) private schools modelling themselves on Western ones (Babu & Mahajan, 2021; Sancho, 2016; Wu & Koh, 2022). Such disruptions may be seen as positive by parents who seek an international, cosmopolitan education for their children, that will also increase their social advantage in competitive schooling systems (Wright & Lee, 2019). But, seen from a systems perspective, they may also further existing inequalities. International schools become sites for the reproduction of local elites (Babu & Mahajan, 2021; Gardner-McTaggart, 2016), and create disconnections between local social and cultural contexts and the internationally oriented pupils they produce (Bunnell, 2022; Gibson & Bailey, 2022). All these perspectives create potential tensions in the work of schools and teachers, since they have consequences for the learning environment and cultures of schools, but also more directly, teachers’ work.

Our study focuses on the Swedish company “LearnyComp” (LC),¹ their schools in India, and the local teachers working in these schools. We research the application and interpretation of the company's education model (the LC programme) in three school sites, and we focus on its effects on how teachers define their work. Drawing on ideas of teacher agency as an active dimension of professional practice, our research focuses on the capacity of the Indian teachers who work in LearnyComp to shape their practice in their interactions with the school environment as constructed by principals, company representatives, and wider school discourses. We address the following research questions:

1. what are the conceptions of educational purpose that teachers and principals promote as important in their work and what discourses do they use around teaching, learning and pupils?

2. what perceptions do the teachers and principals have of the changes that they, as professionals, need to perform to adapt to the Swedish company “LC philosophy”?

3. what are the company discourses articulated by company representatives and in documentation, around teaching, learning and teachers, and how do they frame and shape the teachers’ work and teachers’ agency?

Review of the literature

International schools and teachers’ experiences

Previous literature has focused on the operation of international schools, for instance, the International Baccalaureate (Gardner-McTaggart, 2018; Ledger, 2016), the provision of (low-fee) private education, primarily in developing countries (Härmä, 2009; Srivastava & Walford, 2016; Tooley & Dixon, 2006), and the production of “global citizens” (Woods & Kong, 2020). The literature is also targeting expatriate teachers working in the international schools’ industry, often reporting negative feelings around professional agency and work experience (Bailey, 2015; Bunnell, 2017; Bunnell & Poole, 2023; Winchip, 2022; Wu & Koh, 2022). Early studies developed typologies of international school teachers, and classified them according to their origin, motivation and nature of their work contract (Garton, 2000). More recently, researchers produced more sophisticated typologies that account for teachers’ identities, motivations, international orientation, and other personal and family characteristics (Bailey & Cooker, 2019; Rey et al., 2020), that capture variations in their experiences. We note an important argument in this literature suggesting a shift away from “the tyranny of the typology” with Poole (2022a, p. 1157) proposing instead an analysis that gives voice to individual teachers, and avoids the essentialising of their experience by “oversimplifying the complex and contradictory nature of (their) identities” (p. 1158). International school teachers’ identities are relational and under constant construction and negotiation, and their experiences can vary greatly depending on the local contexts where they teach, their past practices, future aspirations, and of course the increasingly precarious financial conditions of their work (Bailey & Cooker, 2019; Poole 2022b).

In this literature, there is much attention on the experiences of expatriate teachers, but less focus on what researchers called host country (Poole, 2022b) or local teachers (Rey et al., 2020), educated within their country, and working in international and internationalised (national) schools, together with Western expatriate teachers and managers. Findings from these few studies suggest that local teachers can be diverse in their motivations to work in these schools, (Poole, 2022b), they perceive themselves as of a lower status than their Western colleagues (Brandin, 2021), and report paternalistic attitudes and uncritical adoption of Western pedagogies (Brandin, 2021). In a study of Chinese teachers working in an internationalised school, Lai et al. (2016) found that despite the tensions, local teachers also show a “high level of criticality and selectivity” in adjusting imported pedagogies, hence creating spaces for enhanced agentic practices and engagement in mutual learning (p. 20).

In his work, Poole (2022b) points out that “the voices of host country teachers have not been included” in the literature on international schooling (p. 425). Our research contributes to this research agenda, and examines the teachers’ responses to and interactions within the Swedish private international school company, bringing attention to the experiences and voices of a very under-researched group.

A Swedish school company in India – the supply and demand sides of the market

LearnyComp is one of the largest education companies in Sweden. From around the 2010s and onwards, the company has also embarked on an international expansion (cf. Rönnberg, 2017). According to the company figures, the LC programme is implemented today worldwide in more than 100 schools and used by 25,000 pupils and 2500 teachers (LearnyComp Education, 2022). LearnyComp's educational platform and prime educational innovation is the LC programme (also referred to as “a concept” and “a philosophy”). Outside Sweden, LearnyComp offers adapted versions of this LC Programme and enters ventures with different international actors. Work to reframe and adapt the set-up and curricular content of the LC programme is carried out by curriculum developers employed by the company, intended to meet the requirements of the different national education settings. The company turned to India early in their international expansion and followed a similar model as in Sweden, i.e. building and operating schools based on LC. In brief, the LC programme emphasises personalised learning with an active pupil at the centre, it defines the teachers’ roles as “mentoring” and “coaching” to aid and guide pupils in reaching their full potential and aims at “a global future” (cf. Rönnberg et al., 2022). In an LC-programme online Learning Portal, all teaching resources, such as readings, materials and exercises, are collected and organised in steps. This is done to facilitate personalised learning through for instance a pupil-maintained logbook, to enable each pupil to work at their own pace towards the goals they identify in collaboration with their teacher-coach.

India and its education sectors offer a hospitable demand-driven context for international private school providers. A recent report by UNESCO (2022) suggests that south Asia is the world region with the biggest growth of non-state actors in education, with India in particular featuring about 35% of all its pupils registered in private, mostly for-profit, schools. The country has a long tradition of hosting international schools, dating back to the colonial period and the establishment of elite private schools that offered a British education and displayed a “colonial and aristocratic inheritance” (Rizvi, 2014, p. 305). A series of historic political and socioeconomic factors resulted in the steep growth of non-state actors involved in education provision both in the form of international private schools and a huge increase in private tutoring to give children a competitive advantage (Gupta, 2023). Kingdon (2020) categorises all Indian schools into three major types: Government schools, Aided schools, and Private (aided and unaided) schools and reports a huge rise in enrolments in private schools especially in the urban areas (p. 1796). This rise was seen as a response to limited state capacity in human and financial resources, and organisational designs for schooling, as well as increasingly low trust in the quality of state schools (Bhatty et al., 2022). A recent reform under the name “National Education Policy 2020”, is seen to mark the “latest step in increasing facilitation of private engagement in education” through increasing flexibility and autonomy and encouraging private-public education partnerships (UNESCO, 2022, p. 14). In addition, a growing knowledge-based economy and new wealth creation contributed to significant social mobility (Kim, 2019), and the demand for higher quality school standards (Kumar & Choudhury, 2021; UNESCO, 2022). This was coupled with a demand from privileged social groups for English-medium private schooling, long considered as “a signature of the elite since colonial times” (Nambissan, 2021, p. 15). As aspirations for middle-class lifestyles have burgeoned and the private sector expanded, so did the market for English-speaking international schools (Gorur & Arnold, 2022).

It is worth noting that the National Education Policy 2020 recognised as problematic the traditional “culture of rote learning” in Indian schools and argues for a reform that “will move the education system towards real understanding and towards learning how to learn” (Government of India, 2020 para 4.4). The policy document emphasises among others, “experiential and inquiry-based learning”, “holistic development of learners”, “critical thinking”, “multilingualism”, the empowerment of pupils “through flexibility in course choices”, and advocates pedagogical approaches that will make teaching interesting, fun, and flexible (paras 4.5, 4.6, 4.10, 4.21). It also proposes fundamental reforms in teacher education, in recognition that the “quality of teacher education … is not where it should be, and consequently the quality and motivation of teachers does not reach the desired standards” (para 5.1).

LearnyComp establishes itself within this market, building new schools and joining up in ventures with local entrepreneurs who hire and train local staff for their schools. Despite the differences in size and location, all Indian LearnyComp schools offer the LC programme, share similar designs and layouts in their buildings and premises, as well as the LC programme pedagogical approach. LearnyComp school fees in India are considered relatively expensive (for example, charging appr. 300 EUR/month for Grades 9–10). The parents applying to these schools are mainly (upper)middle-class Indians, many with international connections and often experience of working abroad. Generally, the schools follow the Indian exam system CBSE, but at one of the three schools of our sample, the British examination system is also offered to pupils as an additional option.

Teachers in the LearnyComp schools have an Indian teacher education background and/or teaching experiences from working in other Indian schools. When recruited for employment, they are trained in a specially designed teacher training programme to learn about the company and its LC concept. The interest in our research is to understand the dynamics and possible tensions at play when the (Indian) teachers’ agency and experiences of practice encounter the (Swedish) company framings of professional roles, and the school environments.

Teacher agency as an analytical lens

We draw on theoretical work that defines the dimensions of agency as relevant to teachers and their work environment (Biesta et al., 2015) and frames agency through an ecological (Biesta & Tedder, 2007) and relational approach (Pantić, 2017). Grounding agency within concrete possibilities for action, this approach allows for a nuanced analysis of teachers’ discourses around their work, their capacity for constructing and changing practice, the beliefs and values that underpin them (Aspbury-Miyanishi, 2022). In this body of work, agency is not a property, i.e. “not something that people have”, but “something that people do” (Biesta et al., 2015, p. 626). It is enacted through practice, achieved in, and through, specific contexts. The ecology of teaching consists of the institutional and organisational environments within which teachers operate, and so contains the curriculum, teaching and learning resources, prevailing pedagogical approaches and discourses, collegial relations, as well as past histories and professional experiences. It is the interactions between these ecological contexts and professional action that produce the conditions under which agency can be achieved, encouraged or hindered. Agency is manifested through these “actor-situation transactions” and is concerned with the ways in which teachers can critically respond to, and shape, their work environment (Biesta et al., 2015, p. 626). Drawing on pragmatism and action-theory perspectives to practice, teacher agency is always situated and cannot (should not) be separated from the structures and contexts that give rise to it and within which it is embedded. (Teaching) agency does not get free from structures (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998), rather it is made of the goals, intentionality, and beliefs that are bound up with its constituent discourses (Aspbury-Miyanishi, 2022).

In defining agency as the capacity to select amongst a range of courses of action given certain education goals and intentions, it is important to consider what the different options for action are. These options are defined by (a) institutional parameters of individual schools and systems, and (b) the resources (of a cultural, social and material nature) available to teachers, both central in our analysis of LearnyComp India and teacher agentic possibilities. This view of agency is placed in contrast to agendas that promote school change and teacher development through narrowly defined transformations, where teachers implement outside prescriptions and work towards tightly defined competency frameworks, without being able to contribute to the construction of the object of change while being held accountable for its effective implementation (Mooney Simmie, 2021; Priestley et al., 2016). Instead, the ecological view of agency highlights “that actors always act by means of their environment … and the achievement of agency (results) from the interplay of individual efforts, available resources and contextual and structural factors” (Biesta & Tedder, 2007, p. 137). The extent to which teachers are capable to autonomously design their practice, to draw on their expertise and judgement, and “to make active use of their professional space” reveals their agentic capacity and the range of their professional action (Oolbekkink-Marchand et al., 2017, p. 37). In order to understand better the individual capacity of teachers in action, Biesta et al. (2015) draw on the work of Emirbayer and Mische (1998) who capture the agentic dimension of social action as a:

temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment). (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 963)

In introducing a temporal dimension to the analysis of agency, it becomes a construct of past achievements, experiences and patterns of action, which, in a teaching context gives resonance not only to practice in the here-and-now, but also to the pedagogical plans and goals for the short- and longer-term future/s. This is also a central dimension in our analysis.

Methodological and analytical approaches

Study design and empirical data

The research is part of a wider project, and was constructed as a case study (Yin, 2018) of professional practice possibilities when international private actors operate in different national contexts. The study involved extensive fieldwork at three LearnyComp schools in India, preceded by preparatory work before the on-site fieldwork in February 2020. This included interviews with experts on India and its education system, and on ethical procedures and expectations that are important to ensure respectful access and handling of data in local settings. We also conducted interviews with six high-level LearnyComp representatives in Sweden and in India. These enabled an ethically-sensitive, informed access and consent for the on-site research. The fieldwork took place in three LearnyComp schools, selected by their geographical closeness (all three are located in the north of the country). Each of the three schools was visited for two days, during which formal interviews were conducted with school principals (one former and three active ones), and eleven teachers across the sites. In addition, the visiting researcher met with various teaching staff during these visits and was invited to participate in staff meetings. In order to have a comprehensive overview of the schools, documents from the parent company in Sweden, and the Indian schools, from schools’ online presentations and brochures, were also collected.

We designed two interview protocols, adjusted to the participants and their position. First, the six high-level company representatives were asked to describe the company and the Indian branches, to present their ambitions; and discuss the curricular adaptions needed to conform to the Indian schooling regulations, and the LC concept, its educational purpose and pedagogical changes it brings in connection to the Indian teachers’ professional work.

Second, the four principals and eleven teachers were asked to address how they engage with the LC programme and what new leadership and teaching roles they needed to take in the process; what they identify as the LC value for pupils and learning; and any areas of difference in the LearnyComp context as compared to their earlier professional experiences.

The interviews lasted between 30 and 70 minutes each, were audio-recorded and transcribed. In addition, fieldnotes were made that carefully filtered out references to individual pupils, teachers, principals and other school staff. Similarly, the interview data collection process, reporting and storage ensured that no teacher in the company schools is mentioned by name. Still, all interviewees were aware that the company itself could potentially be identified (despite the use of a pseudonym) and provided explicit consent for their participation in the research. Throughout the study, the Swedish Research Council ethical guidelines (Vetenskapsrådet, 2017) were carefully followed. This included full information to all school actors through both the school principals and the researchers about the nature of the study and use of data, and the possibility at any time for a complete withdrawal from the research, including the withdrawal of recorded and transcribed material.

Finally, we acknowledge our positionality as researchers from a Swedish university, with English as a second language and engaged in fieldwork with teachers and school staff who spoke English as bilingual speakers. The issues of language, profession and culture play a role in research across and within one's own location and may influence the way researchers and research participants interact (Merriam et al., 2001). In our case, we share several dimensions with our research participants, the knowledge of the Swedish context (in our interviews with some of the managers and company representatives), and experience of teaching in schools (in common with the Indian teachers). Hence, we depart from simplistic dualities of linguistic, occupational and cultural insiders/outsiders, and acknowledge the fluidity of our own and our research participants’ identities (Savvides et al., 2014). During the data collection, we aimed at attentive listening, empathy and understanding of individual narratives and contexts, as well as a reflexivity towards the data to ensure respectful and trustworthy interpretations (Cormier, 2018).

Analysis process

Our approach to the analysis of the data was a combination of inductive and deductive processes, framed by the ecological and relational perspectives on teachers’ practice and agency, and our focus on the interaction between teachers and contexts. In this case, “context” refers to the company discourses manifested in documentations, interviews with principals and company representatives. The first step in the analysis process included thematic coding of the interview material (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005) followed by the generation of more abstract thematic categories. The aim of this part of the analysis was to understand the teachers’, principals’ and company representatives’ voices with regard to the research questions. At the second stage, we examined the emerged categories from the perspective of the narratives the participants employ to describe work practices and their environment, including the curriculum and resources they use, approaches to pedagogy and relationships with others. Finally, we examined those against the wider discourses used in the schools’ documentation and fieldnotes.

These analyses and interpretation processes provided us with the structure for the presentation of the findings sections that describe the teachers’ capacity for agentic practice through their and the company's articulations of first, pupils, teaching and learning. This part of the findings describes the thematic categories of “pupils”, “learning”, and “teaching” that describe the parameters for teachers’ work. The second part presents the articulations of teachers’ roles in unlearning and re-learning how to teach under the LC concept. This is structured by the two emerged categories of the new types of knowledge and cultural assumptions that structure and shape teacher agency.

Findings

Constructions of pupils, learning and teaching

There is strong consensus amongst teachers that children and their experiences are placed at the centre of all discussions and frame their own responsibilities and tasks. This is also driven by the company itself, that defines the process as one of facilitating children in their “learning journey”, helping “the lamp to be lit in each pupil's head” (LearnyComp representative, O). The teachers develop close relationships with their pupils, part of the design of the school that encourages steady, long-term classroom setups, something that several teachers refer to in rather emotional terms:

[LearnyComp] children, when they come across teachers, they run, come to you and speak to you. In any of the [other Indian] schools they will hide away from the teacher but here they want to interact with you. (Teacher, 3)

This closeness is deliberately cultivated through the LC tools that “help us be more child friendly” and is contrasted to the “spoon feeding” approach, seen as common in the conventional Indian schools (Fieldnotes, team-leaders’ meeting). Positive references to “the school as a family” (Teacher, 4), are accompanied by strong, uniform narratives around child-centredness that all teachers share and define the nature of the education experiences they describe.

Pupils are discussed as highly able persons that need to be approached in individualised ways, to develop into independent, autonomous and responsible adults and future citizens. This includes children gradually acquiring autonomy from their parents, and in the process, becoming “opinionated” and “demanding space … also when they come home” (LearnyComp representative, S). The development of pupils into independent adults entails not primarily academic-school knowledge, but learning-to-learn skills, learning to work with others, as well as cultivating skills for a purposeful and happy life. The teachers bring together these constructions of pupils/children into futuristic projections of the kind of adult they will become, provided their pedagogical approach, to help them to learn the right skills and attitudes for life:

We do think about not just the knowledge of the student but also of how humanly good he has to be in his future. This is something very good about [LearnyComp]. So that's the major difference I think I’d say [with conventional schools]. (Teacher, 2)

These ideas are conveyed in remarkably similar discourses shared by all eleven teachers in the study, as well as found in the interviews with principals and company representatives, in almost identical terms. They are embedded within the LC programme, the LC-based teacher training, as well as the wider discourses emanating from the school leadership that construct the particular ecology of the LearnyComp environment:

The LC educational philosophy is about developing responsible citizens who are aware and take ownership of their process of learning … Academic skills, individual knowledge, flexibility and the ability to take personal responsibility are becoming more important and complex as are interpersonal skills and the ability to collaborate. This is well entrenched and personified in the philosophy. (LearnyComp India, 2022a)

Since the introduction of the National Education Plan 2020, such progressive pedagogic articulations are sanctioned also by official government policy. In that respect, both the national and the LearnyComp contexts converge in their critique of what are seen as traditional approaches to classroom practice. These ideas are also framing the ways in which teachers, principals, and company representatives define teachers’ roles and identities in these schools.

Learning and unlearning contexts – the parameters of teachers’ agency

We find common understanding and acknowledgement amongst the teachers that their role is shaped by the LC programme. All teachers approach these new roles as part of a journey into an entirely new professional identity, strongly framed by the discourses promoted by principals and company representatives. This has two distinct dimensions. First, the new teaching roles reflect the (Swedish) LC objectives for education given a certain new approach to knowledge. Second, teaching identities are being constructed as stripped from the old (Indian) knowledge, experiences, and cultural assumptions about schools, teaching, and views around pedagogy.

A different type of knowledge

The core idea of the LC programme is presented as more than just a curriculum, rather “an educational philosophy”, designed as a new approach to knowledge, child-centred and intending to prepare responsible adults for a modern, globalised future (LearnyComp India, 2022a; 2022b). So, even though the Indian LearnyComp schools have to follow the country's national curriculum, it is the LC programme that defines the structure of the knowledge offer, together with a digital Learning Portal that provides an extensive network of resources to be used for all teaching activities. In that way, the emphasis is on the “how” rather than the “what” of knowledge, with the LC programme focusing on learning and not on teaching.

The Learning Portal is marketed by the company as a repository of rich resources that are already developed, so that teachers are released from the task of preparing lessons, allowing more personalised time with individual pupils. It also functions as a guarantee of quality to parents, since it contains “the best materials”, keeping the quality of teaching approaches constant regardless of the individual teacher (LearnyComp India, 2021a). Frequently, there is also a tendency to devalue conventional ideas about learning and knowledge seen as book-based, in favour of, for instance, references to learning beyond the text:

The teaching pattern [at conventional schools] is different. It is bookish … there is no extended learning given to the children in the traditional school. (Teacher, 9)

The strong knowledge framing in the schools has clear consequences for the teachers’ approach to knowledge and pedagogy. Teachers are expected to not only conform to this new knowledge paradigm but also actively redefine themselves as the carriers of a new pedagogical culture. The company provides instruction and preparation to teachers to achieve this, including intensive teacher training for new staff and continuous on-the-job training as a way of embedding the “right” approach to teaching:

Your teacher is a facilitator who is helping you with your learning … it's an entire paradigm shift, to get [teachers] to see a completely different dimension, and to train them for that. And after training, also make sure that once they are in the classroom, they are doing things the way we have told them, that was a challenge. (LearnyComp representative, L)

Against such discourses around new approaches to knowledge and teaching, the teachers themselves talk enthusiastically about both. They are overwhelmingly positive to the LC programme, the values it comes with, and they hold the Swedish input in high regard, including the Learning Portal and the “amazing growth journey” they have themselves embarked on as new professionals (Teacher, 11). When asked to discuss their role as teachers, they use the same terms to describe the multiplicity of their tasks, as we found in the school marketing brochures (cf. for instance LearnyComp India, 2021b):

I’m playing the role of a base-group teacher. A person who regroups the students, who gets them together in the morning and again in the afternoon … I’m a personal coach, where I look at everything the student is doing. Sometimes I think I have the role of a counselor, because in my coaching sessions students talk about issues they’re dealing with. Then I’m playing the role of a subject teacher, … … I feel I’m playing these multiple roles, yes, as a teacher. (Teacher, 4, our emphasis)

Consistent with the National Education Plan 2020 that acknowledges the theoretical focus of the Indian teacher education courses, and their (often) problematic standards (paras, 5.22–5.28), the teachers in our sample feel happy that the LearnyComp training opened up different professional possibilities in how they view teaching: “I’m in a better position to talk about education not centered just on textbook but around students … my mindset has undergone a metamorphosis” (Teacher, 4). But teachers describe not just new learning, but a process of rejecting past pedagogical knowledge and experiences: “we have to unlearn a lot to learn this” (Teacher, 1).

In these narratives, the teachers also seem to embrace a self-governing discourse of welcoming correcting and disciplining that aim at keeping their professional practice within the bounds of the LC “philosophy”. These narratives are seen as necessary since “if it was not for [LearnyComp], we wouldn't have the kind of progressive thinking that we have because it is very easy to go back into our systems, very, very easy” (Teacher, 1). To a large extent, the position that the teachers in our study take towards this new knowledge is understandable given the shift in Indian official discourses towards learner-centred pedagogies (Government of India, 2020), the parents’ increasing demands for new pedagogical models (Nambissan, 2021), and their own first-hand experience of traditional ways of teaching and learning. The ready availability of the LC curricula resources that are designed on the basics of these progressive logics, make this a (possibly) obvious choice for the teachers who only draw on the LC “language” to describe new approaches to knowledge.

Cultural assumptions and teaching identities

Given the totalising nature of the new teaching roles, identities and approaches entailed within the LC philosophy and embraced by the teachers, there are several cultural and relational dimensions of the school ecology that are framing the transformations. First, teachers are discussed as receivers of the innovative pedagogical approach in the LC programme by themselves, by principals, and company representatives. They are portrayed as embodying this new philosophy, but there is also recognition that this is a fragile process, in that professional histories infuse present professional practice and capacity to shape the work environment. So, the fact that the Indian teachers have been themselves students in the Indian school system, trained as teachers in (outdated) pedagogical ideas, and taught in (old-fashioned) school settings, are discussed as a risk to the school and what it tries to achieve.

As a result, a second dimension that frames the narratives of managers (principals, company representatives) and teachers themselves, is a set of hierarchical relations between the foreign/Swedish school managers and the Indian teachers. This hierarchy does not merely pertain to the organisational positions of representatives/managers-teachers. Rather it is of a more fundamental culturally-embedded structuring set of relations (cf. Holm et al., 2022), manifested in the perceived deference of Indian teachers towards sources of authority (“people always listen to the boss very carefully, it is in their backbone”, Principal, O); and also, projected to the cultural and educational modern approaches that the foreign managers bring with them into the Indian educational setting. Leadership in this context acquires disciplining functions, both of a directed and of a self-governing nature, whereby a constant presence of foreign managers is necessary to make sure that things do not slide back to past practices:

I think their [Swedish managers] presence really keeps us on track. Even now it's a struggle for us to always understand that there are certain values guiding us and we cannot go back to those thoughts, we cannot go back to having an instruction-based classroom … If it was not the Swedish influence, it would be a different kind of a school altogether. (Teacher, 1)

Such (self-)discipline narratives are supported by what company representatives describe as guidance against drifting back to the “old ways”, and having “good principals on-site who can teach the teachers with a firm hand”, all seen as necessary to make sure teachers “can let go of the old and learn new, and thus keep them on track” (LC representatives, L, B). This re-culturing and re-molding of teachers that demands that their history of past practices and experiences is expunged is not challenged by any of the informants. Still, we acknowledge the possibility that the teachers may have a more critical position but chose not to share this with the researchers.

Finally, there is a third dimension to these narratives that refers to issues of recruitment and enculturation of the teachers. The teachers in the three schools are Indian and have received their teacher education in the country, an education sharply criticised by the Indian government (Government of India, 2020). The attraction to work in this company was not financial and LearnyComp teachers earn less than teachers in public schools, a general pattern with employment in private school companies (cf. Golding and Kopsick 2022). Private schools such as LearnyComp argue that the compensations they offer are in the working conditions (modern well-equipped premises, teaching small groups), as well as the professional training teachers receive into the LC programme. Several teachers talk of a sense of the “fantastic” and “positive environment”, being made to feel “important and valuable”, and the value of being trained in new pedagogies. The teachers’ professional and cultural (re)training takes formal and informal forms:

… we had rigorous 20-25 days training, we had a lot of people from Sweden coming … from the Netherland branch too, who were teaching us about how to deal with the students of [LearnyComp] because this is not a conventional school you know. (Teacher, 2)

The teachers always say that working one year in [LearnyComp] schools, is more than teacher training itself. So, it's almost like they go on a journey as a teacher that they don't in the usual Indian schools. (LC representative, T)

Regarding questions of recruitment and professional development, the LC programme, supported by the Learning Portal resources, provides the attraction as well as the structures for training and practice, as well as the cultural “glue” that binds the Indian teachers to the schools. It is also the framework for defining the values of the schools, as well as the education purposes to guide teachers in their professional actions. The literature on the global dominance of new “learner-centered” pedagogies and their dissemination around the world points out that local cultures can be at odds with such approaches. It also highlights the significance of material and human resources for the implementation of such pedagogies (Schweisfurth, 2015). All our research participants seem to be aware of these culture tensions, and LearnyComp has clearly invested in both the material (the LC programme) and the human factors (training on the LC programme & continuous reinforcement) to overcome them.

Discussion and conclusion

Aspbury-Miyanishi (2022) raises the difficult question of how we can distinguish an agentic teacher from one whose agency is limited or constrained. After all, teachers do not operate within classrooms in complete autonomy to decide all aspects of curriculum, pedagogy or set their own long- or short-term goals in isolation. Teachers everywhere are trained in systems imbued with traditions of practice and values, they define teaching practice and professional learning within the parameters of regulated schooling systems, and work with curricular frameworks constructed beyond the classroom level. So, in these ways, professional agency is formed, developed and sustained by institutions, norms and values connected to different schooling contexts. Still, teachers as reflective practitioners are expected in most systems to draw on a variety of knowledge(s) in order to adapt to challenging circumstances, exercise ethical judgements, show commitment to their pupils, and critically engage with knowledge, pupils and colleagues (Stoll et al., 2006; Watson, 2014).

The schools we are concerned with are hybrid “third space” organisations (Hartmann, 2021) that combine the statutory regulations and curricula of the Indian state with the Swedish company LC programme. They also bring together the local Indian teachers’ past professional experience with the imported LearnyComp framework of values on teaching and learning, contributing to an under-researched aspect in the literature (cf. Brandin, 2021; Bunnell & Poole, 2022, 2023; Poole, 2022b). We find that the teachers operate within a school context that discursively dislocates professional agency from the Indian context and all the institutional norms that the teachers (with a teacher education and/or teaching experience in the Indian school system) had been formed in. The possibilities for reflective practice may still be present, but are highly regulated and steered by the accepted normative framework of the LC programme and its views of pupils, learning and teaching.

Our research was not concerned with the nature of the content of LC, nor with the effectiveness of the pedagogical approaches used in LearnyComp. Indeed, the impressions from the on-site school visits indicate a high level of satisfaction with both, and that the pupils seem to thrive in these schools. The focus of the research, however, is on teachers and the ecology of their practice, and the tensions we identified in the ways in which their agency is defined and constrained in the context of international education where various commercial actors offer alternative pedagogies. There are three key observations that emerge from the research we wish to highlight. They illustrate how the possibilities for teachers to shape their responses within the ecology of the schools are stripped from old narratives and institutionalised within the company context.

First, the participants in our study describe a working environment regulated by the LC programme and the resources available in the online learning platform. This means that there are limited possibilities (and need) for teachers to select courses of action beyond those already provided by the learning platform. As a result, not only the overall goals, but also the more detailed routine objectives of teaching are prescribed in advance. This set-up allows for very constrained agentic capacity (Oolbekkink-Marchand et al., 2017) in the form of applying existing lesson plans and materials developed by company education experts. Hence, there is no scope or need to engage with alternative pedagogical approaches or sources of knowledge and so exercise professional judgement.

The second observation concerns the mechanisms for these practices, especially given the teachers’ adoption of the above-discussed limits to their own professional judgement. Our empirical data suggests that LearnyComp, as a company, has been very effective in breaking what Emirbayer and Mische (1998) identify as a continuing temporal dimension of agentic action where the past informs present educational engagement. The teachers in LearnyComp schools draw on three different temporal realities. They orient their professional ambitions towards an education future defined by the company (silencing alternative possibilities that draw on different discourses); they practice in a present that is steered by the LC programme and the already prepared resources in the digital learning platform; and, they have expunged the “past” in terms of their own experiences of education work, cultural and social assumptions about teaching and learning to embrace the new pedagogical concept. The fact that official Indian education policy is, discursively at least, adopting similar approaches to teaching and learning as LearnyComp is not discussed by the teachers, who opt to identify with their employer's narratives.

Teachers in our sample have thus largely embraced the LC programme, goals, and discourses in their entirety. This means they cannot rely on earlier professional language(s) to describe or examine their own practice nor have the capacity to identify the need for a new professional language. They are clearly constructed, and construct themselves, as receivers of knowledge and expertise, and tend to refrain from their past histories of professional experience. As such, there is a limited space for reflecting on changing, or questioning, the given professional practice parameters. The arguments used to legitimise these processes of homogenisation are, once again, the same for teachers, principals and company representatives. They draw on the shared, hegemonic vision of the progressive and innovative nature of the LC programme. They all depart from fundamental views around pupils, learning and teaching, and the assumed superiority of the new type of knowledge and wider educational philosophy of the company, placing these beyond critique or challenge.

It is difficult to disentangle the consequences of these logics that shape teachers’ work, from the reasons that gave rise to them in the first place. This is partly because they continuously inform and re-enforce each other, and in so doing they constrain teachers’ agency further. So, our third and final observation concerns the issue of trust in teachers, embedded in the discourses of company managers, and manifested in a complex interplay of power and knowledge whereby the structure, content and pedagogic framing of the company knowledge acquire an authoritative status. The answer to Mooney Simmie’s (2021) question “whose knowledge counts” is clearly that of “the LC programme design and its defined teaching resources”. There are two points of interest we want to highlight here. First, the teachers themselves respond positively to the non-agentic positioning that the LC programme and the wider discourses of the company create. They follow a strict adherence to the materials available in the digital Learning Portal, and, unlike the findings of Lai et al. (2016) who identified more critical attitudes in their research, the teachers of our study willingly adopt the re-culturation processes offered to them by the company.

The second point refers to the embedded hierarchical and ethnicity dimensions of the lack of trust shown to teachers. These are mapped on the cultural assumptions around powerful knowledge provided by the LC programme, and shaping the social relations within the schools. They are presented as the product of the teachers’ (less valued) Indian experience, social and cultural make-up, as compared to the Swedish/western alternative represented by LearnyComp schools. This thread runs through references in relation to defining education values, conceptions of teaching, pupils and learning. It casts teachers as implementers of a predefined pedagogical concept, expected to add value on the basis of the “best” pedagogical practices and curricula defined by the company. These alternatives are legitimised through discourses around equipping students with the knowledge and competencies to thrive in a globalised world. This is a practice shared by many international elite schools operating around the world (Gardner-McTaggart, 2016; Howard, 2020), and reproducing neoliberal Western values (Woods & Kong, 2020).

Our study contributes an understanding of the local teachers’ experiences when an international company disrupts local contexts by bringing new ideas about teaching and learning, and embeds these in their curricular and pedagogical approaches. The disruptions we observe respond to the Indian middle-class anxieties around school quality (Bhatty et al., 2022), and the idea that Western learner-centred pedagogies are inherently superior (Schweisfurth, 2015). They are used by the company successfully and deliberately in a highly competitive market economy of private schooling, as a marketing device aiming to de-contextualise the school from its Indian social space and confirm its branding as an international, cosmopolitan school of the future. The recent turn of the Indian official policy context towards progressive narratives (Government of India, 2020), and the increasing parental demand for progressive pedagogical models (Nambissan, 2021) provide (unintentional) legitimacy for such hierarchies of knowledge.

The consequences of this for the pupils are beyond our research. But the ways in which international companies construct a floating educational future that connects to abstract global citizenship ideas and downplays situated contexts, raise important questions of educational purpose and values.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Vetenskapsrådet under Grant number 2018-04897.

Notes

1 The company name is anonymised in this article and a pseudonym used instead and, as a result, complete URLs to company online materials are not provided.