Exploring the relational nature of teachers’ agency negotiation through master- and counter-narratives

Abstract

Teachers’ agency has recently been vastly studied from a sociocultural perspective, emphasising that teachers’ action is shaped by the structures within which teachers work. However, this study provides a different perspective, introducing relational sociology to the research on teachers’ agency. Here, agency is seen as embedded in interdependencies and relationships, either personal or impersonal. Finnish newly qualified teachers were interviewed concerning their teacher training and work to explore how they negotiated agency in their narratives. The analysis shows the entanglement of master- and counter-narratives in agency negotiation as the teachers drew on prevailing societal master-narratives and simultaneously provided opposing categories through counter-narratives. The results reveal three aspects of relationships through which the agency was negotiated: political, cultural, and epistemic. The study contributes to the understanding of teachers’ agency, paying attention to language and the plurality of relationships in agency negotiation and formation.

Keywords:

• Agency
• teachers
• teacher education
• narrative
• relational sociology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland, under Grant OKM/47/523/2017.