Teaching ‘a course without content’: relational agentic orientations to reorganisation of higher education

ABSTRACT

The managerial transformation of higher education often means implementing novel modes of teaching and learning, including experiential and collaborative teaching. University teachers’ agency is crucial for managing and enacting changes in higher education. Collaborating as part of these changes requires a specific kind of agency, namely relational agency. The aim of this paper is to conceptualise relational agency by studying the relational agentic orientations of university teachers towards a reorganisation of higher education. The data come from a novel mass course at a faculty of education in a Finnish university, which emerged as part of a major university-wide reorganisation of study programmes. The course is organised and taught collaboratively by a group of teachers, and has no predefined content. A typology of the agentic orientations in the teachers’ interviews was constructed on the base of the intersections between the expansions of different objects of activity (one’s own, others’, partially shared) and the teachers’ evaluation of these expansions (pragmatic-adaptive, critical, developmental-transformative). The teachers focused primarily on student learning and on expanding the object of student learning activity, which extends the focus of relational agency to not only seeking resources in others but also being a resource for others.

KEYWORDS:

• Relational agency
• agentic orientations
• higher education
• cultural-historical activity theory
• educational reorganisation

1. Introduction

Increasing managerialism – a shift toward corporate and market logics – has manifested itself in multiple different ways in higher education, one of which has been an increase in experiential and group teaching (Etzkowitz 2004; Vican, Friedman, and Andreasen 2020), in collaboration between stakeholders in higher education, such as teachers, researchers, members of administration and management, and students (Kezar 2005). Teachers often have to teach large groups of students together and implement novel teaching methods, such as project-based learning. The focus of teaching shifts from knowledge transfer and contents to organising processes targeting the development of student skills.

Although it is becoming more common, collaboration in teaching has received little attention in research in comparison to collaboration in research and student collaboration (La Rocca 2014; Lasauskiene and Rauduvaite 2015; Nevin, Thousand, and Villa 2009). This lack of focus can be dangerous, as teachers are a prerequisite and a key link between students and organisations in the implementation of changes and the reorganisation of educational institutions, for example, the application of novel forms of teaching (Griffioen, Doppenberg, and Oostdam 2018; Handal and Herrington 2003). In the school context, Rajala and Kumpulainen (2017) studied teacher agency as an important element of the emergence and implementation of educational change. Their analysis focused on agentic orientations towards educational change across temporal dimensions, which highlighted the lengthy process of agentic adaptations to educational reforms.

Temporal agentic orientations constitute a working framework for showing how the agency is developed and enacted over time in specific settings. Changes in universities that focus on increasing collaboration require different types of agency from teachers – agency that relies and depends on working with others. This kind of agency can be conceptualised as relational agency (Edwards 2005, 2007). The framework of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) defines it as the ‘capacity to work with others to expand the object being worked on’ (Hopwood and Edwards 2017, 108). Studies of a relational agency discuss two central elements of relational agency: others and the expansion of the object that one is working on. At the same time, they rarely provide a solid analytical framework for studying agency (e.g. Edwards and D'Arcy 2004; Edwards 2005, 2009, 2011), which may be due to a limited conceptualisation of its key elements.

The aim of this paper is to conceptualise relational agency by studying the relational agentic orientations of university teachers towards a reorganisation of higher education.

I focus on a novel mass course for master’s students in a faculty of education in a Finnish university. The course emerged as part of a university-wide reorganisation of higher education, which started as part of a national university reform and the unification of higher education in Europe (Ursin 2019). The new university law came into force in 2010, and aimed to increase the autonomy and independence of universities, especially in terms of finances. This obligatory course covered all the faculty’s study tracts and had no predefined conventional course content; the students created content during the course by defining an educational problem and creating a solution or an application based on relevant research. The course was organised and taught collaboratively by a group of teachers and researchers.

In this context, the relational dimension of agency meant focusing on relations between different ‘levels’, including not only other teachers and students, but also social structures, communities (study tracks and research groups), and the social and administrative structures of the faculty and the university. The study had one research question:

What types of relational agentic orientations to the reorganisation of higher education did the teachers show in their evaluations of and reflections on the novel course?

In the first section of the article, I introduce the background and research context. Then I describe the conceptual framework of this article, based on the concept of relational agency. After this I describe the research approach and the analytical framework. In the results section I present six dominant relational agentic orientations with the help of excerpts from the data. These orientations revealed the process of how the teachers managed the reorganisation of higher education, which is then dealt with in the discussion part of the paper.

2. Research context

The research context for this study is the reorganisation of study programmes in a Finnish university, as it was implemented at a faculty of education. In general, educational sciences comprise a heterogenous field, which has strong connections to and is shaped by professional fields, local educational systems, and other disciplines (Hofstetter and Schneuwly 2002). The important factors that have shaped research and teaching in the educational sciences in Finland are the ‘academization’ of teacher education (teachers must obtain a university master’s degree), and a national curriculum that gives teachers a high degree of freedom, with an emphasis on research-based teaching (Kansanen 2003; Tirri 2014). Finnish universities have a great amount of autonomy in curriculum design for teacher education (Ahonen 2000; Tirri 2014). Many of these factors have impacted the global interest in Finnish teacher training.

The reorganisation of higher education in question concerns the national university reform, which started in Finland in 2005, and the European unification of higher education (Ursin 2019). The new university law came into force in 2010, and aimed to increase the autonomy and independence of universities, especially in terms of finances. The law and its actual effect on university autonomy were widely debated (Heinonen et al. 2016). Another goal of the reorganisation was to complete the transfer to a genuine three-level Bologna system. For the university under study, this reorganisation meant a university-wide transformation of the organisation of teaching, with a movement from separate subjects towards large degree programmes. These degree programmes unite different disciplines and subjects which used to be organised and taught separately as majors and minors. They have different study tracks and are described as multidisciplinary, and offer the opportunity to take courses from different disciplines.

In addition to the implementation of the Bologna process, the other objectives of uniting different disciplines and subjects under one larger study programme were economic efficiency, ensuring better employment for students, and increasing the university’s competitiveness. The reorganisation took place alongside an administrative reform and governmental budget cuts, which meant terminations of research, teaching, and administrative staff’s contracts.

The reorganised study programmes at the university came into force during summer 2017. At the faculty of education, the reorganisation meant one bachelor’s and one master’s degree programme with six study tracks in Finnish and three in Swedish.¹ The study tracks covered special education, home economics, teacher education, craft education, early childhood education, class and subject teacher education, and general and adult education. The reorganisation did not mean the complete eradication of subjects, as teaching is still largely organised around the study tracks (former subjects), and faculties must offer courses on general themes for students of all the study tracts of the faculty. The organisation and implementation of courses moved from inside subjects to programmes, which called for collaboration between teachers from different areas and different subjects.

3. Conceptual framework

Dealing with the implementation of this reorganisation required university teachers to exercise a novel type of agency. In dealing with educational change in a school context, Rajala and Kumpulainen (2017, 312) focused on the agentic orientations of teachers and defined them as a ‘set of … critical evaluations and attempts to reconstruct their work conditions’, which emerge through tensions between educational ideals and actual constraints of work. This framework looks at temporally unfolding the interactions between individuals, collectives, available resources, different structures, and contexts.

It is important to take the nature of these interactions into account as well as their temporal unfolding. In the case of the reorganisation of higher education in question, the social or relational element became crucial in agency, as the situation required working with others in novel ways. The potential way of addressing this element of agentic orientations was the notion of relational agency (Edwards 2005, 2007), which focuses on doing alongside and with others (Edwards and Mackenzie 2008).

The concept of relational agency is not seen as the property of an individual or group, but as a capacity that arises when people work together. Hence it cannot be practised by an individual: it is embedded in dynamic ways of working (Edwards et al. 2017; Hopwood 2017). The traditional conflict between agency and structure is replaced with a focus on relational connections and interactions of situated individuals (Burkitt 2016; Hopwood 2010). The definition of the concept of relational agency has changed and developed over time since its emergence (e.g. Edwards and D'Arcy 2004; Edwards 2005, 2011; Edwards et al. 2017; Hopwood 2017), but has two central key elements, namely ‘others’ and the expansion of the object of activity.

Other people are the first key element of relational agency, as it is exactly this type of agency that emerges when people work together. Doing alongside and with others means engaging with their dispositions (Edwards and D'Arcy 2004) and offering and asking for support from them (Edwards and Mackenzie 2005). Relational agency includes ‘a capacity to align one’s thoughts and actions with those of others to interpret aspects of one’s world and to act on and respond to those interpretations’ (Edwards 2007, 4). Although the conceptualisation mentions offering support to others (Edwards and Mackenzie 2005), the notion of relational agency primarily focuses on others as resources for expanding the object of activity (Edwards and D'Arcy 2004), and does not consider the possibility of being a resource to other people an essential element of relational agency.

The others and the meanings they bring to activity are considered resources, which allows interpreting and acting on the object of activity in new and enhanced ways (Edwards and D'Arcy 2004; Edwards 2005). The object of activity, with its purposeful transformation, is another key element in the definitions of relational agency. The notion of relational agency builds on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), with the principle of object-oriented activity (Edwards 2005).

According to the CHAT framework, the object of activity can be defined both as something towards which an act is directed, something that a human being can relate to (Leont’ev 1978), and a raw material or problem space to be worked on (Engeström 2015). The object of activity is not fixed, but fluid, as there is a distinction between a generalised object of the historically developing activity system and a specific object for a particular subject in a given action in a given moment (Engeström, Puonti, and Seppänen 2003; Vetoshkina 2018). In the case of teachers, the generalised object of activity can be defined as student learning, but in the specific actions of a specific teacher it manifests as a course, the evaluation of a task, etc.

The focus of relational agency is on new, enhanced ways of working on the object or specifically on how working with others expands the object of activity on which one is working (Edwards and D'Arcy 2004; Edwards 2005; Hopwood 2017). The notion of expansion is crucial in CHAT (Engeström 2015; Engeström and Sannino 2017). Expansion does not mean quantitative, but qualitative change – it requires transformation and reorganisation of the object (Engeström, Puonti, and Seppänen 2003). Expansion is also not abandonment of the existing object: it ‘both transcends and retains previous layers of the object’ (ibid, 183).

The expansion of the object consequently causes the emergence of a new pattern of activity oriented to the new object. Activities are carried out through actions, and the same action may belong to several activities (Engeström and Sannino 2017; Leont’ev 1978). In the case of expansion, new patterns of activity may consist of the same actions, but what separates them is the new object – the new motive behind the actions and the new meaning of these actions.

The focus of relational agency is on the expansion of the object of one’s activity, while the objects of activity of others remain unacknowledged. More surprisingly, the expansion of a shared or a partially shared object as the basis for collaboration is not analysed as an element of relational agency. In CHAT, collaboration is conceptualised through constructing a shared or a partially shared object when activities become complex or activity systems interconnect (Engeström 2015; Kerosuo 2001).

Relational agency is an important element of collaboration, which suggests focusing on the relational agentic orientations of university teachers towards educational reorganisation in particular, as this reorganisation includes different modes of working together. On the basis of the presented conceptual framework, I define relational agentic orientations as university teachers’ evaluations of and attempts to transform the expansion of the object of activity (one’s own, others’ or partially shared) in which ‘others’ are centrally involved.

4. Research approach

4.1. Setting and data

This article focuses on a novel mass course, which was a part of the reorganisation of the study programmes. This introductory course was obligatory for all masters’ students of all study tracks of the faculty’s master programme (around 450 students). It was characterised by one of the teachers in an interview as a ‘course without a content’. It indeed had no conventionally perceived contents, but the idea was to develop ‘meta-thinking’ across areas of educational sciences presented in the study tracks of the master’s programme. The course relied on the reorganisation of master programmes, which requires faculty-wide mass courses. The course was also partly inspired by an introductory course for bachelor’s students and a sociological concept of powerful knowledge as a curriculum principle (Muller and Young 2019), along with other experiential and novel pedagogical approaches.

The central idea was that a team of four to eight students develop an ‘application’ – a solution to a significant educational problem, identified by the students themselves with the help of five articles, which students chose from a list of articles recently published by the faculty’s staff. At the beginning of the course, the students attended a joint introductory panel and lectures. The main work was done in teams, in which the students independently worked on their application. The teams presented the progress of their work in a teacher-led group. The groups contained three to four student teams, and in the group meetings, the students received comments from a teacher and the other groups. The course ended with a fair, where students introduced their applications to all the students and teachers of the course. After the fair, the students submitted a written report. The final grades were given by the group teachers, based on peer evaluation of the report. The course was organised and taught collaboratively by a group of teachers.² One group of teachers was responsible for organising the process; other teachers were responsible for the small-group teaching. The role of the teachers was not to supply the content, but to support students in their work by challenging and expanding the conceptual and research framework of their applications.

I followed the first implementation of this course in autumn 2018. The collected ethnographic data were broad and included interviews, observations from teachers’ meetings, observations from teacher-led groups, interviews with teachers and students, email discussions, and course-related documents and texts. To trace the agentic orientations, I specifically focused on the data in which the teachers reflected on the course, namely six interviews³ and two teacher meetings (see Table 1). Other data were considered auxiliary and were used to make sense of the focal data.

Table 1. Data.

No	Description	Duration
Interviews
1	Interview I before the course	68 min
2	Interview II before the course	23 min
3	Interview III before the course	26 min
4	Interview IV before the course	30 min
5	Interview I after the course	44 min
6	Interview II after the course	30 min
Meetings
1	Teacher planning meeting before the course (10 active participants^a)	116 min
2	Teacher reflection meeting after the course (9 active participants)	91 min

^a Active in this context means ones, that were talking in the meeting.

Research ethics

All the participants of the study, including the teachers and students, signed a consent form, which included information on the research purpose and data management. The administration of the faculty also approved the study. The teachers actively and willingly participated in the interviews and had no issues with the observations. This was not only due to general openness to discussions in Finnish universities and familiarity with the researcher who works in the same field as them, but also because the teachers really wanted to reflect and critically evaluate the new course. I also followed the principle of triangulation, specifically, validation from participants (e.g. Jonsen and Jehn 2009). In the study this meant sending the draft of the article to some of the teachers to receive their opinions and comments before its submission.

4.2. Analytical framework

Studies of relational agency rarely provide a solid analytical framework, analyses are primarily based on examples from the data (e.g. Edwards and D'Arcy 2004; Edwards 2005, 2009, 2011). The construction of the analytical framework consisted of multiple iterative cycles of movement between the theory and the data (Vetoshkina and Paavola 2021). The interview meetings and transcripts were analysed using the MAXQDA software programme.

First, I identified the instances in which the teachers talked about different ways of expanding the object of activity (Edwards 2005). The object here meant both the generalised and specific object of activity (Engeström, Puonti, and Seppänen 2003; Vetoshkina 2018). Expansion was understood as a qualitative change in the object, a new meaning of the object, and a new pattern of activity around the object. The object itself, or the actions, could either change or stay the same, but their meaning was qualitatively different. For instance, for teachers, the new expanded object may have remained student learning and actions, but the understanding and the meaning of student learning was different. The pattern of teaching activity – the way in which it was organised – was also changing. To overcome the shortcomings of the relational agency framework, I examined not only the instances of the reflections and evaluations of one’s own object, but also others’ objects and partially shared objects. The teachers talked not only about the expansion of their own objects (e.g. student learning), but also about the expansion of the student’s objects (e.g. the created application) or the shared object (e.g. novel course itself or evaluation). The first dimension of the analytical framework is the expansion of different objects of activity when working with ‘others’: (a) the expansion of one’s own object; (b) the expansion of other’s objects; (c) the expansion of a partially shared object.

Following Rajala and Kumpulainen (2017), I focused on how the teachers critically evaluated and reflected on the expansion in relation to the reorganisation. Rajala and Kumpulainen (ibid.), identified four temporal agentic orientations in the interviews of school teachers on educational change: (a) practical-evaluative (i.e. teachers actively implementing the reforms during pressing contextual challenges), (b) reproductive (i.e. teachers deliberately reproducing past ways of working while implementing the reform), (c) critical-projective (i.e. critically considering how to utilise the potential of the new), and (d) creative-projective (i.e. envisioning new teaching modes that would be a part of the reform but also go beyond it).

The focus on agentic orientations had potential, specifically in the interview data, but the framework did not fully work for this data. Drawing on Rajala and Kumpulainen (2017), I identified the following data-driven evaluations: (1) pragmatic-adaptive – adapting to and utilising the practical sides of expansion; (2) critical – opposing or questioning the expansion and its possibility; and (3) developmental-transformative – envisioning the transformational potential of the expansion. These three types of evaluation and reflection of the expansion of the object of activity were a second dimension of the analytical framework.

The relational agentic orientations were identified at the intersections of these two dimensions of the analytical framework – the expansion of the object and the evaluation of the expansion.

Overall, I identified nine temporal agentic orientations, but I focus here on the most significant ones according to the frequency of their appearances in the data, which is marked in bold in Table 2.

Table 2. Number of instances of teachers’ relational agentic orientations.

Agentic orientations	Evaluation of the expansion
Object expansion	Pragmatic-adaptive	Critical	Developmental-transformative
Expansion of own object by working with others	44	18	14
Expansion of others’ objects	54	50	65
Expansion of partially shared object	54	48	36

5. Results

5.1. Pragmatic-adaptive evaluations

Expansion of own object

The pragmatic-adaptive orientation was present in the teachers’ reflections on the transformation of academic work. The expansion of object here meant different organisation and diversification of the tasks belonging to one’s academic position – teaching, research, administration, communication. On this course, the teachers talked about ways to combine teaching and research. For Teacher 3 and Teacher 9⁴ (Exc. 1 and 2), this course was a meaningful way to fulfil the teaching requirements of their research-focused positions.

Excerpt 1⁵

[someone mentioned] that this kind of course was coming and that something should be done about it. And then I somehow thought that, I started in this new position, and I have to teach something … and there’s no tradition in this position, no ready-made courses that you just start teaching. I thought maybe I should be active here.

Excerpt 2

I was invited and told what I should do […] but I do have research interests. My research interest is also in this type of novel teaching […] I have certain priorities in my work now, I invest more in some things and do other things more routinely. This course can also be taught routinely. I’m still thinking what my personal contribution is: do I give it my all? I most probably won’t be able to focus on only this, as I have so many other tasks.

At the same time, for Teacher 9 this type of organisation of teaching was also a way to benefit from their own research on the course. This kind of jointly taught and organised course provided the opportunity, especially for researchers, to participate in teaching, to meet the teaching requirements of their positions, and to bring elements of their research and expertise into their teaching, especially in their role as educational science experts.

Expansion of other’s objects

The pragmatic-adaptive orientation was present in the teachers’ reflections of organising a course for students from different study tracks. The student’s object expanded from traditionally defined course contents to an undefined educational problem and a developed application. This expansion happened due to working with students with different backgrounds, e.g. craft education and adult education.

The idea behind mixing students with different backgrounds was to have a diversity of views on the identified problems and developed solutions, and to support the development of an educational science expert’s work life skills. Using traditional course content was impossible in such a diverse setting, so students from diverse groups created it themselves. The diversity in the size of teams (4–8 people) also created challenges: not all the students were interested in the chosen topic, which affected the division of labour, and some students potentially became ‘free riders’. These topics were a significant part of the teacher reflection meeting (Exc. 3).

Excerpt 3

T15⁶: In some groups there were apparently ‘artistic contradictions’. In other groups, some were excited about the application, and [some were like] ‘I’ll just hang out here, cause the thing doesn’t actually interest me’ […] And it’s an actual work life skill, how group responsibility is shared and how a group is formed and how tasks are divided […] Should there be tasks that support the processes, or something that will help students identify these traits and work in a reasonable way in a group … 

T5: As we say in Finnish, ‘group rules’ (fin. ryhmäsannöt) […]

T12: If I remember correctly, in one group they pointed out that it was difficult to find something common in the five [articles]. I wonder if during enrolment, when you chose your interest area […]the whole [team] for example chose the work life skills development as their object of interest.

T11: Good compromise […]

T8: In some early childhood education, students have such a tight pace as most of them are working […] Thursdays and Fridays and then right away at the beginning of the week another class and so it was quite a brisk pace.

The overall complexity of the course for the students, in terms of the management of both different tasks and a novel task of creating a research-based application in heterogenous teams, made the organisation of the groups more challenging than it would be on a traditional course organised around contents. Reducing the number of students in a group was not an option, due to the heavy workload and the possibility of dropouts. The teachers decided to make changes in the next courses, for instance, to have separate groups so early childhood education students could meet their work schedule. The task of developing group rules was added. The students would also be able to register for teams according to their general interests (not directly connected to study tracks), while teacher-led groups remained a mix of topics and study tracks.

Expansion of partially shared object

The pragmatic-adaptive orientation also focused on practical issues of combining novel teaching and learning methods and institutional tools for quality learning on such a course (Excerpt 4). The teachers and students had to focus on a new object – a novel course with no contents and new roles. For teachers, the expansion of the object was a novel course with differently organised teaching and a different role for the teacher – supporting students in the creation of an educational application – in contrast to courses on which they create content. For students, the expansion of the object was a novel type of course, with content they had to create themselves through various modes of learning and multiple tasks in contrast to traditional courses with pre-given contents.

Excerpt 4

T9: A combination of this kind of constructivist idea that a student is interested and motivated, and a kind of institutional ‘stick’. Because we have to make sure that students do the amount of work that a degree requires for these different courses. This tells students that it matters what they do. That the bar isn’t too low […] In this novel teaching students may easily think that this is just pottering around, you don’t need to do anything. And it’s not a good message from the university, that studying at university is like this. Or that educational sciences are not important. I think one also needs to be tight and demanding. […] students are motivated, but then there are also institutions and teachers. Quite easily in this kind of constructivist idealism one thinks of only these motives and everyone is interested, but you have to remember that these are university studies and they lead to a degree.

A creation of a new partially shared object between novel teaching and learning in the form of a novel mass course with ‘no content’ required the utilisation of institutional instruments to make it work with regard to the environment in which the teaching and learning was taking place – a university – an institution where students earn a degree and teachers have to teach and evaluate the learning of large numbers of students.

5.2. Critical evaluations

Expansion of other’s objects

The critical evaluation of the expansion of the students’ object – a content to be created instead of pre-given content – were present in the teachers’ reflections on the proactiveness and motivation of students, which was an essential element of the course. For instance, Teacher 13, like many others, was concerned before the course about whether students would be active enough and able to organise the group work fairly.

Excerpt 5

It’s possible to anticipate already now, as there is a great deal of independent work, meeting during one’s own free time requires activeness. And how student will be able to organize [it] along with the rest of their life and studies. And then the schedules of all the group members […] With this type of studies it’s always a challenge […] In this sense maybe this way of work is familiar to them, that they share roles and tasks between themselves, and that they take care that no one is sort of […] that others do work for someone else. It’s important that everyone participates, and everyone has responsibilities.

The worries partly came true before the course, as there were problems with student enrolment, which was crucial for organising the groups, as Teacher 2 mentioned (Ex. 6). The course was obligatory for the students, but they had difficulties understanding which courses were obligatory because of the reorganisation of the degree.

Excerpt 6

One of the problems was that some students didn’t register. For the course, or they didn’t register as attending. The big problem was that perhaps one-third of all the students didn't register on time. And then the group division was made based on registration. Then this terrible flood of emails and phone calls.

The teachers had to come up with a solution and had to divide the teams before the start of the opening lecture on the basis of the rows of seats in the lecture hall, so that even those who had not registered on time but showed up could find a group.

Expansion of partially shared object

The critical evaluations of the expansion of a partially shared object focused on course evaluation. The expansion of the course evaluation included a combination of peer-, self- and teacher-evaluations. The evaluation criteria for the course were relatively open at the beginning of the course and some clarifications were added later, for instance, the length of the report. This caused some of the students to contact the faculty’s student organisation. The complaints started a discussion on the evaluation criteria at the teacher reflection meeting (Excerpt 7).

Excerpt 7

Teacher 6: As a continuation for next year, we can think of clear evaluation criteria […]?

Teacher 3: There are two sides […] As we discussed before the course, that was exactly what we did not want, because they are pseudo-clear […]

Teacher 7: It feels, in my opinion, that in our faculty, maybe this kind of tone, that somehow students learn, that you kind of ‘perform’ […] it directs the practices of many of the studies […]

Teacher 3: We’ll never get rid of it, in an educational institution, […] if we say: ‘try not to perform’, then they don’t do the courses. We can’t say so, we have to say ‘perform’.

Teacher 7: The grade is such a strong thing here, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a number, but it would be a bit funny that if there was verbal feedback, […] But we’ve decided to give from one to five, not ‘pass.

Teacher 14: Maybe, I say it wouldn’t necessarily be better if it wasn’t evaluated.

The difficulty of constructing a novel evaluation focused on learning instead of merely a grade in the setting of an educational institution was a manifestation of a more general issue of what learning and teaching at university is about. Teacher 3 expressed this in the following way:

Excerpt 8

[…] the idea that students come to the auditorium to sit in a row and listen to what great research each [research] group does […] and maybe some pseudo-participatory games in between […] university teaching should not be like this, that you make the students watch others having a good time […] It has to be authentic, like the practices of research in educational sciences […] students’ experience of performing or whether they are doing assignments or learning something that has not been studied before. When you’re learning something interesting, challenging, to which students want to commit. Versus the fact that they are performing some tasks and worried about whether or not all tasks have been completed.

Nevertheless, the institutional requirements and implementation of novel teaching contradicted each other, as Teacher 9 also mentioned in Excerpt 4, stressing that they could and should support each other.

5.3. Developmental-transformative evaluations

Expansion of others’ objects

The developmental-transformative evaluation was mostly present in the expansion of the students’ object. It was perceived as expanding from passively learning pre-given contents to actively learning and becoming an expert.

Some students found the course difficult, and others were not satisfied with the clarification of the evaluation criteria (e.g. report length), so they contacted the student organisation. The teachers were partly frustrated with the fact that the students contacted the student organisation without first coming to them about their concerns. At the same time, it was taken as a sign of activeness on the part of the students – exactly what they wanted to foster during the course (Excerpt 9). Simultaneously, students from the course also collected organised course feedback, which was seen as a way for students to develop their skills as future experts in the field of educational sciences (Excerpts 9 and 10).

Excerpt 9

There was so much discussion about what university teaching is […] I think [future] educators should understand that there are different ways of doing things […] And in my opinion both [name of student organization] and then we teachers […] handled this job nicely. In a way, you should also have this bottom-up approach to reforming and reforming practices, not just when dictating from above that this goes like this. Listen to students’ reactions and discuss them.

Teacher 9, interview

Excerpt 10

But then the one collected by the students. I consider it praiseworthy in principle that students are interested in education and studies, and they handle this kind of student feedback […] these are also things that studying to become an education expert, that this is the work that is done in the profession. Collecting, planning how to get information on something or course feedback. These kinds of things, which is basically a good exercise for anyone […] it’s a great thing that the students considered it important now and it was properly done. Unfortunately, few [students] answered. Of course, in my opinion, that wasn’t surprising.

Teacher 3, interview

The evaluation criteria were changed back to their original form, but clarification of the length of the report was added the following year. While the teachers acknowledged this activeness of the students, there were also difficulties in developing work life skills in connection with academic research, which is not so common for university courses. To tackle this, the teachers wanted the students to build connections with target groups, which not all the teams actually did (Excerpts 11 and 12).

Excerpt 11

Maybe it would still be important to get those target groups more involved. To my understanding, this time it didn’t go this way that they would have contacted these target groups […] I think from the point of view of the students it would enrich the course […] Next time it should be done as a fixed part, as more mandatory and not voluntary.

Teacher 9, interview

Excerpt 12

Teacher 4: I think courses like this are important. […] if you are to graduate as an educator, you should gain experience in different ways of organizing teaching. This includes knowledge creation, knowledge production, group work, group activities, self-organization, that one can then use such methods in accordance with a new curriculum in schools or early childhood education plan in a kindergarten. Then in work life it would be easier to do this kind of work […]

Teacher 3: Somehow it feels that you almost need one more group meeting for this. How does that sound? That you have to go and interview those for whom you are developing your application.

Teacher 10: If you forced them to really go out then that would be a good thing because […] now they interviewed them themselves.

Teacher 4: This kind of testing, yeah.

Teacher reflection meeting

The teachers wanted to ensure the students developed into educational experts by taking them ‘out of their comfort zone’ of university studying. Learning opportunities did not always happen naturally and required stable supportive structures made by the teachers. In this case, the supportive structure to enhance the development of students into educational experts involved making contacting stakeholders an obligatory part of creating an application.

6. Discussion and conclusions

The aim of this paper was to conceptualise relational agency by studying the relational agentic orientations of university teachers towards reorganising higher education. These orientations were analysed in the teachers’ reflections and evaluations of a novel mass course, which was part of a major reorganisation of study programmes in a Finnish university.

Regarding the research question on the types of relational agentic orientations, the study produced a typology of orientations on the intersections between the expansions of the different objects of activity and teacher evaluation of this expansion. The expansions were (a) of one’s own object, (b) of others’ objects, and (c) of a potentially shared object. The evaluations and reflections of the expansions were (1) pragmatic-adaptive, (2) critical, and (3) developmental-transformative. Six of the relational agentic orientations appeared to be the most significant, with pragmatic-adaptive present the most. The teachers also mostly focused on the expansion of the students’ objects.

The prevalence of pragmatic-adaptive evaluations emphasised how strongly development attempts in university teaching are grounded on the practicalities and challenges that teachers face in their everyday work. The teachers had to make various adjustments, from balancing teaching and research tasks to creating a meaningful course for students from different study tracks in educational sciences. The pragmatic-adaptive stance was also logical from the point of view of the teachers’ new role – not as content creators, but as facilitators of students’ active learning, focused on organising but not providing contents. The teachers also voiced criticisms, which in addition to solvable practical issues, emphasised insoluble structural challenges in the organisation of such a novel course. The project-based student learning assumed a great deal of activeness and self-organisation of the students. Learning and teaching in institutional settings still had a strong emphasis on course grades and course completion instead of focusing on the learning itself. Although a prerequisite of the course was the students’ active role, the developmental-transformative evaluations did not play a significant part in the teachers’ discussions and interviews, as could have been expected in the case of this novel type of teaching.

Multiple kinds of messy, general, and specific objects of activity appeared to be expanding in this reorganisation. The teachers’ reflections focused less on the expansion of their own object of activity (e.g. organisation and diversification of tasks) or the partially shared object (e.g. course evaluation). They mostly evaluated the expansion of the students’ object of learning, such as the educational application. The focus on student learning is essential (Postareff and Lindblom-Ylänne 2008). The lack of collaboration – or the construction of a partially shared object – between students and teachers may hinder students’ efforts, especially in project-based learning (Lasauskiene and Rauduvaite 2015).

The focus of the relational agentic orientation of the teachers on the expansion of the students’ objects also provides an important insight into relational agency. In relational agency conceptualisations, others are primarily considered resources (Edwards and D'Arcy 2004; Edwards 2005). The university teachers were not seeking resources in others, they saw their own role as a resource for others. This may be a natural orientation for teachers, so the resourcefulness in others who are collaborating should be studied in other groups of professionals.

The expansion of the objects of learning and teaching activities into different dimensions encountered multiple practical and institutional boundaries and obstacles. Overcoming these required the teachers’ attention, taken from transformative efforts in this educational reorganisation. The teachers’ efforts followed the main points of the reorganisation to a certain extent, although the teachers did not focus deliberately on its implementation, but on the student learning in the given circumstances. The teachers adapted, opposed, and utilised the transformational potential of this reorganisation to develop novel forms of teaching that support the active learning of students. This adaptive fluidity in agentic orientations shared similarities with the idea of bounded agency (Evans 2017), in comparison to another relevant framework of transformative agency (Kerosuo 2017; Sannino 2022). Activity-theoretical understanding of transformative agency focuses on the deliberate transformation of activities in changing circumstances, with a focus on becoming a collective subject, rather than on the natural elements of adaptations to change, which are common for major transformations of activities and practices.

The study naturally had limitations. It focused on one course, which was part of a reorganisation of higher education. This focus may make generalisation challenging, but it showed how a broad educational reorganisation was concretely implemented in practice. A limited number of interviews with only some of the teachers was supported by auxiliary ethnographic data from the course. The draft of the article was also sent to several participating teachers for comments to ensure external validation of the results. The students’ perspectives were not included in this study, as the goal was to focus specifically on the teachers’ perspectives of the reorganisation. Robust analysis of student perspective requires its own research.

This article focused on one course ‘without content’ in a Finnish university. This course is an example of the changing role of knowledge in higher education (Moravec 2008) and the focus on generic and work life skills and competences (e.g. Chan et al. 2017). These types of novel ‘general’ courses with multiple teachers and multiple students are a natural part of the transformation of higher education on a global level.

This study of the agentic orientations of teachers showed that teachers can indeed creatively adapt and use potential even in a top-down approach to educational change. But the implementation and full use of novel ways of teaching in and organisation of higher education, such as collaborative teaching of project-based courses, requires the construction of resourceful structures for bottom-up efforts to foster teachers’ agency. The relational dimension of teachers’ agency emerged in this case through relations to different ‘levels’ in activity, including those of other teachers, students, communities (e.g. study tracks), and the social and institutional structures of the faculty and the university. Finding resources on all possible levels could help teachers themselves become a resource for students in educational transformations.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Swedish is a second official language in Finland.

2 I refer to them as ‘teachers’ in the article, acknowledging their role in the course. These teachers held different academic positions: professors, associate professors, university lecturers, researchers, and postdoctoral researchers. According to the principles of the faculty, ‘all teachers do research, and all researchers teach’.

3 The interviews were conducted before and after the course, with teachers involved in their organisation and implementation. Detailed information on the interviews has been omitted to ensure anonymity.

4 In the presentation of my results, I refer to the teachers as Teacher 1, Teacher 2, etc. The numbers were allocated randomly using https://www.randomizer.org/.

5 Translations of the excerpts from Finnish are the author’s.

6 T – Teacher.