Exploring foreign language teachers’ professional agency in Romanian Public Secondary schools.
Abstract
Aim: This research aims to explore how seven foreign language teachers in a few urban
public secondary schools in Romania understand and enact their professional agency
and how contextual factors support or constrain its achievement. The purpose is to
understand the ways in which the participants’ teaching philosophies and experiences
inform their awareness and achievement of agency, what they perceive as the available
contextual resources within contextual constraints, and how that reflects in their beliefs
and professional aspirations.
Theory: The thesis relies on the ecological theoretical framework (Priestley et al., 2015), which
enables an analysis of how contexts mediate the interplay of values, beliefs, and
practices, shaping the agency of foreign language teachers.
Method: The narrative inquiry methodology is chosen to explore the participants’ personal and
professional experiences, through their stories. The semi-structured, in-depth Zoom
interviews captured the FL teachers’ views, experiences, and relationships. The
narrative analysis and interpretation highlight the particular but also the general in these
individual experiences, illustrated by relevant extracts from the participants’ stories.
Results: Findings show that the teachers’ primary resources for enacting professional agency
was their ability to seek meaningful opportunities for professional development and
build productive relationships in the classroom, school, and community. The teachers
enacted proactive agency through resilience, responsibility, and commitment translated
as compensatory actions to mitigate school shortages, support students from
disadvantaged backgrounds, and ensure students’ academic development and language
certification. Macro factors such as the underfunded centralised education system,
national policies, and appraisal criteria combined with the demand for international
language certification, mediate language teachers’ professional agency, causing
asymmetrical relationships, administrative chores, high accountability, competition
between students, teachers, and schools, and social inequity. The teachers manifested
reactive agency by complying with institutional requirements. The participants’ critical
evaluations and conflicted projections illustrate that their professional agency is
intertwined with their identity and mediated by their need to act according to their
values and professional convictions. The narratives revealed that their agency was also
moderated by their need to preserve a dignified status as FL professionals and be
validated by the school community.
Degree
Student Essay
Collections
Date
2023-10-31Author
Dragomir, Camelia
Keywords
teacher agency
ecological theory
foreign language teaching
accountability
professional development
Language
eng