I, Teacher: re‐territorialization of teachers’ multi‐faceted agency in globalized education

Abstract

Analysis of teachers’ agency as multifarious change, embedded in educational reform in the global era, stands largely unexamined in educational policy. Although the concept of teachers as agents has political implications, beyond this, examining teachers’ agency offers ways of describing and reviewing changes to teachers’ work and relations within evolving education systems. Local systems draw from globally orientated education policies, which continue to influence to the way that local systems redesign education. In the global context, education systems are complex interactions between structure and agency, evidenced as ‘multiplicity undergoing change’. In other words, there is dynamic and dialectic interplay between structure and agency. Teachers’ agency, germane to dynamic interplay, means that teachers are not only engaging in the reproduction of structural change aligning globalization‐driven reforms to their work and practice, but also, in adapting and reacting to new structural conditions, they are transformed through their actions. In this paper, the focus becomes teachers’ agency as a framework for understanding how teachers are redesigned and reassembled to do things differently within restructured education systems. Finally, the discussion considers the possible consequences of teachers work and practice, given teachers’ agency relative to the macro policy of superfigures and the transitional national/global structures.