This project investigates the enactment of teacher agency with technology for teaching and learning. Teacher agency is an individual teacher’s power to act, and the actions and decisions they take within their own context. Research identifies both teacher agency and technology as factors in educational transformation and improvement but previously has not linked them systematically or elaborated their potential when combined. Our transformational view of teacher agency with technology sees teachers as experts with agency and judgement. Through this work we aim to develop a model of teacher agency that we can share and test with colleagues throughout the UK.
Our research addresses how teachers conceptualise their current agency with technology (enactment); teachers’ aspirations for agency with technology (what it might be); the extent to which different technologies invite teachers’ agency (what is possible); and the role technology can play in developing teachers’ agency (enhancement). Our approach challenges and extends the theorisation of ‘technology integration’ in schools, preferring instead a perspective of ‘technology adaptation’ (Bozkurt, 2020).
We ask teachers these questions and explore them through our series of studies:
- Q1: What are your current practices and uses of technology, and what agency do you have with EdTech?
- Q2: To what extent do the EdTech resources and infrastructures of your work allow you to meet your aims and aspirations for teaching and learning?
- Q3: If we could start anew in designing and choosing EdTech, what would you want it to do?
We investigate agency through seven collaborative EdTech-themed studies that, in combination, inform a comprehensive model of teacher agency with technology:
- Teachers’ use and design of technology
- A context for agency: Online safety and wellbeing
- Resourcefulness: Making education technology for the future
- Agency for all: Pedagogies for digital global citizenship
- Navigating boundless knowledge: Online information literacy for learning
- Assessment technology and teacher agency in linked pedagogies
- Technology for teacher agency: Teacher education and development
Modifying established concepts for describing teacher agency allows us to focus on teachers’ uses of education technologies and influence on their design in the context of their schools and region. Taking a place-based approach, we examine the issue of teacher agency with technology in the county of Norfolk. In doing so, we address context-specific factors that will be familiar to teachers across the UK, in varying degrees and in differing relationships:
- the quality and stability of technology infrastructure
- the geographic connectedness or isolation of urban, rural and coastal communities
- social and educational disadvantage
- relationships between individual schools and academies, Trusts, and local authorities
- digital inequalities, and
- emerging and localised impacts of climate change