K–12 Teachers’ Enactments of Professional Agency During Collaborative Design

Hi! I'm Megan Gibas, and I’m a chemistry education researcher at The University of Michigan in the Shultz group. I’m going to be sharing about our research on three teachers’ professional agency during a collaborative design to co-create a series of place-based lessons in the Iñupiaq region of Northern Alaska. Little attention has been paid to understanding how teachers enact professional agency in Collaborative Design. We thus sought to collaborate with teachers to design these lessons and characterize how they exhibited professional agency. We drew upon conceptions of professional agency in educational reform literature, generally defined as the quality of engagement of actors in their current context according to the interplay between their professional past experiences (or iterational dimension), orientations towards their professional future (or projective dimension), and material, cultural, and structural present professional situations (or practical-evaluative dimension), represented by the figure shown here. We analyzed videos of individual and group design meetings through this lens of professional agency, specifically in relation to the community and culture and their students. We wrote case profiles illustrating our characterization. We found that teachers manifested professional agency across a spectrum in relation to incorporating the community and culture and considering their students. While the teachers actively participated in designing activities to engage their students, we saw more reserved agency around culture and community connections. I highlight several instances of active and reserved agency for the teachers in the quotes I selected here. Results indicate a flexible collaborative design can support teachers’ professional agency, and more support may be needed in areas of collaborative design where teachers are not as comfortable and/or exhibit more reserved agency.