Essential Guides for Early Career Teachers: Workload by Greer Julie;Hollis Emma;

Author:Greer, Julie;Hollis, Emma;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Critical Publishing

Chapter 4 Choose your words

What? (The big idea)

The language of agency

From an early age, children are taught to do as they are told; to conform and to comply with adult direction. Fairy tales and children’s stories warn of the perils of independent thinking, curiosity and controlling behaviours. Think of Max in Where the Wild Things Are; consider Angry Arthur, or Alice in Wonderland. There are always exceptions to this rule, but even in books such as Matilda the heroine aspires to a gentle life of books and learning, far away from the successes of her free thinking which had enabled her to expose the abuses at home and at school. These stories add to the cacophony of messages that impact on cultural norms, affecting perceptions of gender, identity and diversity, for example. These messages, over time and through the discourse that follows, contribute to how you feel about your place in the world and your ability to make change.

Having agency in the decisions about your own life and in your own workplace is a good thing, but in the context of schools (which are managerially hierarchical) having a say can be seen as subversive, conflictual and unhelpful. Those who offer opinions that are contrary to the status quo are sometimes deemed ‘meddlers’, ‘trouble’ or ‘bolshy’. It would seem fair that if a school development plan had been agreed and a member of staff was constantly questioning the direction of travel, the practice and procedures of the school, in a way that was critical, personal or affected the quality of provision for the children in that teacher’s class, then a particular type of professional conversation would need to be held in which the teacher’s own approach and practice could be challenged. However, all too often in schools, critique is confused with criticism; questioning with subversion; making an argument with being argumentative; and discourse with dispute. The language of agency is so important and is intrinsically tied to emotional capital.

This chapter enables you to explore teacher agency and develop your thinking about forms of capital, so that you can be part of creating a more effective and collegial approach to policy, procedure and practice in education, particularly in relation to your workload.

Biesta et al (2015, p 624) describe teachers’ agency as ‘their active contribution to shaping their work and its conditions – for the overall quality of education’. They recognise that agency is not a property, capacity or competence, but something that people do. As a result, the quality of someone’s agency is not down to the individual, but is dependent on the quality of their engagement with ‘temporal – relational contexts-for-action’. Emirbayer and Mische (1998) proposed this phrase while defining agency in sociological and historical perspectives. It describes how your level of agency is affected by the past, present and future as you navigate between them in your considerations, actions and reflections; employing your ability to simultaneously hold your own views while considering the views of others and navigating overlapping needs and demands arising from the interplay with habit, imagination and judgement.

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