Narrative Approaches to Teacher Agency: How Educators’ Stories Shape Educational Change
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Educational Change, Narrative Inquiry, Teacher Agency
Abstract
Background. Teacher agency plays a crucial role in educational transformation, yet its narrative dimensions remain underexplored. This study addresses how educators' stories shape their capacity to influence professional practices and institutional policies amid reform initiatives, drawing on narrative theory to examine storytelling as a sense-making tool for navigating complex educational landscapes.
Purpose. The primary aim is to investigate how teachers construct and enact professional agency through narrative structures in relation to educational change, identifying patterns across career stages and reform types to understand temporal, collective, and contextual influences on agency development.
Method. Employing a qualitative narrative inquiry design, the study involved 18 teachers from diverse backgrounds through purposeful sampling. Data collection included three life history interviews per participant over six months, supplemented by artifacts and researcher reflections. Analysis utilized Clandinin and Connelly's three-dimensional framework, incorporating structural, thematic, and dialogic techniques with member checking for trustworthiness.
Results. Findings revealed three dominant narrative plots: progressive (heroic transformation), tragic (constrained persistence), and comedic (pragmatic improvisation). Career stage variations showed early-career teachers focusing on individual agency, mid-career on collective action, and veterans on temporal depth. Curriculum reforms elicited diverse responses, while assessment changes often produced tragic narratives. The case study of Sarah Martinez illustrated narrative evolution enabling strategic adaptation in reform contexts.
Conclusion. The study concludes that narrative storytelling actively constitutes teacher agency, offering strategies for resilience in educational change. Its novelty lies in linking narrative plot structures to agency outcomes, providing a framework for understanding how stories mediate reform implementation and empower educators. This approach highlights the potential for narrative practices to foster equitable, context-sensitive transformations in education.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Erwin Erwin, Teboho Maseko, Syafiq Amir, Saiful Fallah
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