Crisis times and school education: is teacher agency changing?

Abstract

This article explores how educators dealt with an unprecedented educational crisis using remote teaching and delve into the characteristics of teacher agency in crisis situations. Employing a multiple case study design, the study explores diverse school experiences in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago, Chile. Data were gathered from three schools, comprising 24 interviews (18 teachers and six administrators) and analysed using grounded theory. Findings suggest that teachers demonstrate the ability to reconstruct the affected dimensions when faced with a lack of pedagogical resources for emergency remote teaching (fracture in the iterative dimension) and uncertainty about the future (fracture in the projective dimension). Moreover, the agentic transition can explain the practical-evaluative dimension in crises. Across three stages, agentic transition outlines a journey for teachers, from grappling with an unprecedented crisis with limited resources to normalising their practices with technical expertise in the context of new remote teaching scenarios. The present article introduces key concepts and models and delves into implications and future projections.

Keywords

• Teacher agency
• emergency remote teaching
• distance education
• agentic transition