Teacher agency: a case study of Mauritius.
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Date
2022
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Abstract
This study explores the phenomenon of teacher agency within a dynamic socio-cultural space
where a landmark national schooling curriculum policy reform was introduced by Mauritian
educational authorities. It contributes to an understanding of teachers' experiences, their
interpretations of their experiences and the ways in which they exercised agency as they
revisited pedagogies and personal beliefs in relation to a changing macro-policy and micro institutional environment.
A narrative inquiry methodology within an interpretivist paradigm was adopted to immerse in
teachers’ multi-layered experiences. Data was produced through various methods: interviews,
classroom observations, informal conversations and artefact construction activities that
triggered responses and provided insights into teachers’ biographical experiences, beliefs and
practices. The data was re-presented through an ethnodrama of interlocuting participants. This
creative form enabled me to co-construct three-dimensional characters inhabiting complex
temporal and spatial dimensions.
The fieldwork revealed that teachers' personal and professional experiences could not be
isolated from an evolving broader global space grappling with digital pedagogical evolution.
Furthermore, unique nationalistic strategies to enhance the country's small island developing
state socioeconomic landscape exerted additional pressure on teachers’ choices of
representation of their actions. Teachers' career experiences reflect divergent agencies and
agendas characterised by fluid, complex and complementary contradictions and stabilities. An
assessment and performativity regime of outputs of the schooling system featured prominently
as a backdrop.
The thesis developed a model of diffracted and entangled agencies that emphasise a
kaleidoscope of possibilities of understanding teacher agency. Rather than being
conceptualised as a stable characteristic trait of teachers, teacher agency was seen as constantly
adapting to temporal and spatial changes, adopting new beliefs, revisiting past experiences and
reconstructing their professional roles. Teacher agency was further considered as dialogical
choices of representations amongst varied audiences, co-participants and role-players, with
varied agendas.
This study’s unique contextual policy reform parameters are potentially representative of any
significant change that causes diffraction of a relational teacher agency. The thesis emphasises
agentic responsiveness to space and time specificities that intersect with teachers’ personal and
professional experiences. Teacher agency is not simply a singular identity and political
construction, but also a strategic negotiated shifting set of performances of responsiveness to
situational contexts that in themselves are not stable, or coherent. The report concludes with
the theoretical, methodological and contextual implications of the proposed reconceptualised
notion of teacher agency, discusses the study's limitations, and highlights the possibilities for
future research.
Description
Doctoral degrees. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.