Abstract

Teachers’ agency has recently been vastly studied from a sociocultural perspective, emphasising that teachers’ action is shaped by the structures within which teachers work. However, this study provides a different perspective, introducing relational sociology to the research on teachers’ agency. Here, agency is seen as embedded in interdependencies and relationships, either personal or impersonal. Finnish newly qualified teachers were interviewed concerning their teacher training and work to explore how they negotiated agency in their narratives. The analysis shows the entanglement of master- and counter-narratives in agency negotiation as the teachers drew on prevailing societal master-narratives and simultaneously provided opposing categories through counter-narratives. The results reveal three aspects of relationships through which the agency was negotiated: political, cultural, and epistemic. The study contributes to the understanding of teachers’ agency, paying attention to language and the plurality of relationships in agency negotiation and formation.

摘要

最近从社会文化的角度对教师的能动性进行了广泛的研究，强调教师的行为是由教师工作的结构所塑造的。然而，本研究提供了不同的视角，将关系社会学引入到教师能动性研究中。在这里，代理被视为嵌入在相互依赖和关系中，无论是个人的还是非个人的。芬兰新晋合格教师接受了有关他们的教师培训和工作的采访，以探讨他们如何在叙述中协商代理。分析表明，当教师借鉴社会流行的主叙事，同时通过反叙事提供对立的类别时，代理谈判中主叙事和反叙事的纠缠不清。政治、文化和认知。本研究有助于理解教师的能动性，关注语言以及能动性谈判和形成中的多元关系。