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This paper aims to introduce the concept of adaptive agency and illustrate its emergence in the field of English teaching in a number of countries using England over the past 30 years as a case study. It examines how the exceptional flexibility of English as school subject has brought many external impositions whilst its teachers have evolved remarkable adaptivity.

It proposes several models of agency and their different modes, focussing finally on adaptive agency as a model that has emerged over a 30-year period. It considers aspects of this development across a number of countries, mostly English speaking ones, but its chief case is that of England. It is principally a theoretical paper drawing on Phenomenology, Critical Realism and later modernist interpretations of Darwinian Theory, but it is grounded by drawing on two recent empirical projects to illustrate English teachers’ current agency. It offers a fresh overview of how agency and accountability have interacted within a matrix of official policy and constraint.

Adaptive agency has become a necessary aspect of teacher expertise. Such a mode of working creates great emotional strains and tensions, leading to many teachers leaving the profession. However, many English teachers whilst feeling controlled in the matrix of power and the panopticon of surveillance, remain resilient and positive about the future of the subject.

This is to some extent a personal and reflexive account of a lived history, supported by research and other evidence.

Adaptive agency enables teachers to conceptualise the frustrations of the role but to celebrate how they expertly use their agency where they can. It makes their work and struggle more comprehensible. In providing the concept of harmonious practice, it offers the hope of a return to more satisfying professional lives.

This paper offers an original concept, adaptive agency, and discusses other valuable conceptualisations of agency and accountability. It combines a unique individual perspective with a fresh overview of the past three decades as experienced by English teachers in England.

This paper aims to examine ways in which English language arts (ELA) teachers have exercised agency in response to policy changes that have been shaped by neoliberal education agendas that seek to further advance standardization and the primacy of measurability of teaching and learning.

The authors posed the following research questions of related literature: Under what conditions, in what ways and to what ends do teachers exercise agency within ELA classroom teaching? Through five stages of systematized analysis, this scoping review of 21 studies maps the evidence base.

Structural, material, interpersonal and pedagogical issues both constrained and supported agency. Teachers covertly exercised agency to be responsive to students’ needs; in some instances, teachers’ agentive practices reinforced institutionally sanctioned methods. Teachers’ agentive action aimed to combat the deprofessionalization of the field, foster innovative curriculum approaches and challenge stereotypes about students. The authors also found a range of definitions of agency in the research, some of which are more generative than others.

This paper addresses a gap in the research literature by illuminating contexts, consequences and conundrums of ELA teacher agency. The authors documented the range of structural, cultural and material conditions within which teachers exercise agency; the subversive, collective and small- and large-scale ways in which teachers realize agency; and the potentially favorable or unfavorable consequences to which these efforts are directed. In doing so, the authors also problematize the range of definitions of agency in the literature and call for greater attention to conceptual clarity around agency in research. As literacy researchers illuminate work that disrupts the marginalization of teachers’ agency, this scoping review maps the field’s knowledge base of agency in ELA teaching and sets up a future research agenda to promote the professionalization of teaching and advocacy for English teachers.

A new senior curriculum and assessment policy in Queensland, Australia, is changing the conditions for teaching and learning. The purpose of this study was to consider the personal, structural and cultural conditions that mediated the agency of Senior English teachers as they negotiated these changes. Agency is conceptualised as opportunities for choice in action arising from pedagogic negotiations with students within contexts where teachers’ decision-making is circumscribed by other pressures.

An action inquiry project was conducted with English teachers and students in two secondary schools as they began to adjust their practices in readiness for changes to Queensland senior assessment. Four English teachers (two per school) designed a 10-week unit of work in Senior English with the aim of enhancing students’ critical and creative agency. Five action/reflection cycles occurred over six months with interviews conducted at each stage to trace how teachers were making decisions to prioritise student agency.

Participating teachers drew on a variety of structural, personal and cultural resources, including previous experiences, time to develop shared understandings and the responsiveness of students that mediated their teacher agency. Teachers’ ability to exert agentic influence beyond their own classroom was affected by the perceived flexibility of established resources and the availability of social support to share student success.

These findings indicate that a range of conditions affected the development of teacher agency when they sought to design assessment to prioritise student agency. The variety of enabling conditions that need to be considered when supporting teacher and student agency is an important contribution to theories of agency in schools, and studies of teacher policy enactment in systems moving away from localised control to more remote and centralised quality assurance processes.

By engaging levels of W/writerliness, this paper aims to identify how English Language Arts teachers’ personal and professional W/writerly identities impact their performance of pedagogical agency.

In this narrative inquiry, the author draws on theories of writing identity and agency to analyze how four mid-career English teachers’ personal beliefs around writing intersect with their professional practice. Data sources include interviews, journal entries and classroom observations.

Nuanced differences in teachers’ W/writerly identities produce more substantial differences in their pedagogy, especially impacting their performance of agency to (re)define successful writing outcomes and to balance process and product in their writing instruction.

This paper presents one method to expand preservice and in-service English Language Arts (ELA) practitioners’ approaches to teaching writing even alongside limitations of their teaching context by (1) emphasizing their ownership over their own writing in university methods courses; (2) leading teachers on an exploration of W/writerly identities; and (3) investigating ways teachers can transfer their personal and professional learning to students via their own pedagogical agency.

The study extends the work of scholars in the National Writing Project, suggesting that nuanced exploration of ELA teachers’ W/writerly identities in preservice and in-service settings could increase their sense of agency to work against and within cultures of standardization.

Teacher agency plays a crucial role in teachers’ professionalism and makes them capable of acting powerfully in their teaching context. The purpose of this study was to explore the role of case-based instruction (CBI) on the agency development of EFL (English as a foreign language) student-teachers.

The study followed a descriptive narrative design and involved ten student-teachers in five CBI sessions. The data collected through different data sources, such as narratives, interviews, recorded sessions and focused groups, were analyzed using a deductive-inductive thematic analysis.

The results showed that CBI has a constructive role in developing the agency of EFL student-teachers. Active participation in CBI sessions helps teachers consider their future desires. The exploration of cases in CBI sessions helps them recall past experiences that led to the development of their agency. Brainstorming ideas in CBI sessions helps teachers consider their beliefs in decision-making and analyze their past experiences. In conclusion, CBI can help develop teacher professionalism and acknowledgment of the importance of teacher agency.

The research has addressed student-teachers’ agency development through an ecological perspective and CBI.

In response to threats to teacher autonomy and creativity by measurements of teacher quality through student performance on high-stakes test scores and standardised professional learning, this study aims to explore teacher collaborative research for opportunities for promotion of teacher agency.

The authors explore the following research question: How is agentic teacher research into English teaching that integrates information and communication technologies and creative and critical thinking enabled? Using ethnographic tools and an analytical lens influenced by ecological teacher agency, factors which enable teacher agency within teacher research are investigated.

Teachers’ experiences of, and insights into, collaborative research indicate the enabling of teacher agency through an interplay of personal and professional narratives and available cultural, structural and material resources. Intersections between teacher research and teaching for creativity and teacher agency are revealed.

Three separate fields of study including teacher agency, teacher research and teaching for creativity are brought together providing insight into how teacher research into teaching for creativity in literacy learning can enhance teacher collaboration, autonomy and agency.

This paper aims to apply ecological models of agency to understand factors influencing how an eighth grade English language arts (ELA) teacher enacted agency in four moments in the classroom. It focuses on how his language in relation to his instructional choices reflected messaging to his students regarding the learning he intended from his ELA instruction.

The paper applies an existing framework (Biesta et al., 2015, 2017), adding Bakhtin (1981) understandings of language, to classroom discourse supplemented by teacher interviews and other data sources. In looking across these data sources, the paper traces the influence of past factors (i.e. the teacher’s personal and professional history) and future orientations (i.e. goals established in standards and the teacher’s goals for his students) on present instructional decisions. The teacher’s language in the classroom becomes a primary focus for this study, as it reveals the ways in which he drew on specific resources in the messages in his instruction.

In each moment, the teacher’s language could be shown to have motivation in a variety of factors. While influenced by external factors such as the common core standards and standardized assessments, the teacher often enacted agency out of his personal beliefs about making learning personally meaningful for students as grounded in his personal and professional history. Exceptions to this pattern, especially regarding preparing students for writing tests on state assessments, less frequently relied on the language of finding meaning in the learning.

This paper builds on studies of ELA teacher agency through the development of methodology related to an ecological model of agency and Bakhtinian concepts of language focused on the discourse of the classroom. It contributes to understanding the factors at study in an ELA teacher’s instructional agency, which can help teachers and researchers further develop frameworks for describing and assessing the practice of agency in the profession.

The purpose of this study is to explore how, through the cultivation of reform ownership in the professional development (PD) program, the Pathway Project, agency was achieved for the development of teacher professionalism and teacher expertise in the cases of Mrs. Cruz and Mrs. Keyes. This, in turn, provided opportunities to advance student learning.

Multiple sources of data (focused classroom observations, semi-structured interviews and collected artifacts) were analyzed through a case study approach to understand the processes by which an agentic context materialized for these two teachers.

The authors identified the following three stages in the cultivation of reform ownership in the cases of Mrs. Cruz and Mrs. Keyes: emerging; developing; and deepening. Each of these stages proved critical to the achievement of agency for the development of teacher professionalism, teacher expertise and student learning.

The cases of Mrs. Cruz and Mrs. Keyes offer a renewed vision of the ways in which teachers can achieve agency in the current reform environment. Given the proliferation of reform efforts within today’s educational landscape, their cases suggest that PD developers take seriously the responsibility of cultivating reform ownership for the achievement of agency and deep and lasting change.

As concurrent enrollment (CE) programs continue to expand in the USA, a growing share of English teaching at the first-year university level is taking place in secondary schools. Though much of the discourse surrounding CE courses relates to quality control, the purpose of this paper is to argue for a reconsideration of the terms by which these courses are valued, calling for a shift from alignment to collaboration as the crucial work for participating English teachers.

This essay responds to scholarship and primary source documents related to CE programs in light of the author’s experience as liaison for a CE literature course at a Midwestern regional university in the USA.

An ethic of alignment pervades discourse about CE programs. The quality control promised by this “alignment story” presupposes a stable university course to be aligned with and the emulation of college faculty pedagogy as the high-priority intellectual labor. This alignment story is undermined by the variation within and between on-campus and high school iterations of the literature course. Rather than justifying an alignment ethic, this variation continually renews important questions about what constitutes college-level engagement with literature and how to best help students achieve it in a particular setting. These questions call for deliberation among a community of English teachers, not alignment of one constituency to another.

This essay builds on previous scholarship about the importance of alignment and the opportunity for collaboration in CE by exploring how an emphasis on the former misrecognizes the importance of the latter.