Academic Librarians' Conceptions and Experiences of Teacher Agency

Andrea Baer, Public Services Librarian, Rowan University

Agency can be defined as the ability of an individual and/or group to enact power and choice in their surrounding environments. Within the field of education, the concept of teacher agency has been widely discussed. Many education researchers and practitioners have presented teacher agency as essential to individual teachers’ professional development and effectiveness in the classroom. Others have challenged individualistic representations of teacher agency, which they argue often reinforce the status quo and top-down mandates related to curriculum and teaching practices. For example, in Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach, Priestley et al. (2015) critique teacher agency discourse that frames teachers as individual actors outside of a larger system. They instead propose an ecological view of teacher agency through which agency is understood in relation to complex environments and systems in which many factors and forces influence the potential for individuals and collectives to act or not act in a given moment or environment. An ecological view of teacher agency influenced this researcher’s approach to designing and conducting a research study on academic librarians’ conceptions and experiences of teacher agency within the context of their library instruction work. For the purpose of the study, library instruction work refers to all encompassed activities, including but not limited to scheduling, designing, delivering, assessing, and coordinating instruction/instruction programs. The researcher will report on preliminary results of the study, which involved a survey of academic librarians on their conceptions and experiences of teacher agency (i.e., the capacity or enacting of agency that teaching professionals experience in their teaching roles). The survey consisted of five open-ended questions about participants’ experiences of teacher agency in the context of their library instruction work, including about factors and conditions that contribute to or detract from a sense of agency; strategies, approaches, and ideas that help them to experience greater agency; and thoughts, ideas, and feelings that the concept of teacher agency evokes. This presentation will concentrate on participants’ conceptions of teacher agency, as reflected in their descriptions of it as an individual and/or collective phenomenon. Future analysis will focus in more depth on participants’ affective orientations toward the concept of teacher agency and prominent areas of influence on participants’ conceptions and experiences of teacher agency, including factors that fostered or hindered their senses of individual and/or collective agency.

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