Zening Yang, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom

Language teacher agency is a fairly recent publication in the Cambridge Elements series on language teaching - a book series that aims to bridge the research--practice gap and encourage “research-informed pedagogy” (Rose & McKinley, 2023).

The book consists of seven chapters. After a succinct introductory chapter that situates this book within the recent surge of academic literature on language teacher agency, it provides answers to several questions that are close to practitioners’ concerns: What is agency? (Chapter 2) Why does it matter? (Chapter 3) How does it connect with other concepts, such as teacher beliefs and knowledge? (Chapter 4) How can we enhance teachers’ sense of agency? (Chapter 5). Chapter 6 elaborates on the concept ‘collaborative agency’. The final chapter concludes the book and proposes a ‘trans-perspective’ (p. 53) on language teacher agency: researchers need to mesh different theoretical perspectives, and experiment with innovative methodologies, such as multimodal narratives.

As a novice teacher educator, I feel that the book provides a reader-friendly overview that clarifies the concept of teacher agency. This feature makes the book among my favourite sources, given that teacher agency is an abstract term that has been subject to increasingly sophisticated theorisation, often using highly technical language. The book is also successful in motivating me to further explore how I can adapt the suggested tools for developing teacher agency (e.g., building teacher communities, fostering critical teacher reflection, and providing alternative discourses).

However, the book seems to present teacher agency as a homogeneously desirable concept. Indeed, as presented by the authors, teachers can exercise agency for purposes that seem universally desirable (e.g., professional development). Yet the meaningfulness of many purposes might be open to question. For example, when a teacher agentically refuses to participate in professional development programmes because of the overwhelming existing workload, should their agentic refusal be promoted? It seems more appropriate to invite respectful and contextualised debates regarding ‘agency for what?’ (Priestley et al., 2012, p. 211), rather than romanticising ‘agency’, a means without specified ends, as a universally good thing.

Moreover, I was slightly disappointed that the book, claiming itself written “with frontline practitioners, teacher educators, and educational policymakers in mind” (p. 1), finishes with recommendations for research rather than for practice. There are also scant practical examples of how to design and implement agency-oriented professional development initiatives. One possible reason is that the authors expect readers to exercise their agency and develop localised solutions themselves. Yet even with this rationale, the book could have done more to scaffold readers’ agency by, for example, providing reflective tasks for readers’ future exploration.

I highly recommend this book if you are looking for alternative ideas to product-based, transmission-oriented teacher education models, or an accessible and comprehensive overview of the concept ‘teacher agency’. Yet, even with the help of this book, we, teacher educators, still need to play our role, share our front-line experiences and practices, and enhance each other’s agency for developing initiatives that will, in turn, empower teachers.

References

Priestley, M., Edwards, R., Priestley, A., & Miller, K. (2012). Teacher agency in curriculum making: Agents of change and spaces for manoeuvre. Curriculum inquiry, 42(2), 191-214.

Rose, H., & McKinley, K. (2023). Cambridge Elements Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press. https://www.cambridge.org/core/publications/elements/language-teaching