Acting as Accountable Authors: Creating Interactional Spaces for Agency Work in Teacher Education

Published: 
Jul. 01, 2011

Source: This article was published in Teaching and Teacher Education, Volume 27, Issue 5,
Author(s): Lasse Lipponen and Kristiina Kumpulainen, " Acting as Accountable Authors: Creating Interactional Spaces for Agency Work in Teacher Education", Pages 812–819, Copyright Elsevier (July 2011).

In this article, the authors report on the results of an ethnographically-grounded investigation of agency work among nine pre-service teachers.
The main objective is to determine how agency emerges and is constructed in situated discourse practices within the context of a teacher education program embedded in the collective inquiry approach.

This study identifies the forms of agency that emerged in the collective discussions of the classroom community, evidencing pre-service teachers’ transformative agency, relational agency and epistemic agency.

The results of this study also show the negotiation and framing of agency, and acting as an accountable author, involve changes in the positions of students and teachers, such as, crossing and transforming traditional expert-novice boundaries, as well as recognizing and crediting this boundary crossing.

The authors suggest that when framing and supporting students’ accountability, teachers should withdraw themselves from controlling and commanding the learning sessions, but instead, connect, reciprocate, and distribute the responsibility for activities in the learning community.

This study illuminates how agency work is distributed across people, tools, and environments.

Here, agency work emerged in interactional spaces containing the pre-service teachers, educators, the surrounding field of others, and the subject discipline(s) embedded in a particular cultural context including its tools and practices.
Thus, agency work is, embedded in social groups and emerges in collaborative networks.

Updated: Jun. 20, 2012
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