A dialogue about teacher agency: Australian and Chinese perspectives

Teaching and Teacher Education 75 (2018) 316e326

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A dialogue about teacher agency: Australian and Chinese perspectives Alyson Simpson a, *, Guoyuan Sang b, Julian Wood c, Yiting Wang b, Bixin Ye b a

The University of Sydney, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, rm 339 Education Building A35, NSW, 2006, Australia Center for Teacher Education Research, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, China c The University of Sydney, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, NSW, 2006, Australia b

h i g h l i g h t s
Ecological concepts of agency provide impetus for debates on teacher professionalism.
Comparative studies of professional standards reveal international policy drift.
Tension arises in the dynamic interplay of individual empowerment and systemised controls in teaching.
Agency is an epistemological stance on which teachers' work could be built.

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 29 November 2017 Received in revised form 28 May 2018 Accepted 4 July 2018

Agency is emerging as a key concept, as part of increased debates about rigid accountability in measures of teacher effectiveness. However, the construct is elusive. Combining scholarship from Australian and Chinese scholars this research review undertook to create a dialogic space within which a geo-political position could be argued. Given recently introduced professional standards in China that shadow existing governance of teacher education in Australia, the findings indicate commonality in disparate contexts. We investigated how agency played out in the dynamic interplay of technologies of power and discovered the importance of exploring and representing teachers' work in an ecological framework. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Teacher agency Professional standards Teacher effectiveness Australia China

1. Introduction A call for teachers to be agentic professionals has emerged in literature as a strategic response to policy agendas promoting rigid accountability (Edwards, 2015; Gelfuso, 2017). Recommendations in recent reports state the need for teachers to shape and lead educational change by developing the “capacity to engage fully with the complexities of education” (Donaldson, 2011, p. 4). Yet research also recognises the challenge inherent to education systems where teachers' actions may be intentionally dynamic yet institutionally constrained (Schwarz & de Groot, 2011, p. 276). This paper examines the term agency, therefore, in the spirit of an ecological approach to epistemological enquiry exploring how it might inform understanding of teachers' work in Australia and China. Accounting for disparate bureaucratic systems, learning

* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (A. Simpson). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2018.07.002 0742-051X/© 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

contexts, student needs as well as personal experiences our definition of professional agency balances subject-centered and sociocultural perspectives (Etelapelto, Vahasantanen, Hokka, & Paloniemi, 2013, p. 45). We support the view that agency can be defined as an “emergent phenomenon - something that is achieved by individuals, through the interplay of personal capacities and the resources, affordances and constraints of the environment by means of which individuals act” (Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson, 2015, p. 19). This paper explores the concept of agency as a construct that recognises the critical importance of building capacity in contexualised decision making spurred by teachers' professional reflection on “what might be” (Edwards, in Ludvigsen, 2011, p.28). In some contexts, teachers are afforded high levels of teacher autonomy, for example, in curriculum design where they are called on to be “agents of change” (Priestley et al., 2015, p.127). However, when this apparent freedom is contrasted with regimens of control that regulate teacher behaviours based on performative measures,

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an obvious tension arises. Teachers do not have control over the systemic environments within which they operate. For example, mandated standards enshrine expectations of teacher professionalism. Therefore, we feel it is important not to conceive of teacher agency merely in terms of individual capacity or personal attribute; nor should we take up the sociological view of agency merely as social action. Rather, we propose agency should be viewed as relational, bound as it is in dynamic relationships by cultural and structural conditions and emerging when teachers take action based on “deliberative knowledge work” (Markauskaite & Goodyear, 2017, p. 246). It is what teachers “do or achieve” (Biesta & Tedder, 2006, p. 22) within the constraints and possibilities of local education systems. Our key goal in this paper is to examine how the construct of agency plays out in research into teacher professionalism. However, before we examine how this may appear in Chinese and Australian contexts in particular, other constructs frequently associated with agency, which will appear in our discussion such as classroom readiness (TEMAG, 2014) and teacher effectiveness, need to be interrogated for the discursive influences they have in shaping dominant political agendas. For example, the plurality of approaches to assessing effectiveness (Brabeck, Dwyer, Geisinger, & Worrell, 2016) needs to be acknowledged because any discussion of teacher professionalism is “unavoidably political” CochranSmith, Piazza, & Power, 2013(p.7). It is for this reason that the following section of the paper provides a mini-retrospective overview of attempts to benchmark and monitor teacher performance. This section will provide a background to the development of competing attempts to fix fluid pedagogic relations into sets of stable paradigms that reference systems of measurement. For example, driven by neo-liberal policies the emergence of discussion around Value Added Models (VAMs) (Boyd, Lankford, Grossman, Loeb & Wyckoff, 2009; Darling-Hammond, 2015; Fuller, 2014) reveals a chain of reasoning viewing teachers' work as the production of good results from students. As Connell (2009) argued some years ago, the idea that teachers should have their effectiveness indexed to student test outcomes could draw teachers on to ‘dangerous ground’. Nearly twenty years ago a drift towards an audit culture was predicted (Power, 1994). The move to tie teacher's effectiveness to proxy measures such as standardised test scores is now well established. Yet researchers are unconvinced “whether the use of value added will improve or undermine the teaching force in the long run” (Darling-Hammond, 2015, p.133). The discursive influence of this view of effective teacher preparation has been well reviewed by authors such as Allard, Mayer, and Moss (2014) in Australia and Zhou (2014) in China. Neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005) has been the dominant political-economic paradigm for two or three decades in most Western societies, and correspondingly in teacher education. Critiqued most cogently from researchers working in the sociology of education (Connell, 2009), it is associated with epistemological stances that skew debates about what counts as ‘good teaching’ to what can be easily counted. Prior to this phase, the history of research into the effectiveness of teaching and teacher education can be roughly categorised into periods revealing shifts of emphasis conceptualising teachers as: transmitters of knowledge with a focus on teacher characteristics in the 20's-40's facilitators of knowledge transfer with a focus on routine teacher behaviour in the classroom correlated with learning outcomes in the 50's-80's (Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2005; Zeichner, 2005); and eventually, in more recent times, teachers as professionals supporting learning as an active social process with a focus on critical views of education (Buchanan, 2015; Burns & McIntyre, 2017; Edwards, 2015). Though the latest period is associated with agentic concepts of professionalism where proactive teachers translate knowledge into

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contextually relevant teaching, evaluation of teacher quality has remained closely related to the ‘policy turn’ in teacher education. This is characterised by outcomes-based accountability measures couched in standards that “tend to evaluate and control teachers rather than support them as professionals” (Cochran-Smith, 2016, p.97). Illustrations of politically driven action exist in both Australian and Chinese educational settings where top-down reforms of teacher education have been conducted in attempts to improve teacher effectiveness (Day & Gu, 2014). For example, when reform was introduced by the Ministry of Education (MOE) in China, despite the power of the state, researchers note “the teacher education process did not change significantly” (Zhou, 2014, p. 520). In response, in 2017 the MOE launched a policy designed to monitor the quality of teacher education through a system of accreditation measures (MOE, 2017). Parallel systems of policy and regulation encouraging compliance, now exist in the two countries. The potential of these systems to act as constraints on teacher agency will be discussed later in the paper. The authors of this paper address a gap in the literature by attempting a geo-political examination of the structuring of knowledge about teacher agency in two countries shaped by different historical and contextually bound approaches to teacher education. The literature on teacher agency, like many debates within education and social science, is heavily dominated by North American material. Yet, as Edwards notes, “agency cannot be discussed without reference to culture” (2015, p.779). Therefore, this paper is an attempt to enrich the conversation with voices from Australia and China to resist the implicit assumption of universality expressed in previous accounts. We aim to avoid a false universalism by adopting theoretical work from one dominant (Northern hegemonic) view and seek to contribute to Connell's account of ‘southern theory’ (Connell, 2007). Therefore, the concept of agency is explored through a scholarly discussion of Australian and Chinese literature read through a comparative lens that is sensitised to socio-cultural variation. We are not attempting to come to a comfortable resolution. Rather we are aiming to broaden the discussion by interrogating agency enacted in disparate research contexts. We acknowledge specific conversations, educational debates and reform agendas take place within the context of national systems, each with its own peculiarities and histories. This is not an argument for localism rather for explicit recognition of how globalised comparisons can contribute to differentiated understandings of shared discursive constructs. We hope to make visible the epistemic constructs through which we interpret what constitutes teacher agency. 2. Towards a comparative understanding of agency This section of the paper argues the need for a nuanced reading of agency and situates our comparison in debates around definitional complexity. As a starting point for our comparative understanding we need to problematize the semantic overlap between agency and autonomy. Agency and autonomy are two key terms that are common in discussions of teacher effectiveness in Australia and China. Their frequent occurrence is not problematic, however, the elision of the two concepts blurs their meaning. We agree the words are closely related, however treating them as equivalent is unhelpful in terms of specifying contextualised influences on teacher professionalism. We argue that agency and autonomy should have different connotations. Conflating agency with autonomy promotes the idea that teachers can rarely act completely independently of others because they are in a network of relations (with other staff, pupils, parents etc.) and institutional practices (curricula, timetables, exams, national educational agendas etc.). We favour the promotion of agency as something broader

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supporting teachers to move beyond knowledge boundaries anchored in professional know-how. This can be achieved when teachers “oppose or subvert policy, often for good educational reasons” (Sannino, 2010 in; Priestley et al., 2015, p. 27). In this paper (as others before us have done) we read autonomy to mean the systemic permission teachers are granted to act within a given education system. This sense of self-government provides them with professional freedom most often within curriculum boundaries. In this sense autonomy is understood here as “a comparative absence of regulation yet does not necessarily equate to agency.” (Priestley et al., 2015, p. 142). This view of autonomy is a key tenet of teacher professionalism. Research into teacher autonomy ranges from “small stories” (Day & Gu, 2010, p. 57) of teachers researching their own practices to large scale investigations across systems (Donaldson, 2011). Studies of the impact of professional standards indicate a level of inherent “surveillance” (Bourke, Ryan, & Lloyd, 2016, p. 8) that clearly binds teacher autonomy. In contrast we read agency to refer to the purposeful exertion of professional empowerment teachers are able to enact as individuals to actively strive to bring about change to or within components of a system. While both terms rely on professional judgement, agency is more strongly associated with reflective action that is directed towards solving an identified problem (Parker, 2016, p. 8). As agency can not exist independent of structures (Giddens, 1993), we do not wish to examine agency as merely an individual capacity to act. We agree €pelto and colleagues who suggest professional agency is with Etela practiced when “professional subjects and/or communities exert influence, make choices and take stances in ways that affect their work and or their professional identities” (2013, p.61). The importance of a well grounded professional knowledge base informing this kind of agentive behaviour can not be overstated as teachers can not take knowledgeable action without nuanced, professional understandings of teaching and learning. As Toom, Pyhlato, and O'Connell (2015) argue, teacher agency can be used to describe the ways in which teachers strive to make active choices in a way that they feel will make a decisive difference. For example, the teacher who is directed by policy to teach a sound-a-week to her kindergarten class as a phonics first and only approach to teaching reading will limit the learning and severely frustrate any child starting school already able to encode symbols to speech and read for meaning. Better in that situation that the teacher makes a well-informed professional choice relevant to the needs of the individual child and resist the mandated program. Placing agency into this discursive frame aligns with calls for teachers to speak back to reductionist approaches to education that currently echo issues, which preoccupied researchers in the 20th century. It proposes a view of teacher professionalism that focuses attention on intellectual judgement as evidence of “adaptive expertise” (Darling-Hammond, 2016, p.83) thereby allowing space to consider the epistemic nature of teachers' work as professional practice. It also acknowledges the dialectic between teachers' motives and actions and the way external influences impinge on practice. Discussion in the past has debated how much room for manoeuvre teachers have between the constraints of expectations and the exigencies of the classroom (Connell, 2009). We argue that the notion of exploring agency in context (Priestley et al., 2015) has value. It is in this space that concepts such as “worthwhile agency” (Renshaw, 2016) have emerged as a way of recognising that teacher action undertaken on behalf of others is always already situated. This socio-culturally informed view of self-managed teacher professionalism (Edwards, 2015) has been described recently as an “ecological approach” to agency (Parker, 2016, p. 8). Agency is an elusive term that is well used yet poorly defined in the social sciences (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). Hitlin and Elder (2007) argue that the concept of agency differs according to the

debates it is imported into, therefore they call the concept ‘curiously abstract’. In many Western societies over the last three decades neoliberalism has set the agenda for schools and educators to view issues of teacher professionalism as a matter of economic and societal importance reframing the potential for agentic action. We cannot present a model of the agent as being ‘outside’ prevailing social relations of education and schooling. Therefore, this section of the paper sets out how neoliberal values work their way through actual institutions and personnel in specific historical and social conditions. It is recognised that teacher beliefs assembled over time and forged partly in practical encounters, make a big difference to the amount of agency they display (Biesta, Priestley, & Robinson, 2015). This view acknowledges that individuals build capacity, develop professional knowledge, and hold ideological beliefs, which impact on agency in the interplay between personal and contextual factors (Donaldson, 2011; Priestley et al., 2015). There is no privileged position from which the classroom teacher (or the educational theorist) can see all the determinants and account for them fully so as to get an untainted and totalised view of educational practice. Therefore, despite efforts to increase individual commitment to agentic professionalism as part of teacher education, teachers will always be constrained by “local contextual conditions, including the material circumstances, physical artefacts, power relations, work cultures, dominant discourses, and subject positions available.” (Etelapelto et al., 2013, p. 60). 3. Why agency? Why now? Though we acknowledge our paper only covers a small number of empirical studies in its review, we recognise its uniqueness in its provision of a comparative account of research into teacher agency in Australia and China. However, before examining the literature in the area we need to provide an account of current systematic controls of teacher accreditation as these standards set expectations. Therefore, this section of the paper sets out recent reforms in professional standards in Australia and China, which, under the influence of globalised policy drifts have emerged in the last five years. Comparing education systems can be a useful discussion point (Darling-Hammond & Lieberman, 2012) so long as there is sufficient potential for productive comparison. Due to policy changes in the last five years it is now more possible to make useful comparison between Australia and China in terms of similar systemic alignment. What our review attempts to identify is the impact of cultural difference. In studies of teacher regulation in countries commonly compared such as the UK and US it has often been shown that governments use a range of mechanisms from quality assurance, certification of competence, accountability regimens and legislated accreditation to reform teachers' work (Bates, 2007; Beauchamp et al., 2016; Darling-Hammond, 2000; Goodman, Calfee, & Goodman, 2014). This paper proposes Australian and Chinese teachers are now positioned in contexts embedded within similar yet different governing structures. Where Chinese scholars speak of the power of Party and State (Yang, 2012), parallels with policy and regulation at state and federal level also exist within Australian systems of control (Mayer, Cotton & Simpson, 2017; Comber & Nixon, 2009). For example, teachers in both countries are situated within learning communities (with other teachers, school leaders and administrators, etc.) and follow certain rules within a defined division of labour. However, of more relevance is the fact that professional standards for teachers are now foregrounded in both countries through the establishment of national regulatory authorities the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL, 2011) and the Ministry of Education in China (MOE, 2012). The systems linking individuals to social structures in both

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countries are dialectic in nature, both influenced by and influencing teachers' potential actions. The brief review of political systems in Australia and China given below provides a historical context to our investigation of agency in relation to constructs of teacher professionalism. 3.1. Political systems in Australia Opportunities for teacher agency in Australia have emerged from historical factors shaped in a national political landscape but embedded in local cultural contexts. Going back to the beginning of a national agenda, Australia's federal system of democratic government was established in 1901 as a result of an agreement between six self-governing colonies. After federation, the Commonwealth of Australia was governed by both national and state systems. As a result, overlapping portfolios were created. Due to greater emphasis on national education policies and programs established by the Australian Department of Education in the last decade, the impact and autonomy of state governments in is tension with federal bodies. In the Australian education landscape the Melbourne Declaration was an important “pivot point” (Burns & McIntyre, 2017, p. 5) as it negotiated the adoption of national level policies between all eight states and territories. This agreement initiated strategies to improve teacher quality through initial teacher education, which, in parallel to perceptions of falling results in international tests such as PISA, drove the creation of national standards (Dinham, Ingvarson & Kleinhenz, 2008). The Australian education systems focus on social improvement through equitable provision of high quality publicly funded schooling. Mandatory controls over teacher education with all teachers required to have a university degree at undergraduate or graduate level prior to employment in a school are designed to improve education outcomes for all students. Though national reforms support teacher professionalization, because higher education policy, regulation and programs are impacted by localised contexts where teachers work under state regulations, tensions are created within which schools and initial teacher education institutes must operate. For example, in New South Wales, Australia two systems of accreditation and approval operate. The NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) is the state government education board, which accredits teachers for employment and assesses initial teacher education programs. However, the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) has developed and mandated increased regulation through standards that now operate nationally controlling what is acceptable at a State and Territory level of implementation. As a consequence, it is currently possible to have a policy directive focused on a single area from both systems that varies in its advice (see specialisations). The clash of centralised national policies with state is revealed in another example in NSW. In 2012, in a shift to decentralised control, the concept of Local Schools, Local Decisions was introduced as a policy reform giving more independent decision making authority to school principals.

The core intent of both political systems is improved educational outcomes but the complexity plays out in different ways. For example, tracking the regulation of teachers and initial teacher education in Australia since 2009 provides a clear view of increasing federal intervention to what has been perceived as a problem that could be solved by changed policy (Cochran-Smith, 2008). Over the last nine years significant changes have been made to Australian policy. Federal intervention into teacher education in Australia first began in 2009 with the Smarter Schools e Improving Teacher Quality National Partnership (TQNP) program of reforms. This was followed in January 2010 by the creation of the AITSL founded to promote excellence in the profession of teaching and school leadership across all federal and state/territory jurisdictions. National professional standards for teachers and processes for accrediting initial teacher education programs were created in Australia in 2011. Standards such as these can be used to guide teacher learning and influence entry, continuation or recognition in the field (Darling-Hammond, 2017, p.5). The AITSL Australian Professional Standards for Teachers describe the knowledge, skills and understanding expected of competent and effective teachers (AITSL, 2011). Teachers are accredited across four career stages as Graduate, Proficient, Highly Accomplished and Lead according to their level of proficiency and experience as measured by the core seven standards and the 37 additional standard descriptors. Within this heavily politicized context graduate teachers are expected to meet the first level of professional standards for teachers in the three areas of professional knowledge, professional practice and professional engagement on graduation (Mayer, Allard & Bates, 2015). A summary of the Australian Professional Standards that are relevant for all teachers is provided in Table 1. Since these early initiatives the Federal Minister for Education established the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG) in 2014. As a result of ministerial recommendations by the TEMAG in the report Action Now: Classroom Ready Teachers, the national professional standards were amended in 2015. The impact of global approaches to teacher education on Australian policy can be found in TEMAG's direct appropriation of Darling Hammond's words “what teachers should know and be able to do” in their explanation of the AITSL standards (TEMAG, 2014, p. 17). That is, while creating their own guidelines it is clear that teacher education policy in Australia has been informed by ‘transnational discourses surrounding standards and education’ (Comber & Nixon, 2009, p. 336). 3.2. Political systems in China Governance of education is highly centralised in China. The Ministry of Education (MOE) of the People's Republic of China is the agency of the State Council of the People's Republic of China that regulates all aspects of the educational system in Mainland China. The MOE guides the reform of education such as quality-oriented education in an all-round way and monitors the quality of the

Table 1 Framework of Australian professional standards (AITSL, 2011). Areas of professional knowledge

Professional standards

Professional knowledge

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Professional practice

Professional engagement

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Know students and how they learn Know the content and how to teach it Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning Engage in professional learning Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community

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development of elementary education. The Department of Teacher Education subordinated to MOE formulates policies, regulations of teacher education and teacher qualification standards at all levels and guides the implementation of teacher qualification and teacher training systems. Under the central government's direction, local governments have primary responsibility for running the teacher education system. The preparation requirements and standards imposed on teacher candidates are established by the central government. Since 1993, the central government has promulgated Law of Teachers (1993), Regulations for Qualification of Teachers (1995), and Implementation of Regulations for Qualification of Teachers (2000) regulating the teacher education process. Obtaining the teaching certificate is a prerequisite for obtaining qualification as a teacher. After acquiring a teaching certificate, prospective teachers must seek their own employment, as there is no unified employment system. Schools may recruit new teachers independently. Recently the spread of global influences on teacher education has reached and influenced Chinese practices. In the last five years the Chinese government has introduced a suite of policies to improve teacher professionalism. For instance, in 2012, a new set of Teacher Professional Standards was issued by the Ministry of Education (MOE): Professional Standards for Pre-school Teachers (Trial), Professional Standards for Elementary School Teachers (Trial), and Professional Standards for Secondary School Teachers (Trial) (MOE, 2012). The standards play important roles in promoting teachers' professional development in China (Li, 2012). The teacher professional standards contain 3 dimensions: professional ethics, professional knowledge and professional competency. The Professional Standards for Pre-school Teachers and Professional Standards for Secondary School Teachers contain 14 domains. The Professional Standards for Elementary School Teachers contains 13 domains. Similar to the AITSL standards, the full set of MOE documentation provides illustrative descriptors of basic requirements for each domain. A summary of the dimensions and domains of Professional Standards for Secondary School Teachers is provided in Table 2. The framework in Table 2 shows that the MOE Chinese standards have a very strong emphasize on teaching instead of learning (Li, 2012). The standards have been critiqued as too abstract for teachers and practitioners to use (Li, 2012). As a result, there is some concern that the standards may not act as a practical guide for teachers, schools, and teacher education institutions. However, in the announcement of the standards, the MOE emphasized that (1) educational management institutions must take the standards as foundational requirements to build the teaching work force; (2) teacher education institutions must take the standards as major requirements of teacher preparation and training; (3) schools must

take the standards as important requirements of teacher management; and (4) school teachers must take the standards as basic requirements of professional development (MOE, 2012). Similar to the Australian system the standards have become mandatory measures of achievement. This initiative was followed in 2013 by the launch of the Teacher Qualification Exam and a formalised Periodical Registration of Teacher Certification. Building on the regulations for teachers in 2014 came the Preparation Plan of Outstanding Teachers, which aimed at improving the quality of teacher preparation in initial teacher education programs (MOE, 2014). The next policy, the Rural Teacher Support Program, was released in 2015 with the goal of improving rural teachers' effectiveness. The most recent update, Accreditation Measures of Teacher Education Programs at Universities (MOE, 2017), rounds out the suite of controls. The policies in the last decade build on curriculum reforms implemented in China in 2001, which purportedly put teachers at the helm of change. These earlier reforms expected teachers to become curriculum developers, capable of constructing designs for classroom teaching to promote students' all-round development as life-long learners. With the development of democratization of education in China in the 20th century, the role of teachers in school curriculum reform has therefore become increasingly prominent. In the past, teachers in China were expected to be passive practitioners who followed a prepared ‘script’. However, it now appears that recent reforms have reframed teachers as key figures in meditating curriculum reform through professional development to become reflective practitioners (Zhong, 2009). Some scholars in China suggest the topdown reform has empowered teachers providing them with more opportunities to take up agentic stances. However, echoing concerns in Australia, it has also been suggested by others that, topdown reform could hinder teachers from becoming mature leaders (Zeng, Lai, & Lo, 2014; Zhou, 2014). Read against the discourse of quality teaching, professional standards, whilst necessary, are implicated in controlling as well as developing new teachers' agency. (Dinham, 2013; Sachs, 2003). 4. Exploring constructs of teacher agency in Australia and China It is clear from the discussion above that both education systems in Australia and China are now governed by similar systems of professional regulation. What has not yet been established is how disparately the concept of agency is interpreted in the research literature emerging from China and Australia. The next section of the paper therefore, deliberately synthesises examples of ‘localised’ research into teacher agency written in or referring to Australian and Chinese contexts to see how they speak to each other. Our

Table 2 Framework of teacher professional standards for secondary school teachers (MOE, 2012). Dimensions

Domains

Professional beliefs and ethics

1. professional understanding 2. attitudes and behaviors toward students 3. attitudes and behaviors toward education and teaching 4.personal cultivation and behaviors 5.knowledge of education 6.content knowledge 7.pedagogical content knowledge 8.general knowledge 9.instruction design 10.instruction implement 11.classroom management and educational activities 12.educational and instructional assessment 13.comunication and collaboration 14.reflection and development

Professional knowledge

Professional competency

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systematic search of relevant literature using a predetermined search protocol adopted both manual and automated methods including use of electronic databases, peer reviewed academic ejournals and snowballing of reference lists. Inclusion e exclusion criteria centered on the controlled key terms “teacher agency” and “teacher autonomy”. As a result 48 papers were identified as suitable for analysis in the tailored review we strategically aimed to construct. The papers reviewed provide insight to the different, yet complementary ways concepts about teacher agency have evolved in two contexts both regulated by similar standards yet socioculturally different. We acknowledge there were fewer papers in scope than we expected and that there is a preponderance of examples from Anglophone research, however, we note that this reflects the nature of the field at this time. We argue it is important that conceptualisations of teacher agency should be framed not only as decontextualized abstraction but also as authentic practice (Allard, Mayer, & Moss, 2014). Therefore, to ground the construct for purposes of exploration we have selected for discussion studies that illustrate interrelated epistemological realisations of agency. The research papers have been framed as illustrating the dynamic relational interplay of individuals and the technologies of power within which they operate. This ecological representation supports the necessarily complex conceptualisation of agency we argue is required to interpret teacher effectiveness (Simpson, 2016). For example, we have selected studies that focus on the pragmatic development of skills framing agency as individual personal capacity as read through levels of confidence (Lai, Li, & Gong, 2016; Pantic, 2015) to demonstrate the enactment of agency in specific contexts. As a corollary, studies that focus on systems and standards have been chosen to demonstrate the control of individual agency by institutional practices. The last section of our exploration examines studies which frame the discursive construction of teacher agency in ideologically contested space.

program design on PST. For example, the study by Zundans-Fraser and Auhl aimed to build individual pre-service teacher confidence as a stepping stone towards agency (2016). The findings of Lasen, Tomas and Hill complement this view as they suggest that PST students build competency as they become “adaptive, lifelong learners and agents for social and environmental change” (2015, p. 341). Individual perspectives on teacher agency have also been explored in China in studies of teacher belief (Liu, 2011; Wang & Wu, 2016; Yao, 2005, 2011), teacher knowledge (Guo & Bao, 2006) and teacher competence (Wang & Wu, 2016). Teachers who set clear professional plans develop more agency than those who do not focus on professional development and expert teachers demonstrate greater agentic behaviour than novice teachers (Zhang & Shen, 2012). Research into teacher perceptions necessarily focuses on individuals but an ecological account of agency calls for explicit acknowledgement of the dialectic existing between the individual and the organizational conditions within which her/his agentic behaviours may develop or be constrained. For example, in their longitudinal research into teacher effectiveness in Australia, Rowan, Mayer, Kline, Kostogriz and Walker-Gibbs (2015) examined graduates' perceptions of the impact of teacher education programs on their preparedness for teaching noting that results were affected more by employment status than program design. These findings are a strong reminder that investigations of teacher agency cannot focus on teacher education and professional development, which build capacity and capability without paying attention to school cultures and structures (Priestley et al., 2015). For example, research by O'Brien (2007) in the field of teaching leadership studies found deeply embedded school structures could hinder the development of opportunities for teacher agency due to the institutional hierarchies within which teachers operate.

4.1. Agency as individual personal capacity

Professional standards, curriculum reform and school management systems are three well known influences that shape the contexts within which teachers work. Each one has been singled out for the impact it may have in disabling individuals with otherwise high agentic capacity (Priestley et al., 2015, p. 25). All have received attention in the teacher education literature in recent years in Australia and China, as it is recognised that the potential for teacher agency in tightly controlled environments where roles are heavily proscribed is reduced (Sachs, 2003). Researchers have noted how the coercive force of accountability measures (Comber & Nixon, 2009) and the restrictive nature of top-down models of management (Liu, 2011) can lead to passive, ‘tick the box’, behaviours. National professional standards for teachers in Australia shape the conceptualisation of what makes a ‘classroom-ready’ teacher (Mayer, 2015). Initial teacher education (ITE) in Australia is provided through university degrees at bachelor and graduate masters level. All degrees must meet national program standards introduced in 2011 by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). Although the goal of AITSL was to promote “excellence in the profession of teaching, the highly regulated system has been labelled as leading to a “performativity culture” (Hall, Thompson & Hood, 2006, p. 12). Since the initial national standards were designed additional mandatory requirements have been layered into the system by state regulatory authorities such as entry selection criteria. Multiple modes of surveillance now drive quality assurance measures of program effectiveness, which strongly influence the design and practice of ITE. However, a return to an emphasis on teaching as intellectual work is signalled with the new requirement for ITE providers to devise a final year

It has been suggested that the agency individual teachers display relates closely to the beliefs they assemble over time (Biesta et al., 2015). Chinese scholars have investigated teacher agency from different perspectives. Li defines teacher agency from the perspective of rights, competence, ethics and environment (Li, 2008). Mu defines teacher agency as purposeful, professional action within which teachers can fight for their professional rights, coordinate relationships, plan and enact professional actions and promote professional development (Mu, 2014). Zhang and Shen emphasize that as teacher agency is enacted in the context of professional praxis, teachers can actively choose their own professional goals, exert internal and external pressures on systems so as to improve their own personal development and have a positive impact on the educational environment (2012). Similar to the Australian perspective, Chinese researchers argue that during utilization of individual agency, teachers consciously probe, judge, construct and reflect, which includes the process of choosing, motivating, thinking and practicing (Zhang & Shen, 2012). A strong illustration of this point is found in the study by Simpson who presents an account of teachers negotiating professional agency through their individual epistemological resistance to reductionist literacy practices (Simpson, 2017). The latter finding accords with research by Flewitt and Roberts-Holmes who note that, even under a strict regulatory gaze, mature teachers are capable of creating “liberatory pedagogical spaces” due to their development of agentive behaviour over time (2015, p.109). Australian studies focussing on the development of individual agency are exemplified in research that investigates the impact of

4.2. Systems and standards shaping agentic practice

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capstone assessment through which graduate teachers demonstrate their effectiveness recording their impact on student learning through planning, teaching, assessing and reflection. This shift towards evidence based approaches to meeting the program standards through individualised assessment provides greater opportunities for pre-service teachers to enact their emerging agency The change in measuring output from teacher education instead of input as a new organizational structure potentially profiles the unfolding of individual teacher agency in ways that could encourage a view of teaching as “a meaningful profession rather than just ‘a job’” (Priestley et al., 2015, p. 149). Closely related to the professional standards governing Australian teachers and teacher education, teachers are now also required in China by the Teachers' Professional Standards to undertake professional development through the conduction of activities designed to carry out education reform. They are also expected to engage in academic communities of peers engaged in research on their own practice (Shan & National, 2014). Such activities provide opportunities for teacher reflection and encourage exploration of agentic behaviours with peers. Participation in school democratic management and mentoring for teacher training programs also mirrors the Australian professional standards of professional engagement and leadership. A contrasting representation in the Chinese context of the Australian professional code of conduct is an explicit focus of the Teachers Law of PRC obliging teachers to take account of teacher ethics on account of humanity (Wei & Chen, 2010). It appears the utilitarianism of teacher agency in China is positioned in a more humanistic discourse than is overtly acknowledged in the Australian ethos. School management systems through administration, inspection and evaluation are all recognised as exerting powerful controls over teacher agency. The research in China indicates that teacher independence to develop programs of educational research for professional development purposes is curtailed by bureaucratic processes (Lin & Zhang, 2016; Yao, 2005). Such autonomous actions are impeded as teachers lack authority in hierarchical organisations of power commonly found in schools (Jia, 2014; Yao, 2005). The imposition of the standards driven agenda brings the additional challenge that teachers may develop “the tendency to see educational purpose in short term and often narrowly instrumental terms rather than in relation to longer-term, educational aspirations” (Priestley et al., 2015, p. 132). For example, in Australia research has shown that school contexts have a major impact on the formation of teacher professional identity (Louden, 2008, p. 362) as teachers may develop “embodied incapacity” (Giroux, 2015, np) in the face of de-professionalising reporting demands. Yet, as reported above, examples in the research exist of teachers deliberately taking agentic action in response to their local situations and student needs in defiance of authority. Challenges to teacher agency are particularly visible when teacher effectiveness is measured through quantitative evaluation methods that equate proficiency with student outcomes (Jia, 2014) informed by the ‘value add’ paradigm. The value added model of measuring teacher effectiveness has been challenged as it conflates independent variables that should be disaggregated (Loeb & Candelaria, 2012). Attempting to make direct connections from teacher input to student results is problematic when multiple contextual influences need to be taken into account Scherrer (2011). Rather what is needed is a view of teacher effectiveness that understands that teacher agency will be moderated by professional opportunities mediated by the school ecology (Mu, 2017). Working against a view of agency as being time bound, research that contrasts the effectiveness of mature vs novice teachers notes that those who take an agentive stance paying attention to past, future, present actions (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998) may be found at

any career stage. Curriculum reform has been upheld in the UK as a space that offers professional freedom for teachers to contribute to new ways of learning through collaborative design processes (Donaldson, 2011) However, studies of Chinese curriculum reform indicate that teachers lack agency when compared to others placed in this context. Particularly challenging is the research by Qi who compares teacher agency in Shanghai with other countries using the data collected by Shanghai PISA 2012 (Qi, 2016). The study found that teacher agency in Shanghai was significantly lower than the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon countries (Qi, 2016). Yet Liyanage, Bartlett, Walker, and Guo's study of English language teachers in Inner Mongolia (2015) demonstrates that despite instructional demands of an exam-oriented community, the exercise of agency is still possible. In this context the misalignment between exam oriented approaches to learning languages centered on measurement of discrete skills with approaches to learning supporting engagement with authentic language proficiency highlights the challenge of teachers working at cross purposes with imposed curriculum reforms (Liyanage, Bartlett, Walker, & Guo, 2015). As Donaldson warns, in heavily regulated systems teachers may lose their opportunities to react flexibly to context and hence their professionalism is threatened (Donaldson in Furlong, 2015, p. 13). However, studies such as the work by Tan (2016) focussing on teachers' strategic responses to promote indigenous knowledge via engaging teaching methods, demonstrates the enactment of teacher agency is still possible if human effort, capital and other contingent factors are in productive interplay. 4.3. The discursive construction of agency As professional agency is shaped by theoretical and societal conceptualisations, it is vital to examine its discursive construction in the literature. Concerns over the discursive construction of agency have become more explicit in the literature concerning teacher effectiveness in Australia in recent times. Although the term was already in use in the late 20th century (Davies, 1990), it is now more often addressed in studies exploring the impact of burgeoning controls over teacher professionalism. Researchers note the counterproductive nature of mandated policies, which restricts agentic forms of teaching (Comber, 2012; Kostogriz & Doecke, 2013). The impact is felt by PST and well established teachers as pressure to meet constrictive targets (Thompson, 2013) that leads to a lack of freedom to negotiate appropriate programs of study to match the needs of diverse students. Where the dominant discourse of accountability “overwhelm [s] professional knowledges”, recent graduates report reduced opportunities to become proactive teachers (Comber & Nixon, 2009, p. 4). This view is contrasted by studies demonstrating opportunities for teachers to enact agency in school contexts that support their professional development through research informed enquiry (Jones, Simpson, & Thwaite, 2018; Renshaw, 2016). It is clear that tension exists between the ideal of professional agency and teachers' lived experience of standardised testing and accountability measures (Lingard, Thompson, & Sellar, 2016). This tension plays out differently for individuals, as professional agency is “expressed, mediated and directed” (Renshaw, 2016, p. 60), in disparate ecologies shaped by varying contextual dimensions. Interestingly the literature on agency in China reviewed for the paper also proposes the professional life of teachers as an ecosystem. It notes the complexity and systematicity of teacher agency determined by interaction between teachers and their environments. It suggests, that teacher agency should be understood and cultivated in an ecological approach, presenting a definition of agency as a system, which is composed of concept sets (Mu, 2014).

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In other words, while education reform may limit opportunities for teacher agency through control of the external environment and teacher's classroom practices, it cannot fully manage the interaction between teachers and context, which provide the impetus for agentic action. In Lee and Yin's study, Chinese teachers revealed complex perceptions of the national curriculum reform agenda taking critical stances regarding textbooks, pedagogy, and, more importantly, changes to college entrance examinations (Lee & Yin, 2011). Yang (2015) argues that curriculum reform in China needs to shift from reliance on 'top-down' policies to 'bottom-up' implementation that mobilizes teachers' understandings and practices. Teacher education programs aimed at developing teacher pedagogical agency require that teachers have ongoing opportunities to design, develop and evaluate curriculum in the context of instructional reform (Yang, 2015). For, where there are opportunities for action, and teachers are not required to follow “routinized patterns of habitual behaviour” the mechanism of agency is always potentially at play (Priestley et al., 2015, p. 141). 5. Discussion The paper set out to provide insight to the different, yet complementary ways the concept of teacher agency has been adapted in teacher education research in Australia and China. Our investigation tested how robust the concept was across contexts regulated by similar standards yet marked with sociocultural differences. We note that the professional stance of teachers is a common challenge in both countries where effectiveness is largely measured in terms of competency standards (Edwards, 2015; Fuller, 2014). The exploration of agency helped to affirm that teachers in these contexts face the same complexities as shown in prior research in the UK and US (Darling-Hammond, 2015; Donaldson, 2011). Given the nature of teachers' work, tensions are created between drives for individual empowerment and systematised control of ecological boundaries in all teaching scenarios (Parker, 2016). What remains is the need to outline evidence of cultural influence on epistemic constructs, highlight implications we suggest result from our comparative approach and to suggest some future directions research into agency might take. Agency speaks of what might be in an audit culture informed by discourses of performativity. The analysis above illustrates that, when explicit support is given for agency, teachers gain more potential opportunities to innovate their practices. It has also shown up slight variations in the representations of challenges that teachers face developing capacity and beliefs about agency. For example, the Chinese professional standards place importance on teachers taking a values based, ethically informed stance to their work. Epistemic framing of teachers in Australia also demonstrated a pull towards normative behaviours but is less based on personal values and more focused on student learning. Yet the examples of agentic resistance in China to high pressure exams and non localised curriculum content are not generic but individualised to particular teachers. They could equally be studies set in Australia where teachers enact agency in response to issues of social or educational inequality. As predicted, the paper has highlighted the importance of recognising the contextualised nature of agency that is shaped by personal history, professional identity and socialised structures of control (Etelapelto et al., 2013). Yet there is commonality across both contexts that stands outside of culture and is grounded more in conceptualisations of the profession. Therefore, we argue the need for a reframing of teacher professionalism from a deficit model to an expanded model characterised by professional judgement and professional agency and the accordance of trust” (Priestley et al., 2015, p. 134). We propose, that agency needs to be positioned as an epistemological stance on which teachers' work is

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built. If a key constraint on the profession is “the extent to which teachers' engagement with research and enquiry-oriented practice is embedded throughout the education system' (BERA, 2014, p. 15), then teacher agency could be promoted as a means by which teachers actively develop their professionalism. For pre-service teachers to be introduced to the concept of agency initial teacher education programs need to be designed as “expansive rather than restricted, [giving] teachers themselves the skills, knowledge and dispositions to lead the changes that are needed (Furlong, 2015, p. 38). This paper has demonstrated that teachers in China and Australia respond to educational challenges in any context not just as individuals but in relation to school cultures and structures (Priestley et al., 2015). A great deal of the literature sees teachers as caught ‘in the middle’ of forces that constrain them where their freedom to lead change is mitigated by external controls (Yang, 2015). An ecological view of teachers as “agents of change” (Priestley & Drew, 2017) recognises the relationship between past experience, future goals and present constraints which leads to a ‘push/pull’ dynamic effecting their potential to project alternative actions contingent as that may be on local contexts (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; O'Brien, 2007). Yet the literature also acknowledges the role teachers play in enacting curriculum reforms and interpreting systemic initiatives where systems encourage professional authority to be exercised (Burns & McIntyre, 2017). That is, although external policy directives aim to control individuals, individuals can influence implementation by enacted agency (Yu, 2015, p. 113). The research in China and Australia illustrates the application of the concept is used with varying connotations suggesting the conceptualisation is still fluid and needs further clarification. We have demonstrated in the paper how teacher agency is exercised in the dynamic relationships created between people and the institutional practices they inhabit (Giddens, 1993; Priestley et al., 2015). As researchers have stated previously, teachers and teacher educators have been positioned in “transnational power relations” (Comber & Nixon, 2009, p. 4) seemingly left with little agency. Indeed the review of studies from China and Australia reveal how common apparent restrictions are on teachers in these different contexts. Yet the research has also shown that teachers are capable of planning for change through committed action and €, & resistance to “external norms and regulations” (Toom, Pyh€ alto Rust, 2015, p. 615). However, their capacity to enact agency will depend on both their professional competence and their environment as “individuals are enabled and constrained by their social and material environments” (Priestley et al., 2015, p. 23). As noted at the beginning of the paper, the interaction between the cultures and structures of schooling can not be ignored. The Chinese and Australian research indicates schools can cultivate cooperative cultures for professional development (Jones, Simpson, & Thwaite, 2018; Yao, 2005). Furthermore, bureaucratic forms of organization can be recast as people-centric systems to build collaborative teacher communities (Comber, 2016; Jia, 2014). The role of educational leadership is crucial to this effort (Riley, 2013). In times of increasing accountability with intensification of demands for teacher effectiveness, teachers need support more than ever to exercise agency, responding appropriately to external pressures where policy and assessment regimes threaten to constrain their research-based approaches to teaching. In recognition of the importance of teacher agency, support should be offered to help teachers cope with conflicts and uncertainty about educational reform. Initial teacher education programs could help develop teachers' knowledge about and capacity for coping with the contextual constraints of associated with teaching. Policymakers should consider the role and expertise of teachers as

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stakeholders in educational reform. 6. Conclusion The paper has outlined our cross-cultural dialogue on teacher agency and proposed that an ecological approach to understanding this complex construct has merit. Our use of the ecological approach to agency has raised potential challenges for future researchers. In our quest to create a comparative study we attempted to interrogate culturally specific ways of knowing, yet recognise we are always situated within our own internalised discursive frames. This has demonstrated the difficulty of reading similar social structures against cultural complexity. We attempted to capture evidence of geo-political variation in the structuring of knowledge about teacher agency. We chose the standards to represent one key element of the ecology that impacts on teachers' agency realising the global drift of professional standardisation might narrow our view of culturally diverse perspectives. Yet, unsurprisingly, as the profession aspires to excellence (Bourke et al., 2016), we found evidence in the research that the enactment of agency works against compliance with mere standardisation by default. The critical focus of our discussion on the way agency is represented in research on teacher effectiveness, attempted to disaggregate the specific influence of elements in an integrated system, while resisting the essentialising tug to reify difference. We can argue that we have achieved a broader awareness of agency and its value to the teaching profession that has been informed by international perspectives. We can not claim a firm conclusion on the impact of sociocultural contexts on agency in China or Australia for exactly the reason that agency is enacted in the dynamic relationships between people and the institutional practices they inhabit. Future study adopting the ecological approach can provide further evidence of the battle for agentic behaviour teachers face against personal and systemic controls on their professionalism. We recommend that longitudinal studies need to be carried out to comprehend the development of teacher agency within temporalrelational contexts. Research on a larger scale than we could attempt is needed to examine the value of explicitly informing research design with the ecological model in an empirical setting. Funding This research was jointly funded by an International Cooperation Research Program between the Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Sydney. References Allard, A., Mayer, D., & Moss, J. (2014). Authentically assessing graduate teaching: Outside and beyond neo-liberal constructs. Australian Educational Researcher, 41(4), 425e443. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-013-0140-x. Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (2011). Australian professional standards for teachers. Retrieved from Melbourne, VIC: https://www. aitsl.edu.au/teach/standards. Bates, R. (2007). Regulation and autonomy in teacher education. In T. Townsend, & R. Bates (Eds.), Handbook of teacher education: Globalisation, standards and professionalism in times of change. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer. Beauchamp, G., Clarke, L., Hulme, M., Jephcote, M., Kennedy, A., Magennis, G., … Peiser, G. (2016). Teacher education in times of change: Responding to challenges across the UK and Ireland. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Biesta, G., Priestley, M., & Robinson, S. (2015). The role of beliefs in teacher agency. Teachers and Teaching, 21(6), 624e640. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 13540602.2015.1044325. Biesta, G., & Tedder, M. (2006). How is agency possible? Towards an ecological understanding of agency-as-achievement. Working paper 5. Retrieved from Exeter, UK: http://hdl.handle.net/10993/13718. Bourke, T., Ryan, M., & Lloyd, M. (2016). The discursive positioning of graduating teachers in accreditation of teacher education programs. Teaching and Teacher Education, 53, 1e9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2015.09.009.

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