An Ecological Approach to Teacher Agency - A Conversation with Prof. Gert Biesta and Prof. Mark Priestley

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

The critical question for policy is, do you want teachers to become more intelligent professionally or less intelligent? If you start constraining and streamlining the situation, you don't need thoughtful teachers any longer, but you get a one-trick education system. And we know from evolutionary theory that those systems are very vulnerable.

Hi everyone, and thanks for joining me again on this week's podcast. My name's Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. There's lots of talk about increasing agency in education and schooling for young people and for teachers, and we've done many episodes over the last 6 years that touch on it. But there is a tendency sometimes for discussions of agency to lack a bit of clarity in exactly what we mean by this slippery concept. My guests this week, Professors Kurt Biester and Mark Priestley, published a seminal book with Sarah Robinson in 2015 on the subject of teacher agency, which moved the field forward hugely. Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach has just been republished in its second edition last month, so I was really keen to talk about it with them. But while I'm fascinated by the concept of agency for many reasons, what particularly attracted me to Geert and Mark's work on this was their ecological approach. As we talk about, taking an ecological approach to understanding the conditions that give rise to agency, or any other outcome in education for that matter, feels to me like a really vital way to be approaching our central questions. As a now 3-time guest, Geert is well known to listeners of the podcast, but he's recently been appointed as Professor of Education at the University of Melbourne, and since 2023 has served as an ordinary member of the Education Council of the Netherlands, the advisory body of the Dutch government and parliament on educational matters. Mark Priestley is a Professor of Education at the University of Stirling, whose research interests lie in school curriculum theory, policy, and practice, and especially the processes of curriculum making across different layers of education systems. He's the Director of the Stirling Centre for research into curriculum making, a member of the Scottish Government's key educational advisory committees, the Scottish Education Council and the Curriculum and Assessment Board. Alongside Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach, his publications include Curriculum Making in Europe: Policy and Practice Within and Across Diverse Contexts. Thank you so much for doing this, for jumping in, and huge congratulations on the new edition of the book.

Thank you.

It's an extremely exciting and important book, I think, but 2015 is a long time ago now, and it's interesting to, yeah, see it again out in the world in a new, more colorful version. Have you got your copies yet, Gert, or not yet?

No, I'm still waiting.

So yeah, perhaps one of you could just set a bit of the context of why did you decide to do a second edition and, you know, why should we care, to put it bluntly, right? Like why should, why should senior leaders or policymakers or government ministers care about this concept of teacher agency?

So, um, the, the original book was published in 2015 and it's, it's turned out to be something of a bestseller, not, not quite Harry Potter or something like that, but it's, it's sold thousands of copies basically. And we were approached by Bloomsbury, the publisher, probably about 5 years ago asking whether we'd consider a second edition and for various things, including commitments and so on, it didn't happen quickly. But we were very aware of a number of things that had happened. First of all, the appeal of teacher agency as a concept was clearly there to professionals, to policymakers, to offices of organizations like Education Scotland. People are using the phrase all the time. It's often used in a fairly, shall we say, bowdlerized fashion. By policymakers particularly. It's seen as something desirable. We're granting agency or autonomy to teachers, goes the story. And so the phrase gets used without ever saying what it means. And then we were also aware that there was a lot of literature. I mean, Kong Lem, who did a systematic review in 2021, identified hundreds of papers that had been written on the topic. There were probably thousands of papers that used teacher agency in some way. And we were very aware that the literature isn't always very good. Some of it is excellent. We're seeing some really good attempts, I think, to take the ecological approach and to elaborate it, or in some cases to challenge it. And that's always very welcome. But a lot of the work that comes out seems to think that you can take concepts from all over the place and apply them fairly uncritically. And we end up with this sort of fairly often bizarre hybridization of theories and very weak work. So we were aware that there needed to be some updating of the book In order to give some coverage to and address some of the issues which had emerged out of 10 years of literature, I guess.

Fantastic. But there is this kind of slipperiness to the concept maybe, and that's as we get into why it's difficult, why do people use it maybe in multiple ways? You talked in the first edition, and I think still in the second edition, that agency is a slippery concept. So maybe could I ask you what, why is that?

Well, I would probably start by saying concepts are free, so people can use them in any way they want. And agency has some attraction. If you say teacher agency, it refers to, yeah, teachers should have voice, scope for action and doing. And I think that makes it attractive. But maybe we can come back a little later about the or maybe we can do it now, the difference between autonomy and agency and efficacy, which I think are 3 notions that are all sort of in the same sphere.

Yeah, I mean, feel free to dig into that now because the other, the other one I was going to bring in as well was action. I mean, you talk about the illusion of agency and action in the book as well. So there's, there's a bunch of words that somehow circle around the same kinds of ideas, right? Yeah.

And it also connects to this notion of agents of change. So you see the words agency in a number of settings. And as we also say in the book, there was a history where for a long time policy said teachers should just do what we tell them to do. And then in the context of Scotland, suddenly this notion of the teacher as an agent of change or an important agent in educational work emerged. That's, I think, part of where it started for us as well. And an agent is an interesting notion because an agent is someone who can act, but always on behalf, you can say, of a company or an institution. That's already different from autonomy because you can say autonomy has more of this idea people can make up their own mind. And we did want to emphasize, look, teachers are teachers. They are not just free entrepreneurs, but they do a particular job and that job comes with responsibility and towards the new generation, towards society. But that doesn't mean that teachers should just be doing what policy tells them to do. And that's why we put the notion of agency to say that's precisely what we want to highlight and understand and theorize and investigate. And one of the other things that has happened over the past decade is the rise of this notion of teacher efficacy, individual efficacy and collective efficacy. I've published a little piece with colleagues with the question, is teacher efficacy a myth? And we say that no, it's not a myth, but it's one of these other notions that has completely been misunderstood. When people now say, well, if teachers have efficacy, then it has a positive impact on student outcomes, and they completely misunderstand the difference between correlation and causation, for example. and frame teaching in a particular way. So I think the notion of teacher agency still occupies an important spot in that because it says without the work of teachers, the thoughtful work of teachers, education will not happen. But what does that mean and what are the constraints and also the supporting dimensions of that?

Nice. Can I just ask you then, do you relate it at all to subjectification or being a subject? Because obviously, you know, we talked about that previously. It's a big part of your work, qualification, socialization, and this important piece that keeps the integrity of education, subjectification, but not just for students. Like, could it be that teacher agency is a subjectification for teachers?

Yeah, you can make that connection. I gave a nice talk last week actually somewhere about professional subjectification to say this also has a role in the education of professionals. And again, I guess we spoke about that. To be a subject is not to be autonomous and do what you want, but it's also to let yourself be subjected to what you are doing and what the point of the practice is in which you are acting. And in that sense, you can say, yes, it resonates with professional subjectification.

What is the world asking of me? Some might say.

Yeah. And what is education asking of me? Or what is the profession asking of me?

No, no, absolutely brilliant. Thank you. And then Mark, maybe just coming over to you, could you, there's been this 11-year period between the 2 books and you've got this whole new chapter 3 in the second edition, which is really, as I understand it, filling the gap because it, you said explicitly in 2015 that it was massively under-theorized, this idea. And then I'm just curious, why do you think in that time it became such a, in that 11-year period, did it become such a kind of much more popular concept for theory? And then, you know, if you wanted to build on what some of what Gert was saying about how you've taken that literature, connecting it.

Okay, so I mean, there's a couple of points we can make here. One is that, I mean, clearly the ecological approach to agency has provided a set of conceptual tools for researchers to understand the contexts for teaching, contexts for action in education. And so I think it's quite clear that it's appealed to researchers who see this as a way of understanding, as a way of developing their own work in their own particular fields. And so I see the appeal there. In terms of policy, as Gert was saying, that there is a— there has been for some years now this idea of a teacher as an agent of change, and this superficial similarity of agent and agency, I think, has been unhelpful here. We started from a consideration of policy that framed teachers as agents of change. One of the things we said was that you can't demand that teachers have agency. Agency emerges from the dynamic context for action, people's positioning within and by means of those contexts. It's not something that just can be or granted by policymakers. We have to work hard to continually reinvigorate and renew those contexts and also to develop the teachers, the people working within and by means of those contexts. So policymakers, I think, have been very attracted by this notion because there's already an existing agenda of teachers as agents of change. And it became such an obsession, I think, that one of the American teaching unions had given their Obsession of the Year Award in something like 2017 or 2018 to the term teacher agency. So that illustrates how it became very popular. But what we've seen, I think, is the emergence of a set of literature which goes off in lots of different directions. Now, I mentioned earlier on that some of it is really helpful. So we provided a framework for understanding agency, I think, within the first book. But there are plenty of areas which are empirically underexplored, for example, and there are plenty of areas where there needs to be theory elaboration. And some of the better work that I've seen, for example, has taken the ecological approach And applied interesting concepts around futures thinking, for example, or using network analysis to understand relationality, or some of the— I've just examined a PhD which was using ideas from social psychology, for example, around frame analysis to understand how narratives develop over time. So some of this work is actually quite interesting, and some of the authors who have written about this talk about mediating concepts that you can take ideas. From other theories and use them, provided that you actually do the hard work of conceptualizing how they fit together with the ecological view. Now, sadly, a lot of the literature doesn't do that. It uncritically cherry-picks ideas from lots of different theorists and sort of puts them together, often into very over-elaborate frameworks for agency. One of the worst examples I saw, I'm not going to name names today, had used teacher agency theory, the ecological approach to theorize teacher agency, and then had gone on to theorize agency more generally using Giddens. So you get plenty of examples of this uncritical hybridization of theories. And I think what we felt looking at the literature was that there needed to be a sort of drawing together of some of the ideas here and the critique of some of the literature because it's becoming a very messy field and that doesn't help the slipperiness of the idea. So we see all sorts of slippage, and I think slippage is a good term to use here. We see agency slipping into action, for example. We see ideas about relationality and agency slipping into the idea of collective agency, which has become very popular as well. So we can talk about some of these later on in the interview, I guess.

But yeah, I'd love to ask you about particularly that collective agency, but just maybe before we dive a bit deeper into what the ecological approach is, because I think it is, I just think it's fantastic and so resonant, increasingly resonant, I think. And that's why probably, hopefully there's been so much that you're the 2015 book has been so popular. But it's still niggling at me, this idea of like, is it just inherently a good thing to have more of? And I think maybe it's worth just addressing that, because you do address that in the book. And it feels like it's a normative claim, right? It feels like it's just a good thing that, of course, we want more of this for teachers. We want more teacher agency. Can you kind of balance that out a little bit before we then go into what the ecological approach is?

Well, I'll offer a couple of thoughts and I'll pass it over to Gerd for his own. But I mean, the ecological approach for me is powerful because it allows us to understand contexts. It's a heuristic. So if I'm trying to understand why, for example, particular policies work or don't work, or why teachers struggle with new curriculum reform, then the ecological view allows me to, to apply a rigorous analytical frame to that. So that's one thing. But I think there's also an empirical question here about to what extent it's good for teachers to have agency. And we can see that in the effects. And certainly in my own research, I can see that where teachers are engaged in networks, for example, working relationally with other teachers in ways which are asking proper educational questions, then that on the whole enhances practice and it enhances outcomes for young people. So that's an empirical question, I guess. And there are obviously examples of where teacher learning communities don't work. They have the opposite effect, for example, by reinforcing bad practices. But, you know, again, that's an empirical question we can ask here.

Yeah, good. Yeah, Gert, did you want to—

So maybe to be absolutely clear, teacher agency in itself is not good or desirable. You cannot say we need more of it. One thing we try to do is to get away from this question, what is teacher agency, to the question, how does it happen? And then the ecological approach says it happens because individuals have capacity to do things. They can think, they can act, they have a whole repertoire, but that in itself never leads to anything because you always act in a situation which is structured in all kinds of ways, but also is a culture with norms, with ways of doing. So I think the basic insight of the ecological approach is to say it is the interplay of individual capacity, culture, and structure. And then that both has a history, it comes from somewhere, both the practices themselves and how individual teachers develop. And it has something on the horizon. So there is a purpose, a sense of direction. But then what's really important is that within education, people have quite different understandings of what should be on the horizon, what the whole purpose and point of education is. And there you see that teacher agency can also, how shall I put it, yeah, go in directions where I would say that really undermines education. I'm thinking of a school I visited and the school claimed to be evidence-based. And then I asked a couple of times, so what do you read? How do you inform yourself? And they said, we only read what fits our basic insights. So that was a bit narrow. And then I asked, what are your basic insights? And they said, well, we know how the brain works, we know how the memory works, and that's all we need to know.

Brilliant. Sewn up. I'm so glad they've got— they figured it out.

Yeah. Yeah. So there you can say, these are agentic teachers. They do thoughtful things. They organize structures and cultures. But you still have to ask, is this a sound conception of education that informs the agency? And I think that's another empirical question that you can open up with the ecological model.

Yeah, there's a lot there. But is there an ethical dimension to it though? I mean, I'm just, I'm thinking back to our second conversation that we had about the question of freedom. I just wonder if there's an ethical question nestling in this idea of agency.

So if you want to hear me on this, I would say, no, it's not ethical, but it's normative. And for me, that's an important distinction. And the silly joke I have is that an ethical baker is not necessarily a good baker. So to be a good baker, you need to know your stuff and need to be able to bake. And of course, you can do that in ethical ways and unethical ways, but ethics in itself is not sufficient. So for me, I would call it normative to say everything eventually depends on how the teachers and the leaders and the policymakers, how they understand what the whole point and purpose of education is. And there you see completely narrow views that also undermine agency. So that also say the teachers should not even have a voice in this. And you see broad and interesting views of education. But education is a massively big field, so that this can also go in many directions. So again, if you have the notion of autonomy and just say teachers can do it, then you ignore that what they do is influenced by discourses, by their own understanding. And that's a really important element. And there it becomes normative. There you cannot simply say there is a single vision and everything will be fine.

And that, that for me speaks to the value of strong curriculum frameworks that provide a good conceptual framework for developing practice. But it also, I think, speaks to the value of teachers engaging with ideas in education. We're involved, as many Scottish universities are, in a program called Interheadship. One of the precepts underpinning that is that you bring people out of school into university settings to work collaboratively with one another to develop their practice. In the context of ideas about education. So they get exposed to research, they get exposed to theory, and through doing so, this interrupts often quite narrow views of practice. Now, I would argue that this is actually reshaping their agency as school leaders because it's interrupting some of the, well, some of the ways of doing in schools which are often very instrumental and often, I think, countereducational.

Interesting. Yeah, you both use the word narrow as an adjective. So far interesting to going into the ecological approach now. Maybe there's something about it, which is by definition an importantly wide boundary, I would say. But yeah, maybe can we open that up a bit? I mean, why the ecological approach and what is it specifically? I mean, why you've, you've kind of both spoken to it in different ways, but just, it's interesting to me that this is quite still quite a new Frame for a lot of people. And that to me somehow speaks to the ecology of influences that have entrained us into much more narrowly defined concepts or domains. So that's a slightly abstract way of introducing the concept, but I'm, I guess I'm trying to say there's an expectation around sometimes concepts in education that we get used to the fact that they are supposed to be narrow, quite narrowly defined or quite specifically defined. And actually what you are doing with the ecological approach, I think it really importantly is opening it up to context, deep changing context in all sorts of ways, which I feel like it comes up a huge amount on this podcast. We investigate that in all sorts of different ways in different domains, not just in education, but that relational contextual recursiveness and influence feels like a really important broad set of insights that I think is becoming increasingly resonant in the world in general. But how does it land specifically when you're talking about the ecological approach to teacher agency, I suppose?

Let me give you a concrete example here. So for many years, agency was seen, I think, primarily as capacity, something that resides in the individual. And in terms of teaching, we see that in policy, which sees the need to educate or perhaps even just train teachers better. Without considering that teachers need to work in hospitable contexts which allow them to use these capacities they've developed. So I think one of the, I suppose, one of the deep insights in the ecological view is actually we cannot consider the individual and the individual needs of development for teachers without thinking about the resources by means of which teachers are able to act, the conditions that might enable or constrain action, And that these go beyond just thinking about material resources. We can also think about, for example, cultural resources, ideas. I mentioned the Interheadship Program in Scotland. One of the reasons it's so powerful is because teachers go into university and are able to engage with powerful ideas about education, which they wouldn't have in their school context. So the cultural stuff, the cultural forms that develop are really powerful there. But there's also something to say about the structures. And I'm talking here largely about relational structures, social structures here. So if we take a view of social structure that it's to do with the ways in which people relate to one another, their positioning and roles within those structures and so on, we can see that certain types of structure, for example, very hierarchical structures, can actually constrain agency quite seriously. So we may have high-capacity teachers who we've trained well, to use the term, but who are unable to use that professional expertise to act accordingly in their schools because they're constrained by very hierarchical structures. And we found some very concrete examples of that in the research that formed the original book. Teachers who described, for example, school meetings as like school assemblies. You file in, listen to someone, and file out. You really have no idea what you're supposed to do with that at the end of the meeting. But what's missing from that particular school are the horizontal structures where people come together to collaborate, to make meaning, and so on. So that for me is one of the major reasons why the ecological view is so powerful because it's taken us beyond thinking about agency as just an individual capacity, but something that's socially situated.

Amazing. And there's an interesting dimension to it as well, as I understood, that's again, thinking back to one of our previous conversations, past, present, and future. So you talked about, I think it's in the new book as well. It was definitely in the 2015 book, but the 3 dimensions that Iterational, the projective, and the practical evaluative dimension. Can you just speak to that? Because I really like that. I mean, maybe it's just something I enjoy, but the kind of past, present, future framing was quite a useful one. Yeah.

So I think there are 2 components to the ecological approach to agency. One is this capacity, culture, structure, and the 3 have to come together. And the other has to do with time, where you can say you always act in the here and now. So you have to respond to the situation you are in. And we call that the pragmatic evaluative dimension. Pragmatic means, yeah, it's about acting in this situation. And there is always an evaluation of what can be done, what needs to be done. But then when you ask, what does it make it possible to act in the here and now? Then on the one hand, there is a history. That's the iterative dimension. Teachers have histories. They are educated. They come from different generations. Schools have histories. Education systems have histories. So that's always also present in the here and now. And then there is the— I've lost— what is the concept we used?

Projective.

Projective. Thank you very much. I need to put it on a t-shirt to remember. So there you can say you act in a situation, but you always do it with a purpose. You do it with a reason. And in education, that's really important. And you can say that's the projective dimension, that's the orientation. Why are we doing it? What do we try to achieve? And again, what kind of language have we got for that? So in a sense, you have, uh, something horizontal, the capacity, culture, structure, but then you look back to the history you get it that in order to act, you need to know why you're acting and in what direction you want to go. But that works out in the complex ecology of the here and now.

There's an interesting piece of work that was done fairly recently, which we published in the Curriculum Journal, which looked at this relationship between past experience and people's ability to form projective futures. This was a study of teachers who did Erasmus+ exchanges. Now, Having that experience in their biography has enabled these teachers basically to envisage different possibilities for future practice, which wouldn't be in their, I suppose, their repertoire otherwise. I think quite simply, having seen how other education systems operate, they have a wider range of ideas about how their own system might operate. And that's, I think, a really good concrete example of how past experience forms future projections, which then enables people to act differently in the face of the constraints and enablers in the present situation.

Love it. Yeah. And maybe also the interhead example you were giving as well, because as people are going into different contexts like universities or going back into being the role of a learner, you know, there is an interesting experience there that you may, you hope may shape their, when they move back into the space and what they're thinking about or empathizing with other students in their context or whatever. So I guess all experience shapes this, right?

Sure. And in my own work, I've written a bit about how these different types of resources are enabled from these interactions. So involvement in a university course like Interheadship will open up access to cognitive resources, if you like, intellectual resources through engagement with research. But they also open up new networks for practice, relational resources, which become often quite enduring. These critical peer groups that we form in this actually go way beyond the course and people form lifelong networks and relationships and friendships as a result of that. So just having access to what other people do and then being able to have these spaces where you can critically reflect upon those in the context of research, they really do enhance the agency that these particular school leaders experience, I think.

Well, maybe just because there were 2 words to maybe mention here. So I would say our approach is not narrow, and I think Mark just gave many examples of saying to more than teachers' experience, perspective, discursive resources, the languages they can use, is really important. Because if you educate someone for a job or for a profession, you can do that in a very narrow way, and then people can do something, but they will not understand what they are doing. If you only know one way of doing something, you can do that, but you have no sense of what you're doing and what you're not doing. So to broaden that is really important so that you understand what you're doing and maybe what the choices are. So I would say the approach is broad, but also very precise. So it's not that broad means that it becomes open and can go in all kinds of directions. I think for me, the combination of broad and precise is what we try to do.

I love it. That's interesting. And I mean, in a way, that's what I wanted to ask was, what's the role or the value of diversity in that whole picture? Because what I hear you saying is, or my conjecture from what you're saying is that everyone's going to be coming into this space. So we're working in a school, everyone's coming in with their own iterational past habits, histories, et cetera, life experiences. They're gonna also be coming in with their own projective imaginings and future hopes. And then you're all gonna be meeting in this present, you know, in a stuffy staff room and in a, you know, on a Thursday afternoon or whatever. And suddenly there's some school leaders there who have their own histories and own futures who want to somehow corral this thing into some kind of culture in inverted commas, or some kind of direction or vision for the future. just, you know, the kind of reality, the messy reality. And I just wondered, how do you feel about that, the diversity that seems to be inevitable?

Well, it's, I mean, for me, the standardization and the routes to standardized practice are actually an enemy of good education. They impoverish education. So ideas around having a completely shared vision, for example, that everyone buys into. Yes, we have to have some agreement about what constitutes educational practice in our school, but this idea that everyone buys into an orthodoxy that's imposed from outside, is really dangerous to good education. So for me, diversity is really important, diverse views. That doesn't preclude people then coming to a shared vision in their own establishment, but that shared vision will be richer and more meaningful, I think, if it comes from a position of diversity and recognizing that diversity is strength here.

But isn't that a culture that emerges? I mean, you could almost insert the word culture for shared vision that emerges because, you know, as a family, you interact together in your messy ways and you kind of create some kind of what it is to be like in my family versus your family, or similarly in a context like a school. I wonder if that does, the culture piece has a role there as well.

Well, culture's really important and it's continually emerging from the interactions, the transactions that people have in those settings. But, you know, if we've got a situation where we are imposing an orthodoxy from the outside, That every school is going to be the same, that there's no capacity to respond to local conditions. The idea that people can faithfully reproduce a policy in every respect, we know that that doesn't happen because teachers will always interpret policies in different ways. Fidelity is a bit of a sort of false pipe dream, if you like. All of these things, I think, are militating against good education. For me, if we have a strong teaching profession who engage with ideas, who engage with each other, who engage with research, and are well-informed and come together regularly in generative dialogical spaces, that means better practice. And teacher agency is an important component of that, I think.

Yeah. So ultimately it has something to do with, with how you understand what education is and what education is for.

Yeah.

And you see tendencies that just want to shape it into some kind of a single-track machine where there is one outcome that counts and one way to act. And then you get a, yeah, I think a narrow system that ultimately becomes uneducation. That's the whole ongoing critique of all the measurement that says if we only drive up exam scores or only drive up PISA results, then we have good education. And I think that's a mistake, but you see policy very much moving in this direction. I have a little book coming out, so maybe we'll meet again, Tim, next year.

Very good, yeah.

On teaching. And it has a chapter where I go back to Donald Schön, and it's really interesting.

Right.

His book, The Reflective Practitioner, which I characterize as a book that is about educational practice, actually. And one interesting observation he makes is that in professional practices like education, we always meet situations that are in some way unique and unstable. And that's why you need thoughtful practitioners there. So if the situations are not unique and if they are stable, then you just need people with little thoughtful capacity. That's how McDonald's works in a sense. McDonald's is apparently really good for young people in their education. So, but if you look at how McDonald's works, it's just a single-track machine and therefore you walk into a McDonald's everywhere in the world and you can get your food because there are very few options. But in education, we encounter situations that are unique and unstable. Yeah, human beings, living beings where we do not entirely know how to respond, and therefore you need judgment. And therefore, if you begin to narrow the professional repertoire of teachers or the range of discourses that you can utilize there, you get a system that in a sense becomes very stupid at some point. So this school that said you only need to know how the brain works and the memory works, well, if a child is crying in the classroom, the knowledge about the brain and the memory are completely useless. So that is, yeah, a very basic insight there, I think. And it's, it says something about the practice of education and what is needed there. And again, I think teacher agency responds to that by saying you need to have a diversity of frames of references and ways of doing so that you can respond in an intelligent way to what is in front of you.

And there's a good example. I mean, you mentioned measurement culture. The dominant paradigm now in education in Scotland and elsewhere is that it's all about raising attainment or closing attainment gaps, which adds an extra layer of tension, I suppose. But if that is what schools are being judged on, a single measure measure of attainment, then they will make decisions which are often instrumental and countereducational. So I know of schools, for example, that have abolished geography or technology as subjects in the senior phase. Why? Because those subjects were underperforming. Now, in a sense, that's the school leaders using their own professional agency to come up with a solution to a problem, which is that their school stats are being negatively affected by a particular subject underperforming. But if we contrast that with other schools I've come across and worked with, where the focus is on developing the agency of the teachers at the outset and developing the curriculum as a meaningful experience for children and young people, one of the inevitable outcomes of that is attainment will rise anyway because the quality of the educational experience is better. So in a sense, what we're doing through focusing on standardization and measurement is actually limiting responses that schools might have. to particular situations. And that means education as a result is less rich, I think.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mean, you might say these are basic insights, but I mean, I think they're actually really profound because just that there's something about the presence and the, these judge, these words like judgment that you're using, or just the being together in a space with thinking, reflecting people. Humans, more than humans, et cetera, contexts. There's something very alive and real about that. Whereas if you turn it into the much more narrow focus on the instrumentalized version, you're just delivering product or you're doing something, it's much less reflective, much less thinking. I would say probably in a very biased or ideological way, a bit less alive, a bit less real. I mean, problematic terms probably for— You know, 2 professors of education. But yeah, there's something there that's like speaks to something I think really important.

Yeah. And for me, it goes from the basic insights that as educator, you, you want to prepare and encourage students for their own life and their, their own thoughtfulness. And if that becomes completely narrowed to saying we need to focus on your exam scores, then you create a kind of pseudo-reality. Which you can keep pushing and can try to get as perfect as you want. But then as soon as students step outside of the school and into the world, you can ask how have they been prepared? And you will still be because a lot of this is done in the name of equality and equal opportunities. But even if you have sort of equal exam scores, that will not translate into success in societies that are full of. inequalities. So it's quite a poor diet, I think. And it's frustrating that policymakers seem to be falling for this option where they say, if we can just make the system more perfect in a very narrow way, then we have done something good. And it's very short-term thinking.

Yeah. Can I ask, just, there is a layer that's slightly different and adjacent to this that I want to just briefly ask you about, because I wonder about the reason I love the ecological approach to teacher agency is because I love an ecological approach to student agency or an ecological approach to everyone agency, because that feels to me like an incredibly alive discourse around in all sorts of spaces, biology, complexity science, in all these different places. I've had Alicia Juárez on the podcast before, her book Context Changes Everything. this idea of context-dependent constraints and thinking about life actually in terms of an ecological set of constraints and closing, opening, shaping, et cetera. It gets very abstract very quickly. But my point is it feels pretty important that everyone learns the ecological approach to life. Would you say?

Yep.

Good. Right. Done. Right. We can start working on it.

I wouldn't disagree with that at all. I mean, one point to make is that if we are using the ecological approach as a frame for understanding the context. That context will vary from different professional groups to children to general population and so on.

Right.

So if we take the normative dimension that Gert mentioned earlier on, teacher professionalism is an inherent part of the ecological view to agency. And we would expect teachers to, for example, engage with certain ideas or values around education. And that would be different if we were looking at student agency, for example, where the ecology is different. But the, the actual approach as an, as a way of understanding, I think is valid across the piece.

Love it. Thank you so much. I mean, maybe just to briefly ask you, there is something about collective, given everything we've just said, this idea about collective agency that we're acting as a group in a context, in relationship. And there's some, seems to be something quite resonant about that. But what you, part of what you say in the book is that the agency lives in the individual, as I've understood it. It's not a, it's not a collective phenomenon. Am I, is that correct or?

So I'll be slightly pedantic here and say that agency is experienced by or achieved by the individual. So I'm absolutely buying into the idea of collective action, but that really relates to this idea that agency and action are slightly different things, albeit related. So if we take a collective action by a group of teachers, for example, going on strike or campaigning for something, that will be very effective if done collectively. But within that group of teachers, people will experience different degrees of agency. They'll come with different iterational backgrounds, for example. They'll come with different projective futures, and they'll experience the present in different ways. So for me, the idea of collective agency is actually going down a slight rabbit hole because it's taking the conversation away and it's potentially conflating agency and action. For me, it's about understanding how different teachers experience agency and how we can strengthen the agency of teachers So that they're enabled to act in different ways and sometimes in collective ways.

Nice. That's helpful. Thank you. Gert, did you want to say something on that?

Well, I think our ambition is, is not so much to explain agency, but to ask how is agency possible? Because there are also many theories that I would say slip into the genre of explanation and they say we can explain it. So there are people who go to Bronfenbrenner and say, yeah, we can explain the bigger and the smaller and the smaller. The discussion is not to say that's not true, but it's to say it starts from another question. How can you explain how things happen? And we try to understand actually what makes it possible for professionals like teachers to act meaningfully in a situation. That's the ambition. So theories that explain, like Giddens, for example, is, is a theory that tries to explain how individuals can act in social structures. And that's a very different question.

It's super interesting, almost like you're turning the ecological approach on yourself as you're trying to describe it.

But there's also an educational point because the job of teachers is also not to explain students, but to educate students. And there's an awful lot of explanation coming into schools that says, oh yeah, if we understand this behavior and it comes from there, or again, you get all the brain science in, for example. But your job as a teacher is always to say, how can I find an educational opening, an educational possibility for this student? And explanations can really get in the way of that, actually. So that's, I think, quite important for the whole ambition of what we try to do.

Amazing. Thank you. And I mean, I would, I'm not sure how you think about this one, but I will jump to the question on AI because it's not something you cover in the book and you have obviously done some kind of revision in 2025-ish, given, you know, the timing. AI has been around for a little, or advanced AI has been around for a little while now, and you obviously chose not to include it in the book somehow. It maybe find it irrelevant, but I just wondered, given that it's such a prominent feature of the ecological landscape in which teachers find themselves now, how do you think about artificial or generative artificial intelligence as one of the influences in this kind of cultural, structural, discursive, material set of conditions that are shaping teachers' work?

I suppose, I mean, the ambition in the updated book was twofold. One was to provide an updated, I suppose, view or understanding of the ecological approach. We'd done some small things in that respect. For example, we realized we hadn't really given a concise definition of agency. We'd critiqued other people's definitions, and then we provided this rather complex sort of conceptualization of agency. So one of the things that's emerged in the new book is just sort of tightening that up. So we've done tweaks here and there, but the other ambition I suppose was to explore what other people had said. And it was not a theme that came out of the literature very much in the last 10 years. Now, since we submitted the manuscript, which was more than a year ago now, about 15 months ago, there have been a number of publications which have started to explore AI. And I think I think it's fair to say that probably this is, if we're looking at it through the lens of the ecological approach, this is an empirical question that needs to be asked. To what extent is AI part of the ecology? How does it shape agency? So these are empirical questions I think that future research will look at. And certainly I've got a visiting PhD student from Italy who's arriving next week who's doing a PhD study on just that topic.

So I also would say maybe The ecological approach allows for a particular set of questions to ask about a development like this. So yeah, not to be entirely flippant, but you could also have asked, why isn't there a critique of capitalism in the book?

Surely it's you. It's you. Yeah, there is implicit. It's implicit. Yes.

Yeah. And for me, AI is just the next, what is it, symptom of capitalism.

Sure.

So not something unique in itself, but it's of course a big mess. But I think the ecological approach allows to say, so if this is coming into schools, what is it doing and where is it coming in and what does it require from teachers? How may it undermine agency, enhance agency? That's maybe an open question. And in that sense, you can say with the book, we stand next to teachers and educational professionals to say, look, if you want to take your professionalism seriously, this may help in really understanding how that professionalism comes about in concrete situations and also in structures and cultures that are not of your making and often also beyond your control.

Yeah, I love that. I was actually going to end with exactly that question, but you've almost answered it without me asking it, is that, you know, what would be your hope for this edition of the book? But actually, that's a really powerful hope for the book, is particularly now with all of these pressures about AI and all of this constant don't talk about it. It is interesting, yeah, how can we bolster teachers' kind of capacity to respond thoughtfully and from a grounded place? And I think maybe this book is a really useful way or place from which to do that. But I don't know, Mark, any final comments on that?

Well, my additional hope is that policymakers will start to develop a more nuanced view of what agency is and how they can work to afford it within the education system. And that means I think looking anew at the whole culture of performativity and measurement that's like an infection in the system, I think. But it's also about thinking sensibly about what they can do to build the resources, the networks, relationality within the system, which will actually enhance teachers' agency and ultimately lead to better educational practices and outcomes for young people and children.

Amazing.

But the critical question for policy is, do you want teachers to become more intelligent professionally or less intelligent. And I think some of the bigger battles are going on there. And we are making a case for saying, yeah, we want thoughtful teachers who can work in contexts that support them. But policy often thinks— yeah, we mentioned it before— if you start constraining and, and streamlining the, the situation, then in a sense you don't need thoughtful teachers any longer, but you get a one-trick education system. And you can know from, what is it, evolutionary theory, that those systems are very vulnerable for change. So they become in themselves unintelligent. That's the big worry.

The robustness of the diversity. Exactly. No, absolutely. And just to be provocative, we need an ecological definition of intelligence. If you're going to use that provocative word of intelligence about teachers, we need an ecological understanding of intelligence because even the concept of intelligence is locked in the box of narrow boundary definition quite unhelpfully.

Yeah.

So there's a whole, there's a whole bunch of ecologizing to do.

Yes. You've put it so well. Intelligence was already made artificial before AI even emerged.

Precisely. It's never not been artificial. Yeah. And used as a weapon similarly. No, thank you both. I mean, just such a pleasure to chat and I genuinely think it's a really, really important concept, and I'm so happy to see it, you know, and also to be able to help to push it again to more teachers and policymakers and et cetera. So no, thank you so much for taking the time.

It's a pleasure, Tim. Thank you.

Thank you.

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