Exploring teacher agency in universities: three types of agentic actions

Abstract

Understanding how university lecturers exercise teacher agency (i.e. the capacity to intentionally and constructively shape their teaching practices and professional development) is crucial for improving teaching quality and fostering professional growth. Agency encompasses lecturers’ intentional, proactive efforts to navigate challenges, implement effective teaching strategies, and adapt to diverse institutional constraints and opportunities. This study explored how lecturers demonstrate agency through articulating deliberate intended actions, employing scenario-based interviews with 30 university lecturers to explore their strategies for addressing challenging teaching situations. Grounded in the ecological approach to teacher agency, this study identified three categories of agentic actions: Leading, Accommodating, and Supporting actions. These categories represent varied approaches to decision-making and adaptation in challenging scenarios, illustrating how lecturers navigate the cultural (norms, values, and beliefs), structural (institutional roles and relationships), and material (resources and physical conditions) elements of their teaching practices. The practical-evaluative dimension of the ecological model, which emphasizes the dynamic interplay between presently available resources and individual capacities, served as the analytical framework. The findings substantiated and extended the ecological approach by introducing a typology of agentic actions, offering empirically grounded insights into how lecturers exercise teacher agency within university teaching practices. This typology provides a structured framework for understanding teacher agency and offers actionable strategies to enhance lecturers’ deliberate decision-making. By focusing on deliberate and context-sensitive actions, this study highlights the pivotal role of lecturers as active architects of shaping university teaching practices and navigating challenging teaching situations.