earticle

영어

Despite the rich literature on agency in sociological studies, systematic conceptualizations of teacher agency (TA) are relatively new. Moreover, ecologically-inspired approaches to this construct have emerged only recently. In response to this situation, in this paper, we briefly review the theoretical background of agency and develop a more ecologically-oriented and holistic model of TA. To arrive at this, we first introduce the ecological perspective, followed by descriptions of four key concepts relevant to our study. We then offer an analysis of one recent framework of TA, devised by Priestley, Biesta, and Robinson (2015), which appears to be the first one that approaches TA from an ecological perspective. In acknowledging the values and contributions of this framework, we also locate a number of areas that justify our proposal of a new model. By integrating van Lier's (2004a) ecological diagram of affordance in context into the existing framework, our revised model elaborates and extends the previous one making it more explicitly ecological. In so doing, we recognize TA as an emergent phenomenon, as a result of the complex interactions at two levels. This ecologically-extended conceptualization of TA is expected to open up space for more context-sensitive and ecologically-valid research on agency in general, and TA in particular.