Enhancing teacher agency with technology: Creating an ecological model through a place-based study of teaching and learning

Our research investigates teacher agency in the use of technology for teaching and learning. Teacher agency means the capacity of teachers and the actions they take. Educational technology (EdTech) encompasses resources such as computers, smart boards, apps,virtual reality and robots. Research identifies teacher agency and technology as factors in education transformation and improvement, but does not link them or elaborate their combined potential. Our transformational view of teacher agency with technology views teachers as experts with agency often overlooked in official frameworks for professional development and EdTech design. We advance understanding to inform user-led EdTech design and new models of teacher agency. Beyond use of readymade hardware, platforms and apps, what can teachers bring to the design and use of EdTech, and how do these contributions link to their wider expertise?
We add to research knowledge by extending understanding of teacher agency with technology. Two recent surveys summarise research on teacher agency but do not address links with EdTech. We want to understand this link given technology's role in practice. We use established concepts for describing agency and adapt their focus to address how teachers think about their agency with EdTech, what they do with it, and their aspirations for using EdTech. We examine how far different technologies invite teachers' agency, and the role EdTech can play in developing teachers' agency across their careers. Investigating these aspects helps us develop robust understanding of teacher agency and its outcomes for teachers, students, schools and the education system. We look beyond surveying teachers' attitudes and beliefs about using technology to offer an actionable model to support agency for effective EdTech adaptation in teachers' professional development, and suggest training interventions.
We want to understand how teachers' choices and actions relate to their contexts of work, to build a flexible model of teacher agency with technology for national use.Our place-based study of primary and secondary schools in the East is a partnership of UEA Education,Teacher Education and Computing Sciences researchers, British Telecom, Norfolk County Council Children's Services, and Library and Information Service. We embed dialogue with other UK regions in research design. We address research gaps around relationships between school phases, subjects, regionality, and teacher and student experiences of EdTech in schools and homes. We use qualitative and focus group methods, responding to regional challenges of geographic isolation for rural and coastal communities, of social disadvantage, and a technology infrastructure of varying quality and stability.
We investigate agency through collaborative projects in seven EdTech themes. These inform a comprehensive model of teacher agency with technology and form a working group schedule with teachers to match school calendars, recruiting from our university partnership with schools across Norfolk.Our 7 EdTech themes are
1. Teachers' use and design of EdTech: benchmark
2. A context for agency: online safety and wellbeing
3. Resourcefulness:making EdTech for the future
4. Agency for all: pedagogies for digital global citizenship
5. Navigating boundless knowledge: online information literacy for learning
6. Assessment tech and teacher agency in linked pedagogies
7. EdTech for teacher agency:teacher education and development
Three frames link these to support reporting impact:Sustainable technology infrastructures for teacher agency;Ecologies of teacher agency and technology- governance, finance and organisation;and Teacher education and development. We will establish an online Teacher Agency and Technology hub. Outputs will convey what we learn about the transformational benefits of teacher agency with technology in context, shared in policy briefs for local and national levels of government,and teachers.