Exploring foreign language teachers’ professional agency in Romanian Public Secondary schools.

Sammanfattning: Aim: This research aims to explore how seven foreign language teachers in a few urban public secondary schools in Romania understand and enact their professional agency and how contextual factors support or constrain its achievement. The purpose is to understand the ways in which the participants’ teaching philosophies and experiences inform their awareness and achievement of agency, what they perceive as the available contextual resources within contextual constraints, and how that reflects in their beliefs and professional aspirations. Theory: The thesis relies on the ecological theoretical framework (Priestley et al., 2015), which enables an analysis of how contexts mediate the interplay of values, beliefs, and practices, shaping the agency of foreign language teachers. Method: The narrative inquiry methodology is chosen to explore the participants’ personal and professional experiences, through their stories. The semi-structured, in-depth Zoom interviews captured the FL teachers’ views, experiences, and relationships. The narrative analysis and interpretation highlight the particular but also the general in these individual experiences, illustrated by relevant extracts from the participants’ stories. Results: Findings show that the teachers’ primary resources for enacting professional agency was their ability to seek meaningful opportunities for professional development and build productive relationships in the classroom, school, and community. The teachers enacted proactive agency through resilience, responsibility, and commitment translated as compensatory actions to mitigate school shortages, support students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and ensure students’ academic development and language certification. Macro factors such as the underfunded centralised education system, national policies, and appraisal criteria combined with the demand for international language certification, mediate language teachers’ professional agency, causing asymmetrical relationships, administrative chores, high accountability, competition between students, teachers, and schools, and social inequity. The teachers manifested reactive agency by complying with institutional requirements. The participants’ critical evaluations and conflicted projections illustrate that their professional agency is intertwined with their identity and mediated by their need to act according to their values and professional convictions. The narratives revealed that their agency was also moderated by their need to preserve a dignified status as FL professionals and be validated by the school community.