Abstract

Based upon primary school teachers’ reflective narratives, the researcher argues that teachers’
agency is understood as ‘living out’ their educational beliefs and values, referred to as their
philosophy of education, and demonstrated through their pedagogy, within the social and cultural
discursive structures of educational reform and change (Archer, 2003, 267). Ontologically rooted in a
critical realist view of reality that is stratified and emergent, the case is made through Archer’s
morphogenetic model for the interplay between two different causal powers namely those
pertaining to agents and those to structures. The interplay between the two forms the problematic
for the study, a position that places neither the objectivity of structures over the subjectivity of
agents or vice versa but recognises that what teachers do to fulfil their philosophy of education and
related pedagogic intentions involves the subjective and reflexive formulation of their intentions in
respect of their objective circumstances. Overall it is argued that the mediatory reflections of
teachers for revealing the structure agency interplay and their resulting actions in their school
contexts hold a crucially political dimension. The assumption being based on perceived differences
between teachers’ deeply held values and beliefs about their pedagogy and how they see
themselves as teachers within imposed normative value judgements of reform agendas. How they
accept, embrace, circumnavigate or reject educational change and reform, whether they feel they
have succeeded or failed and however small their adjustments to pedagogy might be provides
valuable insights about primary school teachers’ professional lives and their pedagogy that serve as a
source of knowledge for the profession.