Teachers As Policy Agents: Enacting The Professional Learning Community Policy As An Agentic, Ecological Process

Abstract

Contrary to depictions of the educational policy process as a rational set of linear stages, policies are (re)shaped by the larger organizational/policy environment, teachers’ perceptions of a policy and their own roles, how they choose to act upon a policy, and how these change over time. Each of these elements and their interactions are crucial to whether a policy succeeds in practice. Drawing upon the fields of policy studies, teacher agency, organizational change, and Foucauldian governmentality, this ethnographic case study and practitioner inquiry focused on teachers’ enactment of a Professional Learning Communities (PLC) policy during the on-going global Pandemic, at an urban, private high school in Hawaiʻi. The research questions focused on how the policy ecology and teachers’ perceptions, agency, and enactment of the policy have changed over time, and how each of these and their interactions impact the overall policy implementation process. The findings suggested that the policy ecology and teachers’ internal frameworks impacted teachers’ policy perceptions and agency in a variety of ways, leading to many modes of enactment, from positive engagement, compliance and resistance, to critical enactment. The outcomes of the policy included impacts on teachers’ practice, mindsets, and subjectification, and ambiguity over the overall policy’s efficacy.