Teachers’ experiences with agency and well-being during a critical participatory action research project

ABSTRACT

Prior research suggests that critical participatory action research (CPAR) – a research approach that centers democratic participation, agency, and collective capacity-building – may be one way to improve teachers’ professional development and increase their feelings of agency and well-being. Engaging in CPAR has the potential to foster teachers’ positive relationships, build their critical consciousness, and increase their feelings of civic empowerment. The current project explores teachers’ experiences in a yearlong CPAR professional development course, investigating whether this professional development course may support teacher’s self-reported sense of agency and their self-reported sense of well-being. Drawing on interview data, the findings suggest that teachers felt an increased sense of agency and well-being while engaged in the CPAR workshop. Although some teachers were able to transfer these feelings to their school contexts, the levels and forms of transferability seemed related to specific contextual factors. Thus, this study indicates that the benefits of CPAR may not always transfer across settings.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical theory/critical pedagogy
• diversity
• equity
• professional development
• teacher research
• critical participatory action research
• agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Notes

1. Here, we use the word ‘teacher’ broadly to refer to adults who support learning in school; in our case, teacher researchers included school counselors and disciplinary coaches.

2. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic aligned with the start of data collection making participation difficult for many of the teacher researchers.

3. Due to the onset of COVID-19, the CPAR project was moved online in March. Some teachers paused their work and decided to continue once in-person data collection could resume.

4. Interviews were conducted during the spring of 2020, which meant that Covid-19 made it difficult for many teachers to participate.

5. Here, it is worth noting that autonomy refers to the opportunity to make decisions for oneself, which overlaps in important ways with the concept of agency.