Rethinking teacher agency: cybernetics, action research, and the process-oriented rationality

Teacher agency is often depicted in terms of autonomy, empowerment, and participation. This article examines how those democratic visions of teacher agency are (re)constructed during the post-World War Two period when social scientists were eager to find organized procedural reasons. To explain this, I historicize the shifted teachers’ role from a ‘participant’ to a ‘participant observer’ in action research. The analysis focuses on this shift of teachers’ positionality as embodying cybernetics rationales, which conceptualized the role of the observer as the agency for systemic change and knowledge production. The findings show that teachers, who participate in action research as teacher-researchers, follow mechanically applicable rules (e.g., action-oriented methodological principles) while having freedom to select the targets of the inquiry. Whereas it has empowered teachers to have an autonomous sense of agency, the empirical, methodological, and procedural orientation in action research leaves teachers’ agential roles to be bounded with the self-referencing process to believe what is seen, rather than to consider the empirical representations in relation to cultural, historical, and social conditions. The study provides alternative ways to critically examine an individual’s participation in organizational systems and reforms, methodocentrism in education research, and the role of observation for knowledge production.