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Introduction
In the early 1900s, scientific management principles for improving productivity began to permeate USA classrooms and curriculum (Kliebard, 2004). An assumption underlying the reforms was that teachers were not capable of determining curriculum and instruction themselves. John Franklin Bobbitt (1913), an influential curriculum leader at the time, wrote:
The burden of finding the best methods is too large and too complicated to be laid on the shoulders of the teachers […]. The ultimate worker, the teacher in our case, must be a specialist in the performance of the labor that will produce the product (pp. 52-53).
In this view, teachers were akin to factory workers, laborers whose job was to execute mandated curriculum to reach student outcomes that were defined by administrators and policymakers.
Despite increasing teacher control of the curriculum throughout the 20th century, more recent US education policies (e.g. No Child Left Behind), are, once again, standardizing the curriculum and narrowing accountability to students’ performance on standardized tests (Au, 2007). Many teachers are expected to teach a scripted curriculum, which limits or altogether eliminates opportunities for modification based on their expertise and student needs (Au, 2011; Ede, 2006; Milner, 2013). In response, teachers commonly cling to their autonomy (Hargreaves, 1994; Little, 1990; Lortie, 1975). Compliance-focused accountability structures extend to teacher professional development, as well, and often dictate what, and how, teachers should learn (Day, 2017). The resulting constraints on many US teachers are considered a root cause for the deprofessionalization of teaching, teacher discouragement and attrition (Daly, 2009; Fullan and Hargreaves, 2016; Lytle, 2008; Wood, 2011).
In contrast to positioning teachers as powerless, there have been recent calls for increased teacher agency over the curriculum they teach (Priestley et al., 2013) and their professional development (Calvert, 2016, p. 4). Teachers’ individual and collective agency is a hallmark of reforms intended to “bring the profession back in” to improve the educational outcomes of all learners (Fullan and Hargreaves, 2016). Yet, recommendations for increasing teacher agency are often directed towards administrators and policies that “give” teachers agency (cf, Calvert, 2016). While recognizing the importance and interplay of external conditions in shaping teachers’ work, this paper offers an example of how teachers themselves exercise agency over curriculum through collaboration sustained over time.
This study...