The manifestation of chinese preservice bilingual teachers’ relational agency in a change laboratory intervention

Relational Agency of University Teachers of Chinese as a Second Language: A Personal Network Perspective

“…While resonating with Edwards (2015) advocacy for exploring teacher agency from relational and collective perspectives, the study contributes to the literature by expanding the conceptual understanding of relational agency, and argues that relational agency tends to go beyond the psychological interpretation of personal dispositions and the physical boundaries of language teachers' professional communities (Edwards and D'arcy, 2004;Chang et al, 2021). By taking into a fuller consideration of the role that all the important people and resources in their personal social network may play, we delved into depth the different ways that individual teachers capitalized on a diversity of relational resources to enhance their agentic choice and actions as well as the capacity to interact with others (Priestley et al, 2015).…”

“…Moreover, individuals may develop varying degrees of such capacities, and their professional pursuit may accord with their values, choices and aspirations ( Hadar and Benish-Weisman, 2019 ). For example, Chang et al (2021) demonstrated that Chinese bilingual teachers’ relational agency development tended to promote the goals of bilingual education. The existing literature has so far confirmed the forward-looking nature of relational agency in the way that language teachers may take agentic actions and work toward their valued goals due to the mutually supportive relationships in their personal networks ( Kayi-Aydar, 2015 ; Molla and Nolan, 2020 ).…”

“…Collectively, these studies have demonstrated that the existing research mainly focuses on teacher collaboration within the professional learning communities where the strategic use of the relational resources facilitated the enhancement of collective and relational teacher agency ( Tao et al, 2020 ; Chang et al, 2021 ; Prain et al, 2021 ). However, few studies have explicitly explored the possible links between relational resources and relational agency extended from professional communities inclusive of teachers’ life world and all-round social experiences ( Priestley et al, 2015 ).…”

“…The majority of the existing literature focused mainly on teachers’ professional communities (e.g., Wang et al, 2017 ; Chang et al, 2021 ; Prain et al, 2021 ). For example, Tao et al (2020) investigated eight university LOTE (Languages other than English) teachers’ collective agency and relational knowledge development in a multilingual research center.…”

“…Consequently, the rising number of international students has resulted in both long hours of teaching and publication pressure to CSL teachers in the Chinese higher education ( Guo et al, 2020 ). In response, sustained professional development of CSL teachers is crucial at the heart of Chinese language teaching and learning research ( Ma et al, 2017 ; Gong et al, 2020a ) and have been extensively discussed both at the institutional and pedagogical levels, including agency research on CSL teachers ( Gong et al, 2018a , b , 2020b ; Bao et al, 2020 ; Chang et al, 2021 ). For example, Gong et al (2021) investigated the value of agency-oriented approach which fostered Chinese language teachers’ adaptation to online teaching amid the COVID-19 pandemic.…”