Analysing teacher agency within school social structure:New uses of visual methods

Teacher agency has undergone much investigation in recent years. The recognition that teachers are embedded in social networks in schools, which affect teachers’ work, has led to calls to jointly analyse teachers’ relational agency—teachers’ capacity to reach out to others to solve problems—and the social structures that teachers are embedded in. However, disentangling structure and agency is notoriously difficult, both methodologically and conceptually. In the current paper, we present an approach that allows researchers to analyse—and visualise—teachers’ relational agency within social structure. The approach adapts research tools originally developed to support teachers’ reflections, and to visualise the evolution of social networks, to enable a mixed methods social network analysis of structure and agency. It consists in collecting quantitative data on teachers’ social networks and qualitative data on concrete cases of teachers exercising their relational agency to support students, and mapping these latter cases onto network visualisations—specifically, onto the network ties involved in each concrete case. This quantitatively-enhanced qualitative analysis, we argue, can be extended to longitudinal and multi-site analyses, and be supplemented by additional qualitative and quantitative work, to produce further insights on the complex relation between structure and agency. Ultimately, we argue, the approach could even be used with other populations entirely (beyond teachers in schools)