Chinese Russian language teachers’ agency in response to the New Liberal Arts policy: An ecological perspective

Yuan Tao & Lei Cai
Southeast University | Hubei University

The Declaration on the Construction of New liberal Arts released in 2020 put forward curriculum-based ideological and moral education, quality culture, interdisciplinary integration and mode innovation as principles for new liberal arts construction, which are later adopted as language policy support underlying Chinese Russian language teachers’ (RLTs) career development. Against this backdrop, we focused on the issue of Russian language teachers’ agency in response to the call under the guidance of the ecological theory. We applied the ecological lens to researching how RLTs interact with diverse contextual factors at different subsystems to seek their professional development. The current study explored RLTs’ agency exercise experiences through semi-structured interviews with three RLTs working in Chinese universities. The findings showed that Chinese RLTs generally held a positive attitude towards the new education policy, while their potential for mobilizing was directly associated with the contingent policy of their local institutions. What’s more, their career prospects rested upon their career planning and personality. The study provides useful insights into teacher agency for less-commonly-taught languages and the different subsystems constraining their agencies. Given the relatively small sample size involved in the study and the strong dependence on interview-based data, further study based on larger sample size and multidimensional data with adequate cross-validation is expected.

Publication history

Date received: 10 October 2023

Date accepted: 2 February 2024

Published online: 13 June 2024

Table of contents

Agency plays a critical role in sustaining teachers’ professional development, attaining self-realization and strengthening their commitment to being a teacher (Tao & Gao, 2017). It was defined by Duff as “people’s ability to make choices, take control, self-regulate, and thereby pursue their goals as individuals leading, potentially, to personal or social transformation” (Duff, 2012, pp. 417). Agency has been extensively discussed and diversely interpreted from many theoretical perspectives. The ecological conceptualization of agency attaches equal importance to both individual capacity and contextual dimensions in shaping agency and sees the achievement of agency as a temporal process (Priestley, 2015). Considering the temporal nature of agency, teacher agency is conceptualized as “a matter of personal capacity to act, combined with the contingencies of the environment within which such action occurs” and “achieved through engagement with specific contextual conditions” (Priestley, et al., 2012, pp. 11). It echoes the view of Eteläpelto. et al., (2014) that holds “professional agency is practiced when professional subjects and/or communities exert influence, make choices and take stances in ways that affect their work and/or their professional identities” (pp. 61). Therefore, this view identifies the temporal nature of agency specifically within the field of Language planning and policy (LPP) and suggests implications for how teacher agency is being conceived of in LPP research.

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