Despite long-standing debates about the nature of professions and professionalism related to teaching, little consensus has been reached due in large part to an ever-changing political climate and a number of competing ideologies and interests (Bair, 2014; Hargreaves & Goodson, 1996). This lack of consensus fosters variable expectations of teachers, creating opportunities for the generation and implementation of initiatives that ultimately control and undermine teachers’ work (Ingersoll, 2003). While the quality of our nation’s education system depends on teachers' capacity to have professional input regarding their work, concepts of teacher agency and professionalism remain ill-defined, and few studies explore teachers’ experiences in spaces where they are asked for such input. This constructivist study examined teacher agency and professionalism, given the ideal of democracy and the reality of neoliberalism. Utilizing agency theory and participatory democratic theory, this study sought to explore teachers’ perceptions of their professionalism and agency by co-constructing knowledge with 18 members of the Richmond Mayoral Teacher Advisory Council (MTAC). This study took place over seven months and included seven focus group interview sessions, two MTAC meeting debrief sessions, and multiple writing prompts focused on teachers’ narratives of their professional experiences. The study revealed several themes related to teachers’ professionalism, particularly teachers’ focus on student-centered, morally-grounded views of their work. This study’s iterative inquiry process culminated in the development of a Moral Professional Agency framework that may serve useful in future constructivist work with teachers regarding their professional work.

Research in novice teachers has been wide and rich because they are experiencing a special period in their career life after spending their childhood in school and freshly graduating from teacher education. At the workplace, novice teachers might be specially treated because they are the newcomers, but they may want to realize some professional ideals. Research in novice teacher’s professional agency and professional identity needs to be enriched. Professional agency can be understood as initiatives taken at the workplace, and professional identity can be a “self” as a professional. Both professional agency and professional identity are complex when socio-cultural contexts and subjective factors are intertwined. However, they are related and interdependent—professional agency externalizes and negotiates professional identity, whereas professional identity internalizes and influences professional agency. By comparing ten novice teachers from China and Finland, the overall aim of this thesis is to investigate the degree of professional agency as well as professional identity from a developmental perspective so that the socio-cultural contexts, especially the education systems in Finland and China, and subjective factors can be understood. In this thesis, five novice teachers from China and five novice teachers from Finland were invited to participate in semi-structured interviews. By adopting thematic analysis, the author has found that how those novice teachers’ voices on professional agency and professional identity are similar or different. The result shows that Finnish novice teachers enjoy a relatively higher degree of professional agency at the workplace, and they seem to be more well-prepared by according to the testimonies in the interviews. Early-childhood teachers’ wellbeing in Finland and China need to be considered in the future educational reforms and development.

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