Teaching ‘a course without content’: relational agentic orientations to reorganisation of higher education

ABSTRACT The managerial transformation of higher education often means implementing novel modes of teaching and learning, including experiential and collaborative teaching. University teachers’ agency is crucial for managing and enacting changes in higher education. Collaborating as part of these changes requires a specific kind of agency, namely relational agency. The aim of this paper is to conceptualise relational agency by studying the relational agentic orientations of university teachers towards a reorganisation of higher education. The data come from a novel mass course at a faculty of education in a Finnish university, which emerged as part of a major university-wide reorganisation of study programmes. The course is organised and taught collaboratively by a group of teachers, and has no predefined content. A typology of the agentic orientations in the teachers’ interviews was constructed on the base of the intersections between the expansions of different objects of activity (one’s own, others’, partially shared) and the teachers’ evaluation of these expansions (pragmatic-adaptive, critical, developmental-transformative). The teachers focused primarily on student learning and on expanding the object of student learning activity, which extends the focus of relational agency to not only seeking resources in others but also being a resource for others.