Abstract
This chapter presents an individual teacher case study. Sunny (pseudonym), the first case teacher, is named as a ‘prisoner’ because she had a desire to change her teaching, but struggled with many situational constraints. This chapter first analyses the activity system of Sunny’s classroom teaching; secondly it focuses on the levels of contradiction in Sunny’s activity system as well as her agency in resolving these contradictions; and, finally, the chapter explores Sunny’s agency in relation to her ZPD, as well as the factors accounting for her agency. The analysis indicates that some aspects of Sunny’s teaching matched reform requirements, but her lack of knowledge about the reform hindered her from mastering and engaging with them. At the same time, Sunny had a strong desire to make changes and also recognised her lack of theoretical knowledge about teaching, which is necessary to make these changes. The analysis of Sunny’s classroom teaching reveals that the conflicting interactions among the elements in her activity system caused her to give up her previous teaching goals or objectives. Analyses of the different levels of contradiction led us to conclude that Sunny’s passive resolution of these conflicts failed to bring about transformation but instead caused her to have negative feelings towards her work and her students.
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Yang, H. (2015). The Case Study of Sunny: The Prisoner. In: Teacher Mediated Agency in Educational Reform in China. English Language Education, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15925-6_4
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