Teachers' talk of experiencing: Conflict, resistance and agency

This article draws on the concept of experiencing to highlight a positive connection between resistance and agency, and its potential for teachers' professional development and educational change. The article examines teachers' discourse during a Change Laboratory intervention aimed at developing teaching practices. The intervention was initiated to deal with problems in the evaluation of students' learning. The article analyzes in particular the case of a teacher whose discourse shifted from critical and disruptive to constructive and agentive. The analysis explains this transition as a process of experiencing through which this teacher faced and worked out critical conflicts related to her teaching.