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Articles

Vol. 4 No. 3 (2025): Activity theory in technology enhanced learning research (part 2)

Examining agentic actions: University teachers learning to embrace digital change

DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21428/8c225f6e.d4935933
Submitted
14 August 2026
Published
15-08-2026

Abstract

Universities have progressively sought to grow their digital learning options for students, using various institutional change processes to encourage (or direct) university teachers to adopt technologies into their teaching practices. Nevertheless, systemic level cultural change can be difficult to achieve in meaningful and sustainable ways. In an Australian university, an organisational change project sought digitalisation of teaching at scale, by directing replacement of traditional lectures with digital options. Ethnographic fieldwork – as the first phase of an activity theory project – reveals how a community of anatomy teachers experienced various conflicts during this change process yet learnt themselves how to co-construct and transform their digital teaching practice. Accordingly, this paper positions teachers as learners in their university workplace and focuses on their agentic actions as they evolve their practice. Occurring over multiple cycles of activity transformation, teacher actions ventured beyond the required change of teaching tool, to build their digital teaching capabilities including designing their own pedagogical models and developing digital technology skills. Some further actions that the teachers took to gain control, namely efficient video production and quality assurance, evolved into system stabilising auxiliary activities which formed ongoing sustaining mechanisms for their digital teaching activity. Field data analysis utilised two activity-theoretical conceptual notions of actions, that of the hierarchical positioning of actions compared to activities, and progressive actions within transformative agency double stimulation (TADS). Analysis also depended upon authentic tracking of the object across historical, transitional, and emerging forms of the teachers’ activity. The anatomy teachers use of agentic actions for changing practice using well-established tools such as video technology has potential implications for improving academic/faculty development in other technology-enhanced learning practices, for example, teacher-agentic approaches to incorporating more complex emerging technologies such as generative AI into teaching activities.

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