Sustaining Teacher Agency in Times of Crisis: A Longitudinal Study of Czech Teachers in Multilingual Classrooms

The growing linguistic diversity of European classrooms, intensified by geopolitical disruptions such as the war in Ukraine, has created pressing challenges for teachers. Yet little is known about how educators sustain their professional identity and agency in these rapidly shifting contexts. This longitudinal qualitative study follows three in-service compulsory school teachers of Czech as a second language through interviews conducted in 2021, 2022, and 2024. Drawing on an ecological framework and the theory of possible teacher selves, the analysis traces how teachers negotiated contextual constraints, mobilized personal resources, and responded to fluctuating institutional supports. Findings show that while teachers took on extensive pedagogical and affective labor to compensate for systemic gaps, such reliance on personal commitment was unsustainable. The study advances understanding of teacher agency in multilingual education and demonstrates that the sustainability of teacher professionalism depends on the development of collective and systemic support structures.