Teacher Agency, Structural Constraints, and Curriculum Reform in Nigerian Secondary Education: A Critical Realist Analysis

This study applies critical realism as a meta-theoretical and methodological framework to analyse the interaction between teacher agency and structural constraints in shaping curriculum reform outcomes in Nigerian secondary education. Critical realism, pioneered by Roy Bhaskar, distinguishes between the real (generative mechanisms), actual (events and processes), and empirical (observable outcomes) domains, providing a framework for understanding how structural conditions generate tendencies that interact with agent choices to produce contingent curriculum outcomes. Teacher agency in curriculum reform, specifically teachers' capacity to interpret, adapt, and enact curriculum change beyond mechanistic compliance, is a theoretically critical but empirically understudied dimension of Nigerian secondary education reform. This study employs a critical realist multi-case design, examining curriculum reform enactment across 15 secondary schools in Abuja (FCT), Kano, and Lagos during the 2022 curriculum review period. Data sources include 90 teacher interviews, 150 hours of classroom observation, curriculum policy documents, and school inspection reports. Retroductive and abductive inference are used to identify generative mechanisms linking structural conditions to curriculum enactment variation. Results identify teacher professional identity, collegial community quality, and principal interpretive leadership as the key agentic mechanisms that mediate structural constraints including resource scarcity, examination pressure, and regulatory rigidity. Schools where all three mechanisms operate positively show curriculum reform enactment quality scores 40 percent higher than schools where all are absent. The study contributes an original Critical Realist Curriculum Reform Model for Nigerian secondary education and recommends that curriculum reform strategies explicitly address mechanism activation conditions rather than focusing solely on resource and regulatory dimensions.

Keywords: teacher agency, curriculum reform, critical realism, secondary education, Nigeria.