Teacher autonomy, agency and innovation in the language of contemporary pedagogical and jurisprudential terminology. A linguistic-pedagogical study

The article examines the concepts of teacher autonomy, agency and innovation from a linguisticpedagogical perspective. The research material was selected with the use of the method of searching the existing documents. The documents included selected encyclopaedic articles and legal texts concerning the teacher and his pedagogical activity. The authors used the theoretical framework of cognitive semantics in the form of conceptual integration theory when analysing the material. Autonomy as a pedagogical phenomenon has a broad and well-established lexical basis in both encyclopaedic and legal texts. The second concept, agency, has a very narrow dictionary and theoretical basis. The use of the last of the category, innovation, is limited to only some authors and their texts. Besides, the issue of innovativeness appears in legal texts sporadically and, as a rule, in relation to the school and not to the teacher. On the basis of the results obtained, it was proposed to treat the title terminological triad as an amalgam, in which the enumerated terms form a unity on the one hand, while on the other hand each of them expresses one aspect of the whole, which shows the multifaceted nature of the teacher’s pedagogical activity.