Exploring teacher retention in Denmark as an entangled phenomenon: unpacking variations within and across municipalities

Abstract

Drawing on agential realism and critical cultural geography, this article sets out to explore teacher retention in Denmark as an entangled phenomenon with particular focus on unpacking variations in retention rates within and across municipalities and on gaining insights into temporal, spatial, social and political entanglements. With registry data from Statistics Denmark showing that teacher retention rates not only vary across but also within municipal borders, as well as fluctuating over time, we explore retention in three case municipalities selected to maximise inter-case variation. These cases highlight the importance of taking due account of the situational complexity that characterises teacher retention, which thus constitutes a central focus of the article. The study points to how a range of intra-acting agencies enact significant variations in teacher retention both across and within municipalities. For example, teacher numbers declined markedly (albeit unevenly across municipalities), entangled with falling birth rates, changing settlement patterns, and population density—processes that, in some municipalities, were counteracted by local urban planning initiatives, thereby unsettling understandings of location as fixed. Other intra-acting agencies, such as school mergers and economic conditions, further contributed to the production of uneven conditions for teacher retention within and across the three municipalities.