Teachers’ everyday professional lives changed over a night during the pandemic, leading to an unprecedented pace in implementing digital resources in education. As such, the goal formulated by Swedish critical agencies in the Skoldigiplan (2019) was almost attained one year after with the shut-down of Swedish upper secondary schools and higher education in 2020. This study is motivated by the absence of professional agency that has been observable in teachers’ changing practices pre-, present, and post-COVID19 (Haglind & Lindberg, forthcoming). Organizational structures and available technology have to a large extent dictated the rules for the transition to remote teaching and learning, without reliance on those who retain the knowledge about core areas, values, and intricate webs of relationships, that need to be maintained in times of crisis, to preserve learning outcomes.

This study targets the teachers’ imaginaries, their visions about the future of education to give them agency in the current digital transformation. In particular, social imaginaries have been widely used as both a theory and a method to observe human capacity to bring new forms of being and doing into life through the power of thought and formulation (Chassay 2010; Jasanoff & Kim 2015; Jodelet 1989). Conceptualizing social imaginaries have been marked, on the one hand, by the continuous and undetermined creativity, as well as unlimited possibilities, that future-oriented imagination offers, as SF-literature bears witness to. On the other hand, it has been shaped by the constraints, limitations that history, culture, and social structures force upon humans (Castoriadis & Ricoeur 2016. Leblanc 1994).

To shed light on how teachers’ professional agency can be empowered in times of uncertainties and social-technological change, we have collected qualitative answers from both teachers and students in the following three separate data sets:

1. An international survey study of teachers’ and students’ in higher educational settings focused on their psychological experiences transition to remote teaching.

2. Fifty-two narratives by upper secondary school teachers about their chronological experience transition to remote teaching.

3. One thousand seven hundred survey answers by upper secondary students and their evaluation of the transition to remote teaching.

Parts of these data sets' answers are future-oriented, pointing to how teachers and students imagine tomorrow's educational reality. This information is analyzed in the study as categories of seeds of what “could be” if seriously considered and brought into the light, according to Kozubaev et al. (2020). However, these crossed data sets' findings confront researchers in education with a dilemma that we intend to raise for discussion. The answers, which can be seen as dynamic interfaces between subject and world (Chassay 2010), are marked by conditions of what is “sayable” and “thinkable” in everyday life of constraints and restrictions. Significantly, the power of teachers’ imagination is apparently constrained by existing and pre-existing representations of the world. In the dialectical movement between innovative power and the power of the sedimented layers of past and present, the latter seems to dominate, while education needs teachers with visions.