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), and targets educational imaginaries, that could procure agency to teachers in current digital transformations. 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). The faculty of imagining is marked, on the one hand, by continuous and undetermined creativity, on the other hand, by 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 three separate data sets:

1. An international survey study of teachers’ and students’ in higher educational settings

2. Fifty-two narratives by upper secondary school teachers

3. National survey by upper secondary students

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).

These crossed data sets' findings confront researchers in education with a dilemma that we intend to raise for discussion. The answers are marked by conditions of what is “sayable” and “thinkable” in everyday life of constraints and restrictions. Significantly, the power of teachers’ imagination seems constrained by sedimented layers of past and present while education needs teachers with visions.