This study focuses on the different ways in which teachers relatetheir situational agency and professional assignment to the nationalcurriculum content and curriculum dilemmas. It builds theoreticallyon transactional realism and empirically on analyses of interviewswith teachers, exploring the nature of teacher agency during theenactment of a new Swedish curriculum reform. To uphold a dualperspective of teachers’ relation to the curriculum as bothcollectively and individually experienced and as both an ideal andrealistic–practical relation, we term the future as ‘projectiveexperiences’, the presence as ‘practical-evaluative experiences’ andthe past ‘iterational experiences’ in relation to agency. Especially,we are interested in the ‘what’ in the curriculum – what theteachers find intriguing, important or impossible and what affectshow they relate to the curriculum as part of the multidimensionalstructures influencing their agency. This approach reveals that thecrucial issue of teacher agency is related to the policy discourse onknowledge and equity as standards and the uniformity ofassessment and its pedagogical consequences.