Development of teacher agency by student teachers: An ecological perspective

In recent years, much attention has been paid to teacher agency. Existing research into teacher agency from sociocultural approaches offers insight into how subject-specific agency is achieved in interaction with the situation and develops over time. However, it still offers few concrete tools for supporting the development of this amongst teachers. In this study we will first introduce the characteristics of an integrative ecological framework to understand and support subject-specific teacher agency. We then test this framework in an empirical study amongst student biology teachers whose development of their repertoire in relation to their goals and affordances has been followed for over a year. Results show that the student teachers develop their teacher agency step by step on different dimensions (subject matter. content type and educational learning process), thereby achieving (more) goals. This study shows that an integrative framework is helpful in both understanding and supporting subject-specific teacher agency development.