Conference Agenda

General introduction

Teaching and teacher education are increasingly situated within complex and shifting professional landscapes shaped by curricular reform, digitalization, societal challenges, and intensifying policy accountability (Kolleck, 2025). These developments are reflected in European policy frameworks such as the OECD Teaching Compass, which positions teachers as key agents of curriculum change within evolving learning ecosystems (OECD, 2024). Research highlights both the pressures and the professional possibilities within this environment, emphasising how teacher agency is shaped through social, organisational, and institutional conditions rather than residing solely in individual dispositions(Vähäsantanen, 2015). At the same time, both student teachers and in-service teachers are required to interpret curriculum while navigating contested policy discourses, professional communities, and institutional demands (Nieveen & Kuiper, 2021). This symposium argues that responding to these challenges requires initial teacher education (ITE) and professional learning contexts to be understood as spaces where cultivating teacher agency and engaging in curriculum-making are mutually constitutive processes.

Drawing on four studies from Finland, Ireland, Estonia, and the Netherlands, this symposium brings together perspectives across ITE and continuing teacher professionalization that are highly relevant to European contexts. Across these four studies, teacher agency is conceptualised as an emergent, relational achievement that develops through participation in professional communities, engagement in designed curriculum-making tasks, and interaction with structural and cultural conditions (see also Pietarinen et al., 2016; Priestley et al., 2015; Soini et al., 2015). The contributions collectively demonstrate that agency is not only an outcome of professional experience but can be deliberately supported through pedagogical and organisational arrangements that position teachers and student teachers as legitimate curriculum makers.

The central question guiding this symposium is: How can teacher education and professional learning be structured to support the development of teacher agency, and how does agency enable teachers to interpret, design, and enact curriculum in meaningful ways?

The symposium is grounded in a socio-cultural understanding of teacher agency as a temporal-relational achievement shaped by teachers’ experiences across time and context. We extend this framework by positioning curriculum making as a key professional practice through which teacher agency becomes visible, contested, and developed (cf. Leijen et al., 2022; Priestley & Philippou, 2018; Yli-Pietilä et al., 2024). Curriculum-making – including designing, adapting, and justifying curricular choices – requires teachers to exercise professional judgment, negotiate constraints, collaborate with others, and envision educational possibilities (Nieveen et al., 2023; Priestley et al., 2021). At the same time, engagement in curriculum-making practices provides concrete opportunities for agency to emerge and strengthen.

Equally important are the institutional and pedagogical arrangements within ITE and professional learning(Oolbekkink-Marchand et al., 2025). The papers illustrate how collaborative inquiry, design-based interventions, supportive professional communities, and boundary-crossing between universities and schools create conditions in which agency can flourish. When teachers and student teachers are encouraged to justify their decisions, engage with professional knowledge, and participate in shared curriculum work, curriculum-making becomes a collective professional responsibility rather than a technical task.

Taken together, the symposium can be understood as empirically and conceptually engaging with the European OECD Teaching Compass (2024), which positions teachers as central agents of curriculum change within complex learning ecosystems. While the Teaching Compass offers a future-oriented policy vision that foregrounds teacher agency, co-agency, and professional identity, the contributions to this symposium provide grounded insight into how such ambitions are realised, negotiated, and sometimes constrained in practice. By examining concrete mechanisms through which agency is cultivated in and through curriculum-making in ITE and professional learning, the symposium enriches current European debates by connecting policy aspirations to the lived realities of teachers and student teachers, and curriculum work.

Paper abstract Teachers’ professional agency is central to their capacity to adapt to educational change, engage in continuous professional learning, and sustain their well-being in increasingly complex work environments. Professional agency comprises teachers’ motivation, beliefs, and strategies for learning at work. Although professional agency has been conceptualized as a relatively stable individual characteristic, growing evidence suggests that it is dynamically shaped by the social and organizational contexts in which teachers work. The aim of this study was to examine how teacher communities shape teachers’ experiences of professional agency over time. This longitudinal study examined how teachers’ experiences of their work community relate to the development of professional agency across a two-year period. The study focuses on four interrelated dimensions of teacher community: collaboration across professional boundaries, shared co-regulation strategies for managing workload, collective efficacy, and the emotional tone of the community as reflected in cynicism toward the teacher community. The three-wave survey data were collected in the context of Finland’s national curriculum reform between 2016 and 2018 and include responses from 1,543 teachers working in 75 comprehensive schools in Finland. The measures demonstrated good construct validity and longitudinal measurement invariance, which enabled robust comparisons across time points. The analytical approach was based on a random intercept cross-lagged panel model, allowing the separation of stable between-person differences from within-person changes over time. This approach provided insight into how fluctuations in teachers’ experiences of their work community are associated with changes in professional agency. The results indicate that shared practices and emotional states within teacher communities are strongly interconnected, yet their associations with professional agency are partly contradictory. Collective efforts to co-regulate workload were found to strengthen teachers’ professional agency over time. However, an increased emphasis on reflective practices appeared to weaken collective efficacy and intensify cynicism toward the community. Both collective efficacy and cynicism showed strong autoregressive effects, suggesting that deviations from individuals’ typical levels tend to persist over time. Importantly, a strong sense of collective efficacy emerged as a protective factor against cynicism and was further reinforced through active boundary-crossing and shared learning beyond the teacher community. The findings highlight the importance of balancing reflective practices with concrete, efficacy-building actions in professional learning and school development. They underscore the need for school leaders and policymakers to intentionally foster collective efficacy and supportive community practices in order to sustain teachers’ professional agency during periods of educational change.

Yli-Pietilä, R., Soini, T., Pietarinen, J., & Pyhältö, K. (2024). Profiles of teacher’s professional agency in the classroom across time. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research.

The research question driving this study is: "How does the Pico Site prepare pre-service teachers in their agency to become curriculum makers through the 'Units of Learning' intervention?" The Pico site (Doyle, O’Grady & Conroy Johnson, 2025) operates at the level of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) and positions the Pre-Service Teacher (PST) and Teacher Educator (TE) as curriculum makers. The study maps Phases 1, 2 & 3 of a three-year design-based research study (Nieveen, van den Akker & Voogt, 2023) offering an intervention called "Units of Learning," (UoL) specifically designed for the purpose of fostering curriculum-making agency (Priestley et al., 2015) and capabilities among PSTs during their ITE programmes in Ireland. Grounded in the concept of emergence (Osberg & Biesta, 2007), the UoL reframes education not as progress toward a fixed telos or the mere accumulation of knowledge, but as an "outward movement" and "expansiveness" (Davis & Sumara, 2008, p. 57). Central to this intervention is curriculum thinking, which Deng (2018) argues supersedes pedagogical reasoning by prioritising the "what" and "why" of teaching over the "how." This approach involves identifying the "elementary" elements of a curriculum to unlock their potential for Bildung—the cultivation of human powers and capacities. Ultimately, this framework suggests that learning is "progressive" because it is "constantly expanding the space of the possible" (Davis & Sumara, 2008, p. 57). Forming a working team of teacher educators, we set out to do preliminary research on how to address this complex challenge through design-based research. Phase 1: Self-Study (August 2021- June 2022) Phase 2: Design a Unit of Learning (August 2022 – June 2024) Phase 3: Evaluation Unit of Learning (September 2025 – April 2026) The significance of this paper lies in four key areas of development within ITE: 1. The Teacher Educator as Pedagogue of Curriculum Design 2. Curriculum as Dynamic Ecosystem 3. Cultivating Agency through Cognitive Dissonance 4. Professional Preparation & Placement as a Catalyst for Curriculum Design This research argues that fostering curriculum-making capacity (Priestley et al. 2021) is a deliberate, transformative process rather than a byproduct of ‘training’. By reframing the curriculum as a dynamic, non-linear ecosystem, the PST at the Pico site can move beyond technical preparation. This approach empowers teacher educators to act as architects of the process to enable PST professional identity to emerge as agential practitioners. These PSTs are equipped to navigate and shape the complex, emergent dynamics of modern education.

Davis, B., & Sumara, D. (2008). Complexity and Education: Inquiries into Learning, Teaching and Research. Deng, Z. (2018). Pedagogical content knowledge reconceived: Bringing curriculum thinking into the conversation on teachers' content knowledge. Doyle, A., et al. (2025). Making the invisible visible: Introducing the Pico site of curriculum making at Initial Teacher Education. Nieveen, N. M., et al. (2023). Curriculum design. Osberg, D., & Biesta, G. (2007). Beyond Presence: Epistemological and pedagogical implications of “strong” emergence. Priestley, M., et al. (2021). Curriculum making: A conceptual framing. Priestley, M., et al. (2015). Teacher agency: An ecological approach.

Teacher agency has been widely explored in empirical research across diverse sociocultural contexts. Most existing studies are qualitative (e.g. Kauppinen et al., 2020; Ukkonen-Mikkola & Varpanen, 2020), offering rich insights into the nature of teacher agency in specific settings. However, empirical studies focusing on designed interventions aimed at supporting teacher agency and evaluating their impact remain scarce. This study aimed to support teacher agency through a collaborative inquiry-based in-service course grounded in the ecological model of teacher agency (Priestley et al., 2015), which conceptualizes agency as a temporal-relational achievement comprising three dimensions: iterational, projective, and practical-evaluative. The course sought to increase teachers’ awareness and activation of all three dimensions. Its design was also informed by previous research emphasizing teacher collaboration, inquiry, and engagement with professional discourses in professional learning settings. We wished to find out how participants experienced learning in this course and to explore the potential impact of the training course on the participants’ agency. We formulated two research questions: (1) How did participants experience learning in this course, and how do these experiences relate to different dimensions of agency? (2) What is the impact of the collaborative inquiry-based in-service teacher training course on school staff’s evaluations related to different dimensions of their professional agency? The study was conducted during a four-month in-service teacher education course in one school in Estonia, involving 57 teachers and school leaders. The course included five face-to-face sessions and intersession individual and collaborative tasks guided by two teacher educators. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected. Data on participants’ learning experiences were collected through course assignments and course feedback, and data on the course’s impact on the agency were collected using two questionnaires. Analysis of group assignments and course feedback indicated that teachers’ learning experiences were related to all three dimensions of agency. Most experiences reflected the practical-evaluative dimension, highlighting the importance of supportive cultural and structural conditions, particularly collaborative culture, openness, and peer learning. Learning experiences were also related to the iterational dimension through engagement with professional literature and dialogue, supporting the development of professional discourse. Third, inquiry activities addressed the projective dimension by linking teachers’ everyday practices to short- and long-term professional goals. Questionnaire data also confirmed that participants’ agency was supported during the collaborative inquiry-based in-service training course.

Kauppinen, M., Kainulainen, J., Hökkä, P., & Vähäsantanen, K. (2020). Professional agency and its features in supporting teachers’ learning during an in-service education programme. European Journal of Teacher Education, 43(3), 384-404. Priestley, M., Biesta, G., & Robinson, S. (2015). Teacher agency: An ecological approach. Bloomsbury Publishing. Ukkonen-Mikkola, T., & Varpanen, J. (2020). Integrated initial and continuing training as a way of developing the professional agency of teachers and student teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 96, 103189.

Introduction Across Europe, expectations of teachers have expanded beyond implementing curricula to actively shaping educational change. This shift appears in international policy, including the OECD Teaching Compass, which positions teachers as key actors in developing future-oriented curricula (OECD, 2024). While such frameworks promote an ambitious view of teacher agency – i.e., teachers’ ability to act purposefully and constructively to direct their professional practice (Priestley et al., 2015) – they say little about how agency is cultivated in initial teacher education (ITE). It remains unclear under what conditions agency is expected to develop, and which mechanisms are assumed or evidenced in ITE practices, including curriculum-making. This paper reports findings from a systematic literature review on how teacher agency can be fostered within ITE. Guided by a socio-cultural perspective, agency is treated as relational, mediated, and situated in social practice (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). From this view, agency develops through participation in professional practices, interactions with others, and engagement with cultural tools, discourses, and institutional structures. Method The review included empirical and conceptual studies that explicitly addressed teacher or professional agency in ITE. Studies were included if they offered a clear conceptualization of agency and located it within educational practices or institutional arrangements relevant to ITE. Following systematic searching and screening across ERIC, Scopus, Web of Science, and PsycINFO, included studies were analysed for conditions and mechanisms linked to agency development and for factors shaping students’ teacher agency. Preliminary results The synthesis identified three interrelated clusters of mechanisms relevant to curriculum-making in ITE. Socio-relational conditions such as trust, dialogic supervision, and shared authority influence whether student teachers are positioned as legitimate participants in curriculum-making. Boundary-crossing practices between universities and schools, often conceptualized as hybrid or third-space arrangements, mediate access to curriculum interpretation and design. Institutional positioning through assessment and accountability shapes whether student teachers are encouraged to justify professional choices and explore alternatives, or steered toward compliance. Discussion The discussion offers a forward-looking reflection on how curriculum-making and teacher agency are increasingly integrated within Dutch ITE and continuing professional development. This highlights growing recognition of teachers as curriculum makers while underscoring the structural and cultural conditions needed to sustain this role. A brief reference to the nationwide NAPL program situates these developments within the broader national landscape. Together, these elements provide a coherent outlook on how the profession is shaping, and being shaped by, emerging conceptions of agency rich curriculum making efforts.

Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? American Journal of Sociology. OECD. (2024). OECD Teaching Compass: Reimagining teachers as agents of curriculum change. OECD Publishing. Priestley, M., Biesta, G., & Robinson, S. (2015). Teacher agency: An ecological approach. Bloomsbury Publishing.