Conference Agenda

‘The opportunity to change things is available to all those who care about lifelong learning, equal access, and opening academia to new light, new processes, and new ideas. These are the challenges of teaching for the new century.’ (Hanna, 2002a: 31)

This paper is part of the research project The voice of students as the root of teacher training (PPRO-HUM619-G-2023), funded by the University of Malaga. Despite numerous studies aimed at improving initial teacher training, there is little research that places the voice of university students at the centre of reflection and the production of pedagogical knowledge. This project is based on the premise that students should not be considered solely as recipients of training, but as active subjects capable of critically interpreting their experiences and contributing significantly to the construction of knowledge (Leite, Márquez, Calvo, Fernández, 2020).

For fifteen years, the PROCIE research group has developed training proposals aimed at broadening the scope of student participation, with a particular emphasis on volunteering in educational centres as a space for experiential learning. Within the framework of this project, the focus is on the narratives that students construct around their experiences in the university classroom, understood as opportunities for the development of a reflective, critical and committed approach to teaching (Leite et al, 2024).

Teacher training in the 21st century faces multiple challenges arising from social, cultural and educational changes, as well as from the tensions between traditional teaching models and more democratic and participatory approaches. In this context, it is necessary to rethink fundamental questions: how is university teacher training conceived? What kind of autonomy and responsibility is promoted in students? How do previous school experiences influence the construction of professional teaching identity? And how can they be recovered and deconstructed within the university space?

The concept of student voice adopted in this research transcends merely consultative or instrumental approaches. Following Fielding (2011), it is understood as a dialogical, relational, and ethical process that requires genuine openness and conscious reciprocity among participants. From this perspective, the voice of students is not limited to the expression of opinions, but implies recognition of their complexity, their capacity for agency, and their transformative potential. We also highlight bell hooks' (2021) project ‘dialogue with critical pedagogy’, which points out how many university students have been socialised in educational models that penalise active participation and critical thinking, favouring passive positions towards knowledge.

The contributions of Susinos and Ceballos (2012) reinforce the idea that student participation must permeate both the curriculum and the spaces of management and decision-making, understanding shared deliberation as an educational and democratic commitment. From this theoretical framework, the research seeks to highlight how the creation of narrative and dialogical spaces favours processes of re-signification of the educational experience and contributes to the construction of more reflective teaching identities. Along the same lines, Rudduck and Flutter (2007), Ceballos and Susinos (2014), and Saiz-Linares, Ceballos-López, and Susinos-Rada (2019) highlight the importance of student participation in processes of organisational change and curricular structures in institutions. Students are essential if we want to understand the environments and the people who inhabit them (Kincheloe, 2007) in order to build democratic and inclusive spaces.

Leadership is widely acknowledged as central to school improvement (Louis et al., 2010), yet within Initial Teacher Education (ITE) it is frequently introduced late, implicitly, or through abstract frameworks, standards, and competency models. Such approaches risk positioning leadership as a distant, hierarchical role rather than a formative professional practice embedded in the everyday work of teaching (Acquaro, 2019; Aliu & Kaçaniku, 2023). In contemporary schooling contexts characterised by ethical complexity, organisational constraint, and workforce instability, this framing limits early career teachers’ capacity to exercise judgment, agency, and relational responsibility.

This paper investigates a distinctive pedagogical design in which practising school leaders (Assistant Principals, Leading Teachers, and Coordinators) serve as university tutors in a final-semester Master of Teaching subject. Rather than teaching leadership as content alone, these tutors embody leadership through narrative, decision-making, and relational engagement in the university classroom. The study asks:

How is leadership literacy enacted and learned when leadership is modelled, witnessed, and interrogated in situ by practising school leaders within Initial Teacher Education?

We conceptualise leadership literacy as an educative process rather than a technical skillset. Leadership literacy is understood as the cultivation of professional judgment, ethical orientation, relational sensibility, and systems understanding capacities that enable teachers to respond thoughtfully to the demands of schooling rather than merely comply with prescribed roles or standards (Samson & Acquaro, 2024; Samson & Acquaro, 2025).

The theoretical framework draws on Gert Biesta’s critique of “learnification” and his articulation of education as encompassing qualification, socialisation, and subjectification (Biesta, 2010, 2022). While leadership education in ITE often prioritises qualification (knowledge of roles, policies, and structures) and socialisation (alignment with professional norms), this paper foregrounds subjectification: the emergence of the professional as an ethically responsive subject capable of judgment and action.

From this perspective, leadership is not something to be mastered after competence is achieved, but a way of coming into presence as a professional. Leadership literacy becomes a form of knowing-in-action, where understanding develops through engagement with uncertainty, moral tension, and relational responsibility. Biesta’s notion of world-centred education further informs this framing by positioning education as an encounter with the world as it is complex, constrained, and demanding of thoughtful response (Biesta, 2022). Applied to leadership education, this requires engagement with the lived realities of schools rather than idealised or procedural models of leadership.

Within this framework, the presence of school leaders as tutors, functions as a pedagogical catalyst. Their narratives of constraint, ethical trade-offs, and incomplete solutions interrupt students’ assumptions about leadership as managerial, distant, or aspirational. Leadership literacy, in this sense, is enacted through encounter: students witness leadership being lived, questioned, and negotiated, and are invited to consider their own emerging professional identities in relation to these practices.

By bringing together leadership identity formation and embodied pedagogy, this paper responds directly to the ECER 2026 theme Knowing and Acting. It positions leadership literacy as a site where knowing emerges through acting, and where research can illuminate new possibilities for professional formation under changing educational conditions.

Teacher educations (to acknowledge their differences I use the plural) are situated in a complex web with relations to both schools, the state and higher education. Over time, teacher educations are given different priorities, supposed to deal with both stability and change (Hallsén, 2013, p. 12), however, it is agreed that “The central task of teacher education is to develop professionals in education.” (Tatoo, 2021, p. 20). Still, definitions of professionals in education and how it is to be acquired differ. This comparative study explores how Swedish teacher students in 2002 and 2026 perceive aspects of teacher autonomy and governance, or discourses of professionalism (Evetts, 2009) during training. Swedish teacher students are an interesting case, since in Sweden teacher educations are the most regulated university programs (SUHF, 2021), while there is a policy intention to increase the scientific foundation for teacher educations (Hallsén, 2026) and raise professional status for teachers (Blomgren & Waks, 2015). Hallsén (2026) regards the somewhat contradictory policy ideas of increased regulations and increased focus on teachers as professionals, a “professional paradox”.

The current study is part of a larger project on teacher educations as assemblages financed by the Swedish Research Council. This study is carried out as a survey to approximately 650 teacher students at different teacher education programs in three universities during a period where teacher educations have contradictory policy demands and are both debated and to be reformed. We compare our findings to a study from 2002 (Calander et al, 2003) which gives us possibilities to compare changes in student perceptions of autonomy and governance in a period where the restructuring from the 1990s including marketization and freedom of choice have been institutionalized in the Swedish educational landscape. It also makes comparisons over teacher education programs and universities possible.

To be able to study teacher students’ perceptions of autonomy and governance this paper draws on Evetts’ (2009) concepts of organizational and occupational professionalism. These ideal types are based on different ways of organizing and legitimizing work, where occupational professionalism, on the one hand, is characterized by collegial authority, discretion, occupational control, trust and professional ethics, hence “operationalized by practitioners themselves, guided by codes of professional ethics monitored by professional institutes and associations” (Evetts, 2009, p. 248). Organizational professionalism, on the other hand, is characterized by managers’ discourse of control, relational-legal forms of authority, standardized procedures, hierarchical structures of authority and managerialism (Evetts, 2008, 2009). The discourse of professionalism can be regarded a “powerful tool to “analyze occupational change and social control at macro, meso and micro levels and in a wide range of occupations in very different work, organizational and employment relations, contexts and conditions” (Evetts, 2008 p. 20). Here, Evetts is used to analyze how perceptions of professionalism is manifested during training. Thereby, this comparative study aims to contribute to knowledge of professionalism in education, more specifically how teacher students during training embrace the professional paradox of autonomy and governance (Hallsén, 2026) and how it has changed over time. The following research questions are posed:

1. How do teacher students perceive teachers’ work in terms of intensified regulatory governance and claims of professional autonomy, and how has this perception been reconfigured between 2002 and 2026?
2. To what extent do teacher educations function as a site for the manifestation of varieties of professionalism across institutional and temporal contexts?

Teacher students are the most common study object in studies of Nordic teacher education (Forsström & Munthe, 2023), however there are less studies where teacher students’ voices are heard in relation to professionalism, which this study takes on. The next section accounts for methods used.

Background: Teacher autonomy has long been contested in public discourse and policy. While reforms encourage teachers to innovate through professional judgement and flexible pedagogy, in everyday primary and secondary school practice “autonomy on paper” does not necessarily become autonomous action. Drawing on Chinese school contexts, this study addresses a governance paradox: teachers often have some room for discretion, yet exercising it depends on relational coordination within teams and hierarchical structures. When coordination fails, professional judgement can be reclassified as non-compliance, non-cooperation, or even occupational risk (Maylone et al., 2011).

Theoretical framing: The paper distinguishes two dimensions of autonomy: (1) autonomy as an institutional space of possibility—formal decision rights embedded in policy texts, school rules, and routines; and (2) autonomy as practical action capacity—the ability and willingness to translate judgement into situated action (Lin & Gao, 2023). Given that collaboration is central in autonomy research (Çolak, 2024), the study adopts a relational autonomy perspective, viewing autonomy not as an individual right or trait, but as a professional capability embedded in organisational relationship networks (Nce & Tikkanen, 2025). In highly structured, team-based, performance-oriented environments, the key question shifts from “Do I have decision-making authority?” to “Can my judgement be understood, supported, and recognised by others?” Autonomy thus becomes a form of relational competence requiring interpersonal and social scaffolding to be enacted (Mackenzie, 2021).

Questions：(RQ1) How do teachers understand the autonomy space afforded by school rules and daily routines? (RQ2) Under what relational and governance conditions are formal autonomy spaces enacted or deliberately suspended? (RQ3) What strategies do teachers develop between professional judgement and collective expectations, and what are their governance implications?

Method: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 Chinese primary and secondary school teachers, selected via purposive maximum-variation sampling (region, school type, governance model, and experience). To strengthen empirical leverage and reduce generic responses, interviews centred on critical incidents: teachers recounted episodes in which they considered deviating from routine practices (e.g., pacing, test drilling, lesson designs), what they did or avoided doing, and how colleagues and leaders responded. Probing focused on interaction sequences, organisational cues (rules, targets, performance indicators), and perceived risks and safeguards. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and anonymised. Data were analysed through thematic analysis, with inductive coding organised around institutional space, relational constraints, and agentic negotiation. Ethical procedures included informed consent and careful anonymisation to minimise occupational risk.

Findings: First,teachers experience formal pedagogical choice as fragile and contingent on relational and governance conditions (team climate, consensus, leadership signals, and performance considerations), so the same act can be read as either professional initiative or disruption. Second, practice-based judgements that challenge unified pacing or intensive drilling are easily reframed as organisational deviance (e.g., “non-execution”), indicating weak institutional mechanisms for distinguishing legitimate discretion from problematic deviation and thereby encouraging self-censorship. Third, teachers rely on relational strategies—low-visibility adjustment, alliance building, and results-based legitimation—to sustain limited action space, but these strategies may also routinise a risk-avoidant form of autonomy.

Contribution: The study shows how autonomy is reshaped through governance and relational networks into an action capacity that can be sustained—or compressed—by organisational relations. It argues that when “blending in” becomes an institutionalised expectation, autonomy is evaluated less by professional reasonableness than by collective acceptability. The findings suggest that formal empowerment alone is insufficient; schools need institutionalised mechanisms for deliberation, error tolerance, and managing professional disagreement, so professional judgement is not continually translated into relational risk. Although situated in China, the governance tension is transferable to other contexts where collaboration and performance accountability coexist.