Acting as accountable authors: Creating interactional spaces for agency work in teacher education

In this paper, relying on the sociocultural framework of learning, we report on the results of an ethnographically-grounded investigation of agency work among nine pre-service teachers: The main objective is to determine how agency emerges and is constructed in situated discourse practices within the context of a teacher education program embedded in the collective inquiry approach. Our study identifies the forms of agency that emerged in the collective discussions of the classroom community, evidencing pre-service teachers’ transformative agency, relational agency and epistemic agency. This study also shows that the negotiation and framing of agency, and acting as accountable authors, involves changes in teacher–student positions, such as crossing and transforming traditional expert-novice boundaries, as well as recognizing and crediting this crossing of boundaries. The methods and conditions for supporting students’ agency work in teacher education are discussed.

► As our results show, the negotiation and framing of agency, and acting as an accountable author, involve changes in the positions of students and teachers, such as, crossing and transforming traditional expert-novice boundaries, as well as recognizing and crediting this boundary crossing. ► On the basis of our study, we suggest that when framing and supporting students’ accountability, teachers should withdraw themselves from controlling and commanding the learning sessions, but instead, connect, reciprocate, and distribute the responsibility for activities in the learning community. ► Our analyses demonstrate that when teacher educators create interactional spaces for breaking away from the traditional ‘taken-for-granted’ patterns of activities (Engeström, 2005b), pre-service teachers are able to gain what Virkkunen (2006) has called transformative agency. That is, they are able to take initiatives to transform teacher–student positions and change the course of activities. ► Our study illuminates how agency work is distributed across people, tools, and environments. ► Here, agency work emerged in interactional spaces containing the pre-service teachers, educators, the surrounding field of others, and the subject discipline(s) embedded in a particular cultural context including its tools and practices. ► Thus, agency work is, embedded in social groups and emerges in collaborative networks.