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As a geography teacher educator, I’ve always been intrigued by how young students manage to master such a complex profession. This curiosity led to my PhD research on the professional development of future geography teachers. Teacher educators play a key role in this development: they teach subject and pedagogy courses, provide feedback, and assess teaching practice. Recognising this, we focused specifically on teacher educators in the Netherlands. Central to this study were the challenges teams of educators face when designing and enacting the subject pedagogy curriculum, and whether they experienced agency in doing so.

Agency matters because teacher educators are the experts who best understand their students’ development and learning needs. When they experience agency, they are more likely to design curricula that align with their students’ developmental phase, contributing to high-quality geography teaching.

Collective agency

Since curriculum-making requires team effort, our study focused on collective agency (Hökkä et al., 2017), defined as the extent to which teams of teacher educators can exert influence and make choices within their professional context. Whether they perceive this agency depends on both personal capacities and contextual factors (Priestley et al., 2015). A context can be enabling – offering opportunities for learning and development – or restrictive, limiting autonomy and growth. Factors such as team identity, institutional positioning, available resources and the physical environment all influence their perceived collective agency.

We studied the collective agency of three teams of geography teacher educators through focus groups of four to five educators. These sessions encouraged reflection on practical issues, revealing both personal capacities and curriculum contexts. From the data, we identified three key challenges:

Challenge 1: Pacing the curriculum to students’ needs
All three teams found it challenging to align the curriculum with students’ development. However, they managed this well by maintaining close contact with students – during classes, in open learning spaces and on field trips. This helped them understand students’ needs and adjust the curriculum accordingly. Still, educators acknowledged that some theory might not make immediate sense: ‘It’s also just a journey they have to go through. Before they stand in front of a class, it’s good if they’ve heard things first and then gained some experience.’

Challenge 2: Gaining insight into school-based internships
A second challenge was the gap between internship schools and the institutions. Educators felt less agency here, mainly because they weren’t assigned to visit classrooms. They regretted this, as one educator noted: ‘You should also be able to see it in action on a Thursday morning.’ To bridge this gap, teams gave students specific tasks for their internships and discussed these experiences during subject pedagogy courses.

Challenge 3: The divide between general and subject-specific pedagogy
The third challenge was the growing divide between general pedagogy and subject-specific pedagogy. Although educators saw these as intertwined, top-down curricular changes in Dutch teacher education seemed to increase the separation. This was concerning, as one educator explained: ‘In practice, every issue they face, every question they bring … is often a combination of all those things: group processes, subject matter, and subject pedagogy.’ Despite their efforts, educators couldn’t influence or adjust these changes, leaving them feeling overlooked and frustrated – sometimes leading to pocket veto or resistance.

In conclusion, the teams experienced agency differently across the three challenges. Yet in all cases, they strongly identified as geography educators and worked closely together. However, they were unable to structurally address their concerns or influence institutional policy. Instead, they turned to their students, trying to resolve challenges within their own courses and interactions.

‘Collective agency can be strengthened through a shared vision on subject pedagogy and increased collaboration within institutions.’

We believe that collective agency can be strengthened through a shared vision on subject pedagogy and increased collaboration within institutions. While the teams functioned well internally, their vision on subject pedagogy often remained implicit. Making this vision explicit could reinforce their collective identity and agency. Moreover, collaborating with colleagues outside their teams could help them address broader institutional issues, such as curricular changes.

Reflecting on this study, we conclude that teacher educators’ collective agency is likely to contribute to higher job satisfaction, a stronger subject pedagogy curriculum, and – most importantly – motivated and inspired future geography teachers.

This blog post is based on the article ‘’ by Eefje Smit, Tine Béneker and Hanneke Tuithof, published in the Curriculum Journal.

References

Hökkä, P., Vähäsantanen, K., & Mahlakaarto, S. (2017). Teacher educators’ collective professional agency and identity: Transforming marginality to strength. Teaching and Teacher Education, 63, 36–46.

Priestley, M., Biesta, G., & Robinson, S. (2015). Teacher agency: An ecological approach. Bloomsbury Academic.