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Exploring Preservice Teacher Agency Influencing Power Relationships With Teacher Educators: A Multiple Case Study, Steve Hayden

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Teacher agency is the temporal and ecological understanding of a teacher’s capacity to make choices, take principled action, and enact positive change. A teacher’s agency relies on context and is measured on a continuum, with agency contingent on the reciprocal relationship between the individual and the structural environment. Structure influences teachers’ professional practice, but teachers must reciprocally influence power relationships within the structural school context to be successful and active contributors to the education process. Teacher agency is an essential dimension of effective professional practice because of its ability to highlight the required skillset of successful teachers. Because preservice teachers …