Recent changes in academic teacher education have influenced teacher educators’ work, identities, and careers in many ways (Davey, 2013; Hökkä & Eteläpelto, 2014). Ongoing changes have engendered troubled identities, burnouts and even dropouts from the field. This calls for teacher educators to practice active agency and renegotiate their identities to maintain enthusiasm and well-being at work. Despite the growing interest in teacher educators’ professional identity, agency and learning (e.g. Murray & Harrison, 2008) there is still a lack of studies concerning teacher educators’ collective identityand agency in their professional groups and organizations. This is slightly surprising since the teacher educator profession is considered highly co-operational and collaboration based. Thus, this paper presents a study focusing on teacher educators’ collective agency in re-negotiating professional identityamid turbulent work practices. The study illustrates how teacher educators’ professional collective agency and identity can be strengthened and the main prerequisites for this process in the course of an identity coaching programme.

In theoretical discussion, professional agency refers to professionals who act intentionally, exercise control, and have an effect on their work, identity, work environment and professional development (Eteläpelto, Vähäsantanen, Hökkä & Paloniemi, 2013; Harteis & Goller, 2014; Stevenson & Gilliland, 2015). Collective agency refers to what is manifested when a group of people share and pursue a common interest in order to improve their own lives and to affect larger contexts, for example by transforming structures and cultures (e.g. Pantic & Florian 2015). In this paper the understanding of collective agency is based on a subject-centred sociocultural approach, in which both the sociocultural conditions and professional subjects are addressed (Eteläpelto et al., 2013). This implies that professional agency is manifested in and resourced by a relational interaction between social conditions (including certain cultural and material resources and constraints) and individual subjects with their professional identities and competencies. In this approach, the relationship between professional identity, agency, and work practices is further emphasized. Agency is addressed in relation to professional identity by highlighting the need for continuous identity renegotiation amid changing work conditions (Vähäsantanen, 2015). This approach also emphasizes the importance of agency for the development and transformation of work practices and cultures. Therefore, collective agency can be manifested in terms of a group of employees’ collective initiatives to develop new work practices, or their new shared understanding of themselves as a professional group amid external challenges.

In this paper our aim is to elaborate the question about teacher educators’ professional collective agency and identity among a group of teacher educators who had faced major external preassures in their work (e.g. discontinuous employment and increased preassures to publish academic research). We focused particularly on i) How do teacher educators perceive collective professional identity before and during the identity coaching programme and ii) What are the most critical prerequisites in building collective identity and agency during the identity coaching programme. The programme, that included six workshops over the course of six months, aimed to foster the professional identity negotiations of participants by strengthening their agency, allowing them to face current learning challenges at work. The group-based setting included various collaborative and narrative methods with applications of sociometry, sociodrama, paired and group discussions, drawing, and writings (Kalliola & Mahlakaarto, 2011).

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