International policy agenda has long demanded Teacher Education to train student teachers on taking responsibility for their professional development and remaining up-to-date in how to support their pupils’ learning [1]. Such claim has never been so relevant as in our current society due to the fast-paced digitalization of education [2], increasing demands from educational reforms [3], and pupils with various backgrounds (i.e. different cultural, academic, and socio-emotional) [4]. On top of that, the Covid-19 pandemic demanded constantly new sets of teaching methodological approaches over the past year [5] and accelerated the coming trend of new generations of students, who live in a digital culture in the 21^st century society [2].

This contextual background requests high quality teacher professional training, not only for the beginning of teachers’ careers, but for a constant lifelong journey [6]. Teacher Education should support student teachers’ sustainable and continuous professional development to enable them to cope with work challenges throughout their careers [7]. For that purpose, authors [7, 8] state that fostering student teacher professional agency (STPA) can be a powerful way to support such challenging aims.

We adopt the ecological perspective of agency, assuming that the engagement of actors is a practice to be achieved, rather than an intrinsic trait, and it occurs in “temporal-relational contexts-for-action” [9]. In the educational context, student teacher´s active learning can be understood with the holistic concept: STPA. STPA means the capacity of managing one’s own process of learning – individually and through social interactions [7]. STPA is highly relational, context-dependent and includes three interrelated elements: motivation to learn, efficacy beliefs about learning, and active learning strategies [6, 7, 8].

The fact that STPA is context dependent and social-oriented calls educators to reflect about this topic from a cross-cultural perspective. Building on the current studies from Finnish perspective [6, 7, 8], I will widen the STPA viewpoint by including the perspective of another context: Brazil. Therefore, I will investigate how distinct Teacher Education programs [10] and their learning environments [7] can differentially model STPA. Although Brazil and Finland represent contrasting realities, they have been developing educational partnerships [11]. For instance, Finland has become a strong teacher education exporter since its educational miracle, and teachers from many countries, including Brazil [11], come to Finland to learn. However, social, political, and economic national environments are not exportable and if not considered, one cannot assure the efficiency of such education exchange investments. Hence the relevance of contextual understanding of Teacher Education programs is to plan interventions sensitive and oriented to particular needs of students who might come to Finland to learn, but their education system poses a different reality. We start from the premise that each context calls student teachers to develop different STPA’s elements over time.

To illustrate such hypothesis, we believe that the more coherence (linkage) between theory and practice the Teacher Education curriculum provides for student teachers, the more practical their professional competences will be [12]. Such “realistic” training enables students to better assimilate their learning in order to navigate the school environment, especially the classroom work in a daily basis [12]. Consequently, it will also strengthen STPA. On the other hand, the lack of possibility to align students’ professional knowledge to their future concrete work is probable to weaken or challenge their way of self-monitoring their progressive learning during Teacher Education. This might bring frustrations and demotivation towards professional development. Additionally, there is evidence that the learning environment of Teacher Education can impact on STPA [13]. Especially the types of social interactions and atmosphere between teacher educators and students, and the pedagogical practices afforded during Teacher Education [7].

Our research investigates how STPA develops in two universities, one in Finland and one in Brazil, over 3 years, correlated with students’ perceptions of Teacher Education (TE) curriculum and learning environment. We are using quantitative methods and analyzing longitudinal data from both universities [14] to identify the developmental pathways of STPA over time. This paper reports the pilot test of the study measurement in Brazil. The scales will be used for data collection over the longitudinal and cross-cultural studies. They needed to be pilot tested to verify their psychometric properties only in Brazil, because they were previously validated in the Finnish context [7]. The questionnaire was compound by three scales. 1. Student Teacher Professional Agency in the Classroom scale (STPA) with the subscales: collaborative learning and transformative practice (CLE, 8 items, α: .91), reflection in classroom (REF, 5 items, α: .80), competence (COM, 5 items, α: .93), and modeling (MOD, 2 items, α: .82). 2. Teacher Education Coherence scale (TEC) with the subscales: linkage to practice (LP, 10 items, α: .91), using theory (UT, 7 items, α: .89), coherence between parts of the program (CPP, 5 items, α: .87), coherence between courses (CC, 10 items, α: .85), and connecting field experiences with courses (CCF, 4 items, α: .64). And 3. Learning Environment scale (LE) with the subscales support (SUP, 3 items, α: .77), equality (EQU, 2 items, α: .77), climate (CLI, 2 items, α: .50), and recognition (REC, 2 items, α: .85). The participants of the pilot study were 97 first- and second-year student teachers (82% female, 89% in the 2nd year of TE) from the State University of Ceará (UECE), Brazil. The students were invited during their lectures to answer the online questionnaire voluntarily in a separate computer laboratory within the premises of the University. The data collection occurred in July 2019 and had the support of the educators from the Faculty of Education. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) models were estimated using an MLR and MLM procedures, which produce maximum likelihood estimates with standard errors and χ² test statistics that are robust to nonnormality [15]. The goodness-of-fit of the estimated standardized model were also evaluated [15]. Additionally, a network model used an iterative process to compute a layout in which the length of the edges depends on the absolute weight of these edges [15, 16]. The statistical softwares used for the quantitative analysis were SPSS, Mplus, and R-package (qgraph).

Initial CFA analysis presented the same latent structures for the STPA, TEC, and the LE scales found in the Finnish studies [7]. Path analysis investigated the interrelationships between them. Findings showed that TEC-CCF and LE together explain 36% of the total STPA variance (model fit: x2=48.68, p=.48, RMSEA=.00, CFI=1.0, TLI=1.0, SRMR=.04). This replicates the previous Finnish findings regarding how student teachers intentionally benefit from a collaborative environment for their learning [7]. The results further integrate in the model how the strong linkage between what students learn in the courses and what they experience in the field work contribute significantly for them to develop professional competences over their initial years of TE. Additionally, this work reports an innovative analysis based on the positive and negative correlations of each item of the questionnaire. Findings showed how TEC, STPA, and LE items spread around each other depending on the strength of their positive or negative relationships. The generated network of correlated items revealed that students attribute to the core process of developing STPA a strong Teacher Education Coherence. For instance, the extent to which they observe teachers using the same theories, strategies, and techniques they were learning in campus courses in their fieldwork is strongly correlated to their experiences of reading, analyzing, and discussing educational theory specific to their subject matter; and both supported students’ competence to analyse their professional practice as a whole and to feel more and more successful in their teaching. Even though this type of network analysis is an incipient procedure to account for interrelationships between items, it has strong potential to identify and follow-up pragmatic links between environmental factors and professional development. Based on the results of this pilot study, the measurement was improved for the next research stages.

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