International literature on teacher education increasingly highlights the central role of teacher agency—the capacity of educators to act purposefully and reflexively in pedagogical contexts. A vital pathway to developing such agency is structured reflection on one’s own past educational experiences. This process enables future teachers to critically examine the foundations of their beliefs and practices, thereby advancing beyond the passive implementation of external curricula toward autonomous, informed pedagogical decision-making.

While the importance of reflective practice for fostering agency is widely affirmed, a significant implementation gap persists. Teachers often find their personal, emotionally rich teaching experiences isolated from formal theoretical training. This disconnect, wherein experience remains either privatized as anecdote or overshadowed by decontextualized theory, can inhibit the development of a coherent and agential professional identity, limiting transformative classroom engagement.

To address this gap, this study is grounded in Zembylas's theorization of emotion as a socially constituted and politically charged medium—one that actively shapes pedagogical relations and professional identity formation. Within this framework, affect is not a private internal state but a dynamic interface through which personal experience and social structures converge, thereby mediating the very construction of teacher agency. Agency, accordingly, is conceptualized not as a static attribute but as an emergent capacity that is continually realized and negotiated through reflective, affective engagement with one’s lived history and the normative demands of teaching.

Building upon this affective perspective, the study further draws on the tripartite ecological model of agency—comprising iterational (past-oriented), projective (future-oriented), and practical-evaluative (present-oriented) dimensions—as advanced by Emirbayer & Mische and applied in educational research by Biesta et al. This framework accordingly guides the investigation towards how agency is manifested and developed across its three dimensions through participation in the Feelinks game and through what core affective-pedagogical mechanisms such development is activated and sustained. The research ultimately aims to elucidate how experiential, affectively mediated learning can be translated into the cultivation of more purposeful, reflexive, and empowered teacher agency.

To translate this integrated theoretical perspective into practice, this study employs Feelinks, a creative purpose-designed emotion-themed board game, as an intervention tool. The game operationalizes the interplay between affect and agency by engaging participants around four thematic scenarios: 1) Authority, Rules, and Public Life; 2) Learning, Confidence, and Growth; 3) Peer Relationships: Bullying and Friendship; and 4) Adolescence, Sex/Gender, and Love. Each scenario elicits emotional responses across the positive-negative-neutral spectrum, establishing a structured yet open environment for affective exploration.

Through gameplay, Feelinks functions as a mechanism for affective mobilization, enabling teachers to safely embody and examine the emotional dimensions of educational situations. The process facilitates what can be termed an "experience-recognition-agency" loop: personal emotional reactions (experience) are named and shared within the group (recognition), which in turn supports teachers in consciously envisioning how such affective awareness could inform their future teaching practice (agency). Crucially, this process engages not only positive emotions like joy and solidarity but also negotiates negative and neutral affects—such as anxiety or ambivalence—transforming them from private impediments into shared subjects of professional inquiry.

Analytically, the study investigates how gameplay generates distinct affective-discursive patterns and how these patterns activate and interconnect the iterational, projective, and practical-evaluative dimensions of teacher agency. By grounding the intervention in Zembylas’s affective theory and the tripartite agency model, the research aims to foster an embodied, critical, and reflective teacher agency, simultaneously enhancing pedagogical participation and co-constructing more reflexive and supportive learning environments.

This study adopts a qualitative research design to investigate how emotion serves as a medium for activating teacher agency. The empirical data are derived from semi-structured written reports completed by 28 normal university students across 5 different majors following their participation in the Feelinks board game during university sessions, supplemented by in-depth interviews with 6 selected student participants. The primary data sources consist of these written reflections and audio-recorded interview transcripts. All data were collected with informed consent; interviews were transcribed verbatim for detailed analysis. The written reports provided immediate, structured feedback on the participants’ experiential engagement with the game. Thematic analysis was conducted to examine the processes through which emotion mediates the development of teacher agency. The analysis proceeded through inductive, data-driven coding to identify recurring patterns and salient themes related to emotional resonance, reflective insight, and the construction of agentic pedagogical identity within the participants’ accounts.

This study is expected to demonstrate that the Feelinks intervention provides a viable pathway to bridge the persistent gap between teachers’ personal emotional histories and their professional agency. Rather than viewing reflection as a primarily cognitive process, the outcomes will likely illustrate how structured affective engagement can serve as a powerful catalyst for professional development. It is anticipated that the research will reveal the "experience-recognition-agency" mechanism in action, showing how the collective interpretation of emotions within gameplay transforms isolated personal feelings into shared professional insights. The findings are expected to contribute an expanded, more nuanced understanding of teacher agency—one that is deeply interwoven with affective experience. Specifically, the study may illuminate how the iterational, projective, and practical-evaluative dimensions of agency are activated through emotional resonance and narrative recalibration. This could challenge existing models of reflective practice by positioning emotion not as a peripheral concern, but as central to the formation of a purposeful and resilient professional identity. Ultimately, the research aims to generate a framework for affective pedagogical design in teacher education. The anticipated results advocate for the intentional creation of curricular spaces where emotion is legitimized as a source of professional knowledge. By documenting how teachers convert emotional insight into pedagogical resourcefulness, the study underscores the transformative potential of aligning felt experience with professional action.

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