General introduction

Teaching and teacher education are increasingly situated within complex and shifting professional landscapes shaped by curricular reform, digitalization, societal challenges, and intensifying policy accountability (Kolleck, 2025). These developments are reflected in European policy frameworks such as the OECD Teaching Compass, which positions teachers as key agents of curriculum change within evolving learning ecosystems (OECD, 2024). Research highlights both the pressures and the professional possibilities within this environment, emphasising how teacher agency is shaped through social, organisational, and institutional conditions rather than residing solely in individual dispositions(Vähäsantanen, 2015). At the same time, both student teachers and in-service teachers are required to interpret curriculum while navigating contested policy discourses, professional communities, and institutional demands (Nieveen & Kuiper, 2021). This symposium argues that responding to these challenges requires initial teacher education (ITE) and professional learning contexts to be understood as spaces where cultivating teacher agency and engaging in curriculum-making are mutually constitutive processes.

Drawing on four studies from Finland, Ireland, Estonia, and the Netherlands, this symposium brings together perspectives across ITE and continuing teacher professionalization that are highly relevant to European contexts. Across these four studies, teacher agency is conceptualised as an emergent, relational achievement that develops through participation in professional communities, engagement in designed curriculum-making tasks, and interaction with structural and cultural conditions (see also Pietarinen et al., 2016; Priestley et al., 2015; Soini et al., 2015). The contributions collectively demonstrate that agency is not only an outcome of professional experience but can be deliberately supported through pedagogical and organisational arrangements that position teachers and student teachers as legitimate curriculum makers.

The central question guiding this symposium is: How can teacher education and professional learning be structured to support the development of teacher agency, and how does agency enable teachers to interpret, design, and enact curriculum in meaningful ways?

The symposium is grounded in a socio-cultural understanding of teacher agency as a temporal-relational achievement shaped by teachers’ experiences across time and context. We extend this framework by positioning curriculum making as a key professional practice through which teacher agency becomes visible, contested, and developed (cf. Leijen et al., 2022; Priestley & Philippou, 2018; Yli-Pietilä et al., 2024). Curriculum-making – including designing, adapting, and justifying curricular choices – requires teachers to exercise professional judgment, negotiate constraints, collaborate with others, and envision educational possibilities (Nieveen et al., 2023; Priestley et al., 2021). At the same time, engagement in curriculum-making practices provides concrete opportunities for agency to emerge and strengthen.

Equally important are the institutional and pedagogical arrangements within ITE and professional learning(Oolbekkink-Marchand et al., 2025). The papers illustrate how collaborative inquiry, design-based interventions, supportive professional communities, and boundary-crossing between universities and schools create conditions in which agency can flourish. When teachers and student teachers are encouraged to justify their decisions, engage with professional knowledge, and participate in shared curriculum work, curriculum-making becomes a collective professional responsibility rather than a technical task.

Taken together, the symposium can be understood as empirically and conceptually engaging with the European OECD Teaching Compass (2024), which positions teachers as central agents of curriculum change within complex learning ecosystems. While the Teaching Compass offers a future-oriented policy vision that foregrounds teacher agency, co-agency, and professional identity, the contributions to this symposium provide grounded insight into how such ambitions are realised, negotiated, and sometimes constrained in practice. By examining concrete mechanisms through which agency is cultivated in and through curriculum-making in ITE and professional learning, the symposium enriches current European debates by connecting policy aspirations to the lived realities of teachers and student teachers, and curriculum work.

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