Initial teacher education for reform readiness: Examining student teacher agency in curriculum reform implementation

While teacher agency in curriculum reform is well-studied, its development during initial teacher education (ITE), a formative phase for developing competencies for standards-based teaching, remains under-explored. Informed by Priestley et al.'s (2015) ecological model, this qualitative multi-case study breaks new ground by examining how student teachers from two Chinese normal universities enacted agency in implementing the 2022 English Curriculum Standards during a full-responsibility internship. Analysis of focus group and individual interview data from 13 ITE graduates shows that implementation-oriented agency was shaped through the interaction of university preparation, internship conditions, and future professional trajectories. Agency was enabled when reform principles were integrated through sequenced curricula, reform-aligned pedagogical modelling, and structured school mentoring. Specifically, coherent feedback, professional learning opportunities, and curriculum-aligned resources supported the enactment of standards-aligned practices, whereas fragmented or absent support prompted compensatory adaptation. A particularly salient finding concerns the positioning of student teachers as legitimate learners during full-responsibility internships, which legitimised experimentation, reflection, and pedagogical risk-taking during professional transition. By integrating a pre-service perspective into the ecological model, this study identifies mechanisms through which ITE programmes shape agency in implementing new standards and offers insights for strengthening ITE design in reform contexts.