Co-Constructing a Discourse of Preservice Teacher Agency to Support Responsive Literacy Instruction

Cultivating preservice teachers’ (PSTs) agency to enact responsive literacy instruction is vital in helping them navigate the sociopolitical contexts that increasingly mandate standardized curricula. This study examined how PST agency emerged within ExPLORE, a space designed to nurture PST agency as they tutored K-6 students alongside their literacy methods coursework. Using situational analyses, a postmodern extension of grounded theory, we examined agency emergence for one PST, through the interplay between the relational and discursive elements of ExPLORE and the broader teacher education context (i.e. structural elements). Findings indicated PST agency emergence is a fluid, situated-process, co-constructed as a PST moved from leaning into dominant discourses to taking up a discourse of preservice teacher agency. Concurrently, her agency for responsive literacy instruction expanded. This shift in discourse was influenced by a teacher educator’s intentional scaffolding and reciprocal interactions with the PST’s tutee. Findings illustrate how agency and structure can productively-coexist, and that K-6 students themselves are key agents in PST agency emergence. Implications point to the importance of creating spaces in teacher education that intentionally redistribute power as PSTs exercise agency in authentic instructional settings.