Exploring pre-service teacher agency in critical pedagogy: an ecological perspective from an EFL practicum context

This study set out to reveal how pre-service EFL teachers perceive and enact teacher agency when implementing critical pedagogical activities in the ELT practicum courses at a public university in Türkiye. Adopting an ecological approach to teacher agency, the study was designed as a qualitative instrumental case study with a purposeful sample of four pre-service EFL teachers enrolled in practicum courses in the 2023–2024 academic year. The thematic analysis of the qualitative data revealed a divergence between the perception and enactment of agency by the pre-service teachers, suggesting the dynamic and context-bound nature of teacher agency. The findings also yielded indications of iterational (e.g. personal and educational histories), practical-evaluative (e.g. institutional constraints and stakeholder interactions), and projective (e.g. teaching philosophies and aspired identities) dimensions of teacher agency when implementing critical pedagogical activities in a practicum context. The study offers practical implications for how to integrate critical pedagogy into ELT programmes.