Navigating professional development pathways across career stages: faculty agency through an ecological perspective

This study explores how faculty members at different career stages navigate institutional professional development (PD) programmes to foster or sustain faculty agency. Faculty agency emerges from considering personal capacities, resources, affordances and constraints of the environment when deciding to act as a lecturer, researcher or in any other academic role. Drawing on interviews with faculty and academic developers, observations and artefacts, we analysed three PD programmes at a Dutch research university: University Teaching Qualification (UTQ), Senior Teaching Qualification (STQ) and Change Lab (CL). Within and cross-case thematic analysis revealed three themes: the evolving role of reflection across career stages, dialogic and collaborative engagements as catalysts for broadening perspectives and the varying affordances and constraints of institutional PD. Interpreted through the ecological framework of teacher agency, the findings show that UTQ strengthens the iterational dimension by building pedagogical repertoires, STQ advances the projective dimension through vision-building and CL reinforces the practical-evaluative dimension through localised, inquiry-driven practices. The affordances and constraints of each PD are described in detail. The results indicate the need for a holistic, complementary PD approach across career stages to facilitate the enactment of agency through the interplay and continuous development of teaching repertoire, teaching philosophy and contextual affordances.