This article, focusing on undergraduate practicum courses, examined the role of these courses in strengthening pre-service teachers’ agency and enabling them to act agentically in their teaching. The participants in this study were 11 fourth-year undergraduate pre-service mathematics teachers from one of the campuses of Farhangian University and their university supervisor, all of whom participated voluntarily. Given the aim of the study, which was to understand the phenomenon of pre-service teachers’ agency in teaching, a phenomenological approach was employed. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, observations conducted by the first author during the pre-service teachers’ teaching, and the first author’s reflective notes following each teaching session.



In the Practicum 3 course, pre-service teachers teach independently for the first time. Therefore, in this study, their teaching was recorded in the presence of the university supervisor and the classroom teacher, as well as the first author. Subsequently, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the 11 participants and the university supervisor. Through systematic data reduction, eight categories were initially developed. Then, through the final stage of data reduction, four themes emerged. Three of these themes showed clear alignment with the existing literature in this area, while one theme more prominently reflected the ecological nature of agency within the Iranian cultural context.



The study concludes that pre-service teachers play a key role in educational development and that attending to teacher agency and supporting teachers in acting agentically in their teaching are among the essential requirements for teachers’ professional development.