While agency is a contested term

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Term the intellectual base of teacher education through research, and – where democratic structures are in place – support policy development. Agency is of the upmost importance to this work as GTEs engage with, and are responsive to, student needs and interests, the impacts of policy on education and society, (issues in) the world and research.

(Priestley at al., 2015), we use it to refer to people’s intentions in making decisions/acting, but also in their capabilities and power to act within wider social, political and economic structures (Giddens, 1986). Contributing to debates in geography (teacher) education in England has become more urgent due to the rapidly evolving policy context in initial teacher education. The Department armenia consumer email list for Education (DfE) has become increasingly prescriptive in its guidelines for teacher education, without consistently explaining how or why it focuses on specific ideas of professional knowledge for teachers (Hordern & Brooks, 2023). This raises important questions about the intellectual basis of such decisions, and what might be termed ‘epistemological privilege’ (Holt et al., 2019) in education policymaking in the present time-space. Put simply, epistemology is the study of the nature of knowledge, and questions of epistemological privilege consider the relationships between who knows about issues and ‘who has the right to be listened to and forge agendas’ (Holt et al., 2019, p. 391).