The Interplay of Curricular Knowledge and Perceived Agency of Pre-service Physics Teachers in Vienna and Tokyo

Teacher educators and education researchers have argued for the importance of responsive teaching. To teach responsively, however, requires more than creativity. It requires also a perception of agency, that one has the freedom to deviate from the lesson plan when needed. Effective responsive teaching requires also an understanding of why the textbook and other curricular materials were designed the way they were. In this paper, we investigate the interplay between this last factor (“curricular knowledge”) and perceived agency in the context of an opportunity for pre-service teachers earning a MS degree to learn about and use Open Source Tutorials. Through qualitative analysis of written student work and transcripts from interviews and in-class recordings, we document growth in curricular knowledge that, at the end of the semester, seemed to be coupled to perceived agency.