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This paper presents a narrative inquiry study on agency development in student-teachers of an English language teacher program at a public university in the south of Colombia. Our goal was to understand how student-teachers develop agency when narratively inquiring their community by planning and conducting community-based pedagogy projects on issues they found pertinent to investigate. The data were gathered through semi-structured focus group interviews, individual journal entries, and video-recorded talks about their inquiries. As a conclusion, we acknowledge that certain social and narrative practices such as interacting within their inquiry groups, interacting with their communities, voicing their communities’ necessities, and acting upon the inquired necessities facilitated developing agency and contributed to rethinking their roles as transformative members of their communities.

Beginning teachers are often left on their own to endure life at school perhaps as a result of the assumption that learning to teach comes from the experience of teaching, or that the theoretical knowledge gained in teacher education programs is sufficient to deal with such an endeavor. This narrative study investigated student teachers’ retrospective conceptions of English language teaching as they entered a teacher education program and as they completed their practicum at a public school, to better understand their process of learning to teach English. By analyzing participants’ reported experiences, we identified a growing awareness of the contextual circumstances regarding students’ needs and social realities which led to a confrontation of the theoretical insights’ participants had gained through the teacher education program. Findings also revealed participants’ overall dissatisfaction with the learning experiences during their English lessons in public schools and a rather positive view of their learning experiences in language institutes and in English vocational education and training courses.

The current review offers an analysis of the prevailing literature on teacher learning in language teaching from an international perspective. We initially revisit several contributions from a general education perspective. Then, we focus on three dominant approaches, identified through the literature, to understand teacher learning from a language teaching perspective. Finally, we provide implications for teacher educators to consider in the preparation of prospective language teachers. These include acknowledging future teachers’ prior cognitions and learning experiences, highlighting the benefits of collaborative work and communities of practice, and adapting and innovating within the social constraints of their teaching context.

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