Preservice language teachers’ agency in self-directed informal learning with GenAI

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) fuels self-directed learning and may empower informal professional learning. Previous research has focused on understanding teachers’ use of GenAI for teaching practice, with little attention to teachers’ agency in utilizing GenAI for self-directed professional learning. This study traced 15 Hong Kong preservice language teachers’ agentic engagement with GenAI for self-directed professional learning over one year through two rounds of interviews. The interview responses revealed that their agentic interaction with GenAI was a process of working with GenAI’s constraints, expanding its affordances, and negotiating dynamic empowering configurations of AI and human control. The participants’ agency attribution, positioning of GenAI interaction, capacities to co-team with AI, and learning mentalities played an essential role in the evolving interplay of human and GenAI agency. The interplay was fueled or moderated by the interaction of personal circumstances with the socio-educational and socio-technological contexts. The findings suggest that teacher educators need to adopt a holistic approach to help preservice teachers develop productive GenAI partnerships for self-directed professional learning: 1) to foster proactive agency attribution and positive positioning of AI interaction for mutual empowerment, learning mentalities towards the interaction, and capacities to co-team with AI; and 2) to support effective navigation of personal, socio-educational and socio-technological circumstances that optimize conditions of possibility for agency.