National and international guidelines on Faculty Development highlight the need to foster the professional growth of university teachers in order to promote innovation and raise the quality standards of higher education teaching. In particular, these documents emphasize the importance of designing training pathways strategically oriented toward the development of a reflective approach to teaching in order to support faculty members to enhance their awareness of their own professional practice through goal-oriented actions. In line with these reflections, Faculty Development increasingly highlights agency as a distinctive element of teaching. According to Bandura’s socio-cognitive theory, agency is characterized by the ability to undertake actions aimed at achieving specific goals. When applied to teaching, this concept, referred to as teacher agency, focuses on teacher’s action as a situated competence which develops in relation to the context and its different affordances thus promoting intentionality and self-efficacy, as well as designing possible courses of action in order to make deliberate and informed choices. Specifically, the concept of teacher agency, within an ecological perspective, reflects the development of competent action aimed at promoting inclusion as a process constructed through daily teaching practices and both individual and collective reflection. Teachers who exercise their agency are able to translate didactic design into responsible and intentional behaviors, adapting them to the specific contexts and to students’ learning needs.

In light of this theoretical framework, the study aims to identify and analyze, through a scoping review, national and international research that addresses the topic of teacher agency within Faculty Development processes, specifically in relation to inclusive teaching in higher education.

The scoping review follows the PRISMA-ScR guidelines and the search is carried out using five international databases: Science Direct, EBSCO, Taylor & Francis, Scopus, Zenodo.

This work aims to investigate studies that explore the relationship between teacher agency and inclusion processes within faculty development programs in higher education.

After analyzing the scientific findings following the PRISMA-ScR protocol, the present study reveals that few studies explicitly address the relationship between teacher agency and inclusion within faculty professional development. This lack of studies highlights a gap in current faculty professional development processes, undervaluing the role of teacher agency in promoting inclusion in teaching practices. Therefore, there is a need to rethink faculty development processes to evaluate the potential of teacher agency, recognizing it as a fundamental lever for achieving inclusive teaching practices and meeting the needs of each and every student.

Keywords: Faculty Development, Teacher Agency, Higher Education, Inclusion.