A scoping review of democratic teacher education finds stronger evidence for classroom practice than for institutional transformation

Abstract Teacher education oriented toward democratic principles is central to debates on critical citizenship and educational change, yet evidence of sustained institutional transformation remains fragmented. This scoping review mapped studies published between 2020 and 2025 on democratic teacher education across three theoretically derived levels, teacher, classroom, and institution. Peer reviewed articles in English and Spanish were retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science, and ERIC. The corpus included empirical, conceptual, theoretical, and review based studies. Selection and extraction followed the PRISMA extension for scoping reviews, while synthesis combined multilevel coding, narrative analysis, and descriptive keyword co-occurrence mapping in VOSviewer. Claims were differentiated according to evidence type, and all studies were independently coded by two reviewers. Agreement was almost perfect for the primary analytical level classification, at a Cohen kappa of 0.96. Of 92 records identified, 34 met the inclusion criteria, of which 13 focused primarily on teacher level findings, 10 on classroom practice, and 11 on institutional conditions. Evidence at the teacher and classroom levels was predominantly qualitative and consistently described professional agency, democratic competence, participatory pedagogy, deliberation, and student engagement. Institutional studies were numerically substantial but mainly diagnostic, identifying governance conditions, leadership arrangements, political constraints, and organizational barriers rather than tracing sustained reform resulting from teacher education. The principal asymmetry therefore concerns the directness and methodological basis of the evidence. The review proposes a multilevel mediation framework in which institutional transformation depends on the alignment of professional agency, classroom practice, leadership, governance, organizational culture, and political context.