•Language teacher educators face agency tensions due to top-down policies.•Economic preferences of schools constrain teacher educators' agency.•Teachers develop interpersonal relationships with other teachers as a way to experience facilitated agency.•Constrained and facilitated agencies are key to teacher educators' personal and interpersonal identities. Despite the recent growth of research on language teacher educators’ (LTEs) professionalism, little research is available on their agency. In response to this gap of knowledge, this study drew on an ecological theoretical framework and explored the agency and identity construction of Iranian LTEs. Grounded in a narrative inquiry methodology, data were collected from narrative frames and semi-structured interviews. Analyses of the data revealed that power and interpersonal relationships were key to the LTEs’ constrained and facilitated agency, respectively. Collectively, the findings show that although power ecologies perform negatively in sanctioning LTEs’ agency and identity, such ecologies motivate LTEs to strive toward becoming more caring through enacting agency strategies that build on discursive meaning-making processes among LTEs and teachers. Based on the findings, we provide implications for policymakers and teacher educators in regard to how partnership initiatives could be established so that a more professional environment is provided for teachers and LTEs, especially in relation to the role of language in such partnerships.