Exploring early career physical education teachers’ professional identity construction in rural China: insights from socio-ecological perspective and practice architectures theory

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study explored 15 early career physical education (PE) teachers’ professional identity construction from rural China. Identity was shown as a multifaceted, context-specific, and dynamic social-cultural phenomenon. From a socio-ecological standpoint, this research demonstrated that early career rural Chinese PE teachers’ professional identity construction was shaped by the interplay between family backgrounds, Chinese Confucian cultural tradition, physicality, schooling experiences, workplace contexts, and the PE core competency curriculum policy. From the perspective of practice architecture, the professional identity construction encompassed their cultural-discursive arrangements (sayings), material-economic arrangements (doings), and social-political arrangements (relating). PE teachers’ professional identity may be facilitated by school administrators and education policymakers’ support.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese physical education
• teacher professional identity
• socio-ecological perspective
• practice architecture theory

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to extend their gratitude to Dr. M. Jean Keller (University of North Texas, the US), Dr. Wesley O'Brien (University College Cork, Ireland), and Dr. Juanjo Mena (University of Salamanca, Spain), and Dr. Diane Yendol-Hoppey (University of North Florida, the US) for their professional support while crafting and polishing this manuscript. We also appreciate the constructive feedback from the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research has been jointly supported by the National Key Project of the 13th Five-year Plan of Educational Science “Research on the policy system of improving the status of teachers in the new era”(AFA2000007) in China and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities “Innovative research on teacher professional learning and evaluation” (2021QKT012) at East China Normal University.