The sociocultural and political context plays a crucial role in influencing and shaping teacher identity, and recent developments in China's higher education have seen moral education become a priority area. This has presented new challenges to Chinese university teachers in terms of their pedagogical delivery and sense of self. This chapter therefore attempts to explore the identity construction of a Chinese EFL teacher who has been incorporating course-based moral education within his teaching and research practices. Through a positioning analysis, it is found that teachers may experience a triple identity and that the identity construction process is tied to the active agency of teachers. The relevance of this chapter for transnational higher education is also interesting, because providers are influenced by the context they are a part of, so understanding how domestic policy is changing is important for anticipating how international and transnational provision might enabling proactive forward thinking leadership.
Developments and Future Trends in Transnational Higher Education Leadership
Top1. Introduction
Teacher identity is an important construct that is concerned with “the ways teachers make sense of themselves and the images they present to others in their situated institutional and sociocultural contexts” (Yuan & Zhang, 2019, p. 3). It is a fluid construct and one that can vary depending on the role teachers are performing in a given personal or professional context, as Wang et al. (2021) allude to. As a key factor affecting the implementation of teaching (Varghese et al., 2005), teacher identity has been gaining more and more scholarly attention (Trent, 2014). The importance of teacher identity to language teaching is clearly emphasized by De Costa and Norton (2017) who contend that language teaching is in essence identity work. Sachs (2005) suggests that language teacher identity will to a large extent determine the teachers’ views of “how to be”, “how to act” and “how to understand” their work and place in the society (p. 15). Equally influential as far as identity creation, sustainability and development is concerned is the role that educational institutions play in shaping students’ identities, as Szczurek-Boruta (2021) draws attention to.
China has a time-honored tradition of emphasizing cultivation of student morality. The emphasis on moral education gained a new momentum in 2016 when specific importance was given to all kinds of courses focusing in the same direction as ideological and political courses, forming synergies to cultivate student morality (Wu & Hu, 2016). Since then, course-based moral education has become an emerging trend in China’s educational system as Yu (2018) and Ye (2023) note. A milestone came when the Chinese Ministry of Education (2020) released The Framework of Guidelines for the Construction of Moral Education in Higher Education, further emphasizing the importance of moral education, which is not limited to a particular course, but applicable to all.
Foreign language teaching is an indispensable part of China’s higher education. Of the various foreign language courses offered to Chinese university students, English is the most conspicuous one. The necessity of integrating moral education into English teaching has been explicitly expounded by high-level official documents such as the latest version of Guidelines for College English Teaching (Foreign Languages Teaching Committee for Higher Education of Ministry of Education, 2020) and Teaching Guide for Undergraduate Foreign Language and Literature Majors in General Colleges and Universities (Part 1): Teaching Guide for English Majors (Foreign Language and Literature Major Teaching Supervising Committee, English, 2020).
Indeed, “[t]he moral landscape of the language classroom is rendered even more complex than in other contexts by the fact that the teaching of languages by definition takes place at the intersection between different national, cultural, and political boundaries, representing often radically different sets of values” (Johnston & Buzzelli, 2008, p. 95). As an on-going educational reform in China, course-based moral education has posed a new challenge to Chinese university EFL teachers (W. Zhang et al., 2022). Efforts have been made to investigate Chinese university EFL teachers’ practical knowledge of course-based education and the status quo of their teaching competence (Hu & Liu, 2022; Q. Zhang, 2022a). However, how educational reforms affect the process of Chinese EFL teachers’ identity construction remains under investigated (Gao et al., 2018). Therefore, the present study aims to explore the identities that a Chinese university EFL teacher constructs as a result of now having to take on added responsibility in the area of course-based moral education.