Private school teacher identity construction as innovator in implementing China’s 2022 new curriculum reform /

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Student Theses

2025

Wang, Hao

Hong Kong : The Education University of Hong Kong

Thesis

Education reforms have become a global phenomenon aiming to improve education quality and cultivate talents for national development. In China, the 2022 New Curriculum Reform was a significant and latest move to promote quality-oriented education, aiming to transform China’s deeply entrenched exam-oriented education to the competency-oriented education with considerations of student’ overall development. The successful implementation of the reform relies heavily on active identity construction of teachers, who play a pivotal role in translating policies into classroom practice. However, in China’s public schools, literature identified various implementation obstacles caused by the exam-oriented education, such as teachers’ pressure from the high-stake examination and insufficient support from schools, and few studies have reported teachers’ positive experience of reform implementation. In addition, private schools, an increasingly significant part for the education system and the education reforms, have received few attentions, even though their management flexibility can make private schools become potential reform agents. To address the gaps, the study adopts a qualitative case study design to investigate a case of teachers’ implementation of the 2022 New Curriculum Reform in a private junior secondary school through the lens of teacher identity (Trent, 2014b). The study explores what identities participant teachers construct through discourses and how teachers negotiate their identity as the educational innovator through the interplay of the discourses in implementing the curriculum reform. Findings reveal that participants construct two competing identities, educational innovator and traditionalist. Participants construct the innovator identity through taking subject positions of student-centred and competency-oriented teachers from the discourse of teaching as innovation. Participants also constructed the traditionalist identity through invoking subject positions of teacher-centred and exam-oriented teachers from the discourse of teaching as tradition. Participants embrace the innovator identity and distance themselves from traditionalist identity through privileging the positions from the discourse of innovation over the positions from the discourse of tradition. The competition between discourses of innovation and tradition is manifested at teachers’ discursive, experiential, negotiated, and contested construction of their identity, which reveals the complexity of teacher identity construction under the curriculum reform. The study has theoretical implications by investigating the under-researched area of teacher identity construction under the latest education reform in private school settings, and has practical implications valuable for policymakers and school administrators who aim to support teachers under curriculum reforms by offering rich empirical evidence on how the institutional structure enables teachers to construct their identity as reform innovators

LG51.H43 Dr 2025eb Wangh

https://educoll.lib.eduhk.hk/records/MfQ1R2rm