Conference Agenda

This proposal addresses the research question: How do in-service ethnic minority (EM) teachers in Hong Kong engage in reflexive identity work to disrupt linguistic and cultural hierarchies in multilingual classrooms, and what pedagogical practices emerge from this process to foster belonging among EM students? The objective of this study is to explore the micro-level pedagogical and ideological strategies that EM teachers deploy to “undo” conventional authority and foster inclusive, multilingual learning environments. The study focuses on how reflexive teaching functions as an ethical and political act of resistance against systemic exclusion, particularly in postcolonial educational settings like Hong Kong, where English and Cantonese remain dominant in public schooling systems (Bhowmik et al., 2017; Sah, 2025).

The conceptual framework is anchored in identity undoing (Nicholson & Carroll, 2013), reflexive pedagogy (Iszatt-White et al., 2017), and critical praxis (Waller et al., 2016). Identity undoing describes the active process of decoupling oneself from institutionalized identity roles, in this case, monolingual, authoritative teacher personas, to reconfigure professional identity in more collaborative, dialogic terms. Reflexive pedagogy situates teaching as a continual practice of self-inquiry, where educators interrogate their own positionalities in relation to power structures in the classroom. Critical praxis provides the framework for understanding how these ideological transformations materialize in specific, socially just teaching strategies aimed at recognizing and affirming marginalized students’ voices, languages, and experiences.

The European and international dimension of this proposal lies in its implications for super-diverse, multilingual educational settings beyond Hong Kong. Across Europe, particularly in countries with growing immigrant populations (e.g. Germany, Sweden, France, the Netherlands), schools are grappling with similar tensions between dominant linguistic norms and the realities of plurilingual classrooms. This research contributes to transnational conversations about the role of teacher identity, agency, and reflexivity in addressing structural inequalities in education. The process of “undoing” authority to reconfigure pedagogical relationships is relevant to international educators committed to inclusive, democratic schooling in post-migration societies.

Furthermore, this proposal aligns with current European policy goals, such as those outlined in the Council of Europe's Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture, which advocate for intercultural awareness, inclusive education, and the deconstruction of hierarchical teacher-student power dynamics. By examining teacher agency in a postcolonial Asian context, this study offers valuable insights for European educators confronting racialized language ideologies and challenges of integration within their own school systems. Ultimately, this research aims to bridge global south and global north discourses on education, critically highlighting how teachers across contexts can co-construct pedagogies of belonging through reflective and inclusive practices.

Topic

This ethnographic case study examines the intersection of non-teaching workload, emotion labour, and professional identity among rural English teachers in China. While existing research on language teacher emotion labour has predominantly focused on classroom-based sources such as pedagogy and student interactions, the emotional consequences of non-teaching work remain insufficiently understood despite recent policy recognition of this burden. This study addresses this gap by investigating how excessive non-teaching duties—including administrative tasks, student management responsibilities, mandatory training, and community service obligations—generate distinct forms of emotion labour that fundamentally reshape rural English teachers' professional identities.

Research Questions

The study investigates two interconnected questions: (1) How does non-teaching work generate emotion labour for rural English teachers? and (2) How does this emotion labour shape rural English teachers' identity? These questions are particularly significant given China's 2025 Ministry of Education policy addressing teachers' non-educational and non-teaching burdens, highlighting a critical gap between scholarly priorities and institutional realities in language teacher education.

Objective

This study aims to extend Benesch's (2017) emotion labour framework beyond classroom interactions to the often-invisible non-teaching duties that saturate teachers' daily work. By focusing on two early-career English teachers in a rural Chinese secondary school over five months of fieldwork, the research reveals how rural English teachers navigate emotion labour arising from contradictory institutional roles, age-based hierarchies, and future-oriented career anxiety. The study demonstrates how these emotional experiences drive the erosion of English language educator identity and the reconstruction of pragmatist-survival identities, offering critical insights into the structural conditions shaping professional development in marginalised educational contexts.

Theoretical Framework

The study is grounded in a poststructuralist perspective that conceptualises emotion labour and language teacher identity as socioculturally constructed, dynamic, and embedded in power relations rather than as internal, static traits. Drawing on Benesch's (2017, 2018, 2020) critical reconceptualisation, emotion labour is theorised as "the tensions produced by the clash between teachers' training/beliefs and institutional regulation." From this lens, both what constitutes non-teaching work and how it is valued are shaped through discourse, power relations, and institutional narratives.

Language teacher identity is theorised as dynamic subjectivity—multiple, constantly in a state of becoming, and produced through discourse and social interaction (Zembylas, 2003, 2005). Consistent with the poststructuralist turn in English language teaching, identity shifts as teachers move across contexts and as wider discourses about language, education, and professionalism change. Critically, emotions are not simply consequences of identity but provide the conditions through which teachers make sense of their work and construct meanings within professional contexts.

Central to this framework is the mutual constitution of emotion labour and identity. Teacher identity work is an emotionally charged process where teachers grapple with tensions, conflicts, and struggles as part of professional practice. Performing emotion labour involves identity negotiation, making emotion labour the mechanism through which identity is both contested and reconstructed. The study positions non-teaching workload not merely as a practical burden but as a productive force that continuously shapes what it means to be an English teacher in rural China, revealing how structural pressures create conditions for sustained identity transformation rather than momentary tensions.

This theoretical positioning allows the study to demonstrate how emotion labour and language teacher identity operate as mutually constitutive processes under structural constraints unique to rural educational contexts.

Boundary practices and boundary crossing have been widely used as analytic lenses in research on interdisciplinary collaboration, multi-professional work, and organisational boundary work, where individuals operate across distinct epistemic, institutional, or professional domains (Fisher & Atkinson-Grosjean, 2002; Akkerman & Bakker, 2011). In these contexts, boundaries are conceptualised as potentially productive sites for negotiation, learning, and identity work, and are commonly associated with professional development, transformation, and the reconfiguration of roles.

More recently, this perspective has been taken up in research on teacher education and teacher educator (TE) professional lives, particularly in contexts characterised by disciplinary or epistemic divides. Here, boundary practices are mobilised to explain how TEs navigate competing traditions of knowledge, expertise, and legitimacy, and how such navigation is expected to support professional learning and identity formation (Whitchurch, 2008, 2009; Goos & Bennison, 2018). Across this literature, boundary practices are therefore typically embedded within developmental narratives, in which engagement at boundaries is assumed to culminate—over time—in integration, identity transformation, or settlement within hybrid or “Third Space” configurations (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011; Whitchurch, 2008).

Even when struggle, uncertainty, or liminality are foregrounded, these experiences are generally framed as transitional and oriented toward eventual resolution (Sikko & Grimeland, 2021; Obexer, 2022). As a result, non-belonging is rarely examined as an outcome in its own right, but rather treated as a temporary condition to be worked through within a broader developmental trajectory.

Recent scholarship has begun to question the adequacy of this framing. Marshman and Goos (2025), for example, call for closer examination of cases of “unsuccessful” boundary crossing in mathematics teacher education, while research on TEs’ professional identities documents persistent tensions around recognition, legitimacy, and credibility that do not necessarily dissipate with increased participation or experience (Edwards et al., 2010; Francis et al., 2022). Together, these studies suggest that boundary practices may give rise to professional conditions that remain insufficiently theorised within dominant developmental accounts.

Positioned within this emerging space, the present paper foregrounds TEs’ non-belonging as a distinct and analytically meaningful phenomenon. Rather than approaching boundary practices as pathways toward development or settlement, it examines a trajectory in which sustained engagement at boundaries does not culminate in professional integration, identity consolidation, or hybrid settlement, but instead stabilises as an ongoing experience of non-belonging. Such trajectories sit uneasily within prevailing developmental narratives of boundary practices, which presuppose progression toward coherence or resolution.

Accordingly, the paper addresses the following research question:

How do boundary practices produce and sustain non-belonging in TEs’ professional lives, and why does this condition resist explanation within dominant developmental narratives of boundary practices?

Conceptually, the study draws on relational and process-oriented perspectives on professional identity, which conceptualise identity as constituted through participation, performance, and recognition rather than as a fixed internal attribute (Wenger, 1998; Gee, 2000). Following Darragh’s (2016) distinction between identity-as-performance and identity-as-being, the study allows for the possibility that TEs may enact professional roles and participate extensively in institutional practices without developing a corresponding sense of belonging. From this perspective, belonging is understood as a contingent and socially negotiated condition rather than an automatic outcome of participation.

Within this framework, boundary practices are conceptualised as an enduring professional context rather than a transitional phase. While such practices may enable learning and reconfiguration, they may also unsettle established bases of recognition and professional security (Edwards et al., 2010). When alternative forms of legitimacy fail to stabilise, non-belonging emerges as a condition that cannot be adequately captured through developmental accounts of boundary practices. By centring this condition, the paper seeks to extend existing theorisation by making visible what dominant narratives tend to leave unexplained.

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Wenger states (1998, p. 151), “Who we are lies in the way we live day to day” and “our experience of life becomes one of identity”. That is, our identities are embedded in almost all aspects of our lives … “a lived experience” (Ibid). Thus, to study identity of a person is to study his/her lived experience. In education, our work as teachers shapes and is shaped by our being and then thinking about the formation of our identities is crucial for us in the field (Clarke, 2009, p. 186). In other words, studying teachers’ work cannot be separated from their identities.

Researchers (i.e., Cui et al., 2025; Gao, 2010; Liu, 2025; Liu & Li, 2023; Ou & Singhasiri, 2020; Wang & Du, 2014; Xiang, 2017; Zhang, 2015) have conducted studies on (teacher/professional/language teacher) identities of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) teachers who worked at (Hanban or Confucius institutes) universities or schools outside of China, i.e., the UK (Scotland and England), Netherlands, Denmark, Solomon Islands, the US, Australia and Thailand. However, participants in most of these studies were native Chinese speakers, and they did not do the initial teacher education programme in a university in the country where they worked. This study explores language teacher identities of novice Chinese teachers in mainstream schools in England to track how they became newly qualitied Chinese teachers and how they worked as in-service teachers, which has not been well studied yet, according to the up-to-date published literature in the domain of CFL teaching and learning in the UK and globally. The overarching research question is: How did novice Chinese teachers negotiate and renegotiate their language teacher identities at different stages of the first years in their teaching career? Sociocultural perspectives combined by Wenger’s (1998) social theory of learning: community of practice and Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) sociolinguistic approach, is the theoretical and conceptual underpinning, which is to find out how CFL teachers work in mainstream schools in England.

This study is a qualitative longitudinal multiple case study. Data were collected from multiple resources among novice Chinese teachers, both the pre-service and in-service or Early Career Teachers (ECTs), and people they worked with. The main participants were selected via purposive and snowball sampling. Pre-service ones were on an initial teacher education programme, secondary Postgraduate Certificate in Education programme (PGCE) languages, particularly, Mandarin Chinese and another language (i.e., Spanish) and they had their placements in different mainstream schools in England. ECTs worked as Chinese teachers after their initial teacher education programmes in the UK in different mainstream schools in England and they account for the majority of the qualified Chinese teachers in England, even the whole UK. Multiple data collection methods were employed, which are audio recorded semi-structured interviews with novice Chinese teachers and people they worked with, observations in schools and at conferences and documents (i.e., portfolio generated by pre-service teachers on their PGCE programme, reports (i.e., Early Career teachers (ECTs) Induction assessment/ programme review) for ECTs and field notes). Data analysis method is intended to be discourse analysis, particularly poststructuralism discourse analysis underpinned by the theoretical and conceptual framework of this study, which is the focus of this submission.

The study found that multiple identities of novice Chinese teachers emerged on their PGCE programme or at work, i.e., student, (English) learner, (Chinese/Spanish/IT/home) teacher, including metaphorical identities i.e., babysitter/sponge…, and their identities varied due to the changed contexts and other factors. Such findings might provide references for people who work in the CFL and other language education in European countries, i.e., practitioners and people they work with, researchers and policy makers.