Understanding identities of university English lecturers in mainland China

In China, a lecturer is an academic rank below associate professor. While recent education reform has increasingly focused on the professional practices of lecturers (Teng, 2017; Tian & Lu, 2017), the identity development of university English lecturers – who play a pivotal part in the development of teaching, research and teacher education – becomes an emerging topic in higher education. The present study, drawing upon communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), aims to bridge these gaps, with a focus on using identity as an analytical lens to examine the identity construction experiences of one group of university English lecturers in the contested and ever-shifting contexts of teacher education and higher education in mainland China. Data were triangulated through narrative frames, interviews, group discussions and documents and were analysed through the ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ approaches. The findings revealed a wide array of identity options that the participants chose to identify themselves with. Identities included ‘guide’, ‘innovator’, ‘bottom-line worker’, ‘teaching machine’, ‘factory-line worker’, ‘fisherman’ and ‘a researcher that lives in a haze of whisky’. The present study adds new knowledge to the complex and contested nature of lecturer identity, which is often ignored in research on teacher education. Copyright © 2018 Asia TEFL.