Understanding teacher voice at schools in China: Definition and narrative Inquiry

In the era of increasingly stringent accountability, teacher voice is pivotal to student learning and school improvement. The nature and dynamics of teacher voice greatly vary with the organizational, societal, and cultural context. However, existing research on the concept of teacher voice tends to focus on issues in a particular domain, resulting in an under-synthesized, inconsistent understanding of teacher voice. The present study aims at conceptualizing teacher voice based on existing educational and organizational literature and clarifying its components in Chinese context. In a multi-site case study of retrospective stories from 18 focal teachers and 60 peers (teachers and school leaders) from 12 schools in Shenzhen and Shanghai, we clarified the conceptual components of teacher voice in Chinese context mainly based on teachers’ own understandings, comprising the content, nature, and diverse channels of expression or communication. This definition complements the previous literature with more integrative, comprehensive and common-grounded definition, which may enable scholars to select, absorb, adapt to, and synthesize teacher voice findings across diverse school and cultural contexts and guide further teacher voice research. Copyright © 2025 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.