Teacher Agency for Social Justice in Rural China: A Study in the Field of Critical Applied Linguistics

Although teachers are increasingly being called upon to act as 'agents of change' towards greater justice, there is little clarity about how teachers enact and develop such justice-oriented agency. Drawing upon the ecological model of teacher agency (Priestley, Biesta and Robinson, 2015), some initial research in general education (e.g., Pantic, 2017) has explored different types of justice-oriented agentic actions and identified various affordances and constraints of these actions. The proposed study will extend this emerging line of literature in three ways:
-It will extend previous research on the enactment of justice-oriented teacher agency by investigating the development of such agency over time.
-It will focus on the agentic actions of EFL teachers, as they may face additional justice-related issues (e.g., the status of English in global capitalist production).
-It will be conducted in rural China where, though quantitative statistics of multiple inequalities are well-documented (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2019), little empirical evidence on people's negotiations with these inequalities exists.
Research questions
-How do EFL teachers enact agency for social justice in rural China?
-What are the teacher-perceived affordances and constraints of agency for social justice?
-How does teacher agency for social justice evolve over time?
Methodology
A qualitative case study design will be employed. Five to eight EFL teachers from rural China will be investigated, each constituting an individual case. These teachers will be recruited with the help of a non-governmental organisation committed to supporting justice-oriented teachers in rural China.
Critical communicative methodology (CCM) (Go'mez, Puigvert and Flecha, 2011) will be adopted because of its potential for simultaneously researching and promoting social justice. A key feature of CCM is 'egalitarian dialogues', where the researcher actively contributes academic knowledge and co-constructs knowledge that has transformative potential with participants. In this study these dialogues will be embedded in:
a) Communicative data collection
One communicative life story interview will be conducted to construct critical reflective narratives of participants' past biographies, present justice-oriented practices and mediating factors, and future visions.
Photo-driven (Wang, 1999) and video-driven (Erickson, 2011) interviews will be used, whereby participants will use photography and videos to record behaviours and artefacts related to their daily enactment of agency for social justice. The researcher and participants will co-construct interpretations of visual data in an online WeChat group over an academic year.
Bi-weekly communicative focus groups will be held with participants online to discuss key issues emerging from their daily participation in the Wechat group.
b) Communicative data analysis
Data analysis will follow an abductive approach (Tavory and Timmermans, 2014). Participants will be involved in data interpretation to ensure the transformative potential of findings and to establish trustworthiness.
c) Advisory Committee meetings
An Advisory Committee consisting of the researcher and non-academic research beneficiaries from the NGO will be formed. Meetings will be held throughout the research process to discuss the research purposes, adjust data collection tools, interpret data, and identify appropriate ways of findings dissemination and public engagement.
Significance
The potential contributions of the proposed research include but are not limited to:
-generating insights that may build and refine emerging theoretical knowledge on teacher agency for social justice
-paving the road for future CCM studies
-creating democratic spaces where teacher participants may develop agentic capacity for reducing inequalities in rural China
-producing usable knowledge which may transform policy and practices in the NGO