Teacher Identity, Course-Based Moral Education, and the Lessons for Transnational Higher Education Institutions

Abstract

The sociocultural and political context plays a crucial role in influencing and shaping teacher identity, and recent developments in China's higher education have seen moral education become a priority area. This has presented new challenges to Chinese university teachers in terms of their pedagogical delivery and sense of self. This chapter therefore attempts to explore the identity construction of a Chinese EFL teacher who has been incorporating course-based moral education within his teaching and research practices. Through a positioning analysis, it is found that teachers may experience a triple identity and that the identity construction process is tied to the active agency of teachers. The relevance of this chapter for transnational higher education is also interesting, because providers are influenced by the context they are a part of, so understanding how domestic policy is changing is important for anticipating how international and transnational provision might enabling proactive forward thinking leadership.