Contextual Support for Sustainable Professional Development: A case study of Chinese senior high school EFL teachers

This thesis sets out to explore how schoolteachers might be best supported to sustain Teacher Professional Development (TPD) throughout their careers. Although TPD is a thriving field, contextual support for schoolteachers’ career-long TPD is under-researched. Studies from a person-oriented ecological sustainable perspective are also unusual. This qualitative multiple-case study begins to fill the gap.
Set in the context of Chinese senior high schools, the case study inquired into the lived TPD and support experiences of eleven schoolteachers of English. Three waves of semi-structured interviews were conducted with the participants, and the participatory tool of life maps was employed to facilitate the interviews and generate complementary data. The data set was also complemented by the data from an open-ended questionnaire, school observations and document analysis. Template analysis was used to identify, analyse and report the patterns in the data set.
The findings suggest features of sustainable professional growth over the span of a schoolteacher’s career. Schoolteachers realise career-long TPD in the process of self-actualisation guided by their ideal professional prospects. In the process, they emulate role models and engage in a series of activities, through which their TPD ecosystems expand and their ideal prospects evolve accordingly. To enable career-long TPD, it is essential to keep the TPD ecosystem supportive for the schoolteacher as a socially developing person in education profession, permitting and supporting, rather than inhibiting, him/her to actualise his/her ideal-self in the profession by engaging in structurally interrelated activities, with all the involved processes kept consistent with each other and his/her characteristics. Overall, there is a need for a conceptual shift towards Sustainable Professional Development (SPD), i.e. to coherently understand the schoolteacher, the developmental process and ecosystem, and contextual support from a person-oriented ecological sustainable perspective.