Bridging The Rhetoric And The Reality:Towards An Understanding Of Female EFL Teachers' Professional Agency At A University Of Shanghai,P.R.china

The burgeoning of educational research from the sociocultural perspective has fostered a spectacular expansion of scholarly interests in the work and lives of teachers.In particular,female faculty constitutes a large proportion of the EFL(English as a Foreign Language)teaching force in China.As yet,studies on female EFL teachers and their professional development appear to be largely missing.With the aim of exploring how female EFL teachers become shapers of their own lives,i.e.,their professional agency,this qualitative study sets out to trace how three female EFL teachers at a university of Shanghai act proactively to initiate and steer changes,to explore the fabric of their professional lives,and in so doing,attempts to expand the understanding of teacher agency,and to foreground the phenomena how female EFL teachers seek progressions in their career routes.Guided by the research questions(the enactment of professional agency and the negotiation with the contextual influences)and the theoretical framework,this study adopts an eclectic collection of methods: narrative questionnaire is administered to nine female EFL teachers at a university of Shanghai,based upon which,three of them are invited to participate in the follow-up research.Metaphor,concept map,and timeline are utilized to collect the background information;semi-structured interview and classroom observation are conducted as the main protocols;artifacts and netnographic data collection are applied as the supplementary approaches.On the basis of transcribing different sources of the data and conducting a thematic data analysis facilitated by CAQDA(Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis),the findings suggest that the participant teachers enact their professional agency by partaking in multifarious teaching,academic research,and teacher learning activities:they articulate their agency beliefs concerning these dimensions;they intend to fulfill their aspirations by actualizing their agency competence through a series of goal-setting,envisioning,acting,and reflecting practices so as to make decisions,maneuver between repertoires,and frame future actions;they demonstrate theiragency inclination as the mediation between their beliefs and practices;additionally,their enactment of professional agency is reflective of the dynamic and discursive interplay of their personal biographies,interpersonal relations,institutional environments,as well as the macro social context.Although this study does not intend to build a binary division between female and male EFL teachers or to highlight the uniqueness of gendered agency,it indeed suggests that female EFL teachers' professional agency,though found to be gender-neutral,as an open entity,it is sometimes influenced by female teachers' gendered agency when their intentions and efforts to deal with work-life balance and to avoid role conflicts are addressed.They are found to be agentic practitioners to fulfill their dual commitments in workplace and the family through a vast array of meaning-making efforts although there are sometimes rooted prejudices or “glass ceiling” for their professional development.Taken together,the research findings attempt to create compelling portraits of female EFL teachers' proactive engagement with their professional tasks and the multiple influences that contribute to the exercises of their professional agency.The study reported here,although relatively small-scale and with some limitations,for instance,generalizability and representativeness,the endeavor to adopt the explorative inquiry and the nuanced approach has contributed to the existing body of research on female teachers' professional development and illuminated thinking about the issue of teacher agency by problematizing and complicating female professionals' active positioning and engagement in their career circle.It is indicated that addressing the need of and understanding the trajectories of female teachers' career development,cultivating and fostering their agency at work can help more practitioners get ready for challenges and changes to come in their professional paths leading to excellence.