From Drifting To Embedding:Study On Rural Teachers' Self-identity In Social Change

The development of rural society and the improvement of rural education quality were closely related with “Last Mile” in the overall development of the whole country.As the active subject in the field of rural education,when facing the impact of the relationship between urban and rural areas and the transformation of rural society in the process of modernization,rural teachers' understanding of their self-role and action choice in social changes is key to the situation in which they will “settle down,stay long and teach well”.Therefore,this study investigates an excellent rural teacher's self-identity process from drifting to embedding and explores his action logic in the evolution of social time and space with the purpose of providing some references for rural teachers to take root in rural education and actively seek for professional development.Furthermore,this study takes the initiative manifested in the constraints of social structure as the inner logic in analyzing the self-identity of the rural teacher,in the background of the social changes taken place in urban and rural areas since the reform and opening-up policy implementation,to examine the deepening process of self-identity in his different career stages chronologically.The study aims to reveal how rural teachers gradually deepen their self-identity from ignorant choice,awakening exploration to reflexive construction while interacting with society,under the impact of professional development requirements and career roles transition,which is expected to achieve a virtuous circle that typical dynamic individual might promote the overall development and progress of rural teachers,rural education as well as the whole rural society.To be specific,this paper firstly justify the significance of rural teachers' self identity,and then explains the connotation of rural teachers' self-identity and the structure of this study.Then,a case study of Teacher M's rural education life course,which consists of three periods,namely passively-selected stage of entering local Normal School and resigning to the job allocation,actively-constructed stage in the tension between urban and rural areas,deeply-confirmed stage in the mutual structure of urban and rural areas,is carried out in a qualitative research way,such as interview,observation,physical material analysis and educational narrative.Based on it,this study analyzes the key elements in the process of rural teachers' self-identity from the perspective of multiple interaction between individual agency and social structure,in order to explain the logic of self-identity generated by the two-way interaction between rural teachers and social structure.It is found that rural teachers' self-identity is an identity confirmation resulted from individual reflection,which will guide and dominate rural teachers' practical choices and actions.Therefore,it seems that self-identity is restricted by the exertion of individual initiative and the condition of social structure,but it will also play a reflexive monitoring and subjective active role in rural teachers' different career stages.Moreover,the changes of the structure between urban and rural society not only push the awakening of rural teachers' self-identity,but also offer the action basis,which exerts both motivating and restricting forces on the formation of rural teachers' self-identity with its institutional rules and resource flow.In return,rural teachers might make use of reflective monitoring and reflexive shaping effects of the self-identity system from below to dynamically adjust and reasonably plan how to construct “an ideal ego” in their actions,so that the two-way mutual construction of self and social structure can be achieved.In other words,the formation and deepening of rural teachers' self-identity is a course of active inquiry and deep confirmation of “who I am,where I am,what I am doing and how I will act”,as well as the viewpoint of identity value,the reflective understanding of behavior and the approaches to self-realization.Based on the construction logic of rural teachers' self-identity in social changes,this paper argues that self-empowerment and internal generation,structural empowerment and external support might be a possible way to promote rural teachers to be embedded into rural society and rural education willingly.It should be admitted that this paper takes an excellent rural teacher as a case to discuss the deepening process of self-identity in their social changes,trying to “see the sun through a drop of water”,that is,through the explanation of the construction process and action logic of rural teachers' self-identity to shed new lights on the current construction of rural teachers.However,the limitation of this study lies in the depth of digging out the“truth” in the field and the proficiency of applying research methods.