'I Am Only A Migrant Worker!'

Although study of teacher identity has borne much fruit, the study on private high school teachers in China has been an uncharted territory so far. This is a 14-month ethnographic study investigating the stories of English teachers in a private school to see how they construct their identities.The participants of the study are 4 English teachers and two principals:Cai and Xu in a private senior high school in WenZhou. Semi-structured interviews with participants were the primary data source in this study. Data collected during the 14 months of fieldwork include interviews with four English teachers who talk about their jobs and everyday lives as well as principal Cai's speeches in staff conference which is held once per two weeks. The point of departure for the analysis is the following research questions:1) what is the landscape of a private high school in this study (community of practice)? 2) how is teachers'identity discursively constructed?Major themes have emerged from the findings and analyses, which allow us to see the general pattern of teachers' living and knowing. In the main, teachers all refer to themselves as migrant workers, including the Principal and they just come to "da gong"(打工) here. To obtain a deeper insight into this curious identity, I adopt CDA as major theoretical scaffolding and Foucaudian, Bakhtinian and Lakoffian perspectives as main analysis tools for the present research.The study reveals that there are various discourses surrounding and constituting teachers:migrant workers can be interpreted as a "metaphor" (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) that structures what and how teachers perceive, a "heteroglot" of voices from others which teachers selectively assimilate and internalize (Bakhtin,1984), the result of the discursive construction of "subjectivity" where teachers' possibilities of being are defined (Foucault,1982), historical "contingency" (Foucault,1977) and a sign of "colonization of education"(Taubman,2009). On the whole, the study indicates that "da gong" is a language game which constructs a reality for teachers in which teachers begin to complain about their lives and also a contingent social construct that teachers come to recognize and identify with. The paper concludes that it is of great necessity to construct a distance towards taken-for-granted labels, language and discourse. Only by doing so can we gain a better and sounder understanding about our lives and selves. In the finale of this paper, as a researcher, I add my own story and depict a transforming journey I have gone through in such a research.