A critical realist analysis of kindergarten teachers' professional identity in Chinese policy

• Chinese policymakers expect kindergarten teachers to fulfil multiple roles. • These expected roles involve caring, pedagogy, partnership, and learning in the empirical domain. • These roles are expected to actualise in different social interactions in the actual domain. • Different mechanisms in the real domain underlie those expected roles in social interactions. Internationally, government-produced policies, such as professional standards for teachers and curriculum documents, generally reflect how countries view teachers’ professional identities. Educational policies are often considered more authoritative than teachers’ perspectives in shaping teachers’ professional identities and teachers’ practices in advancing child learning experiences. However, little attention has been paid to analysing ways policies in non-Western countries, such as China, construct kindergarten teachers’ professional identities. Exploring kindergarten teachers’ professional identity in Chinese policy is critical to understanding this phenomenon in a specific context that foregrounds both local and international sociocultural conditions. This paper thus brings new insights by examining kindergarten teachers’ professional identity in Chinese policy. The findings show policy expectations in the form of caring, pedagogical, partnership, and learning roles as part of teachers’ professional identity. Critical realism enabled the analysis of social interactions, where these expectations could be exercised, and the underlying mechanisms which explain these expected roles and interactions. This paper's empirical findings and contributions invite more policy studies of kindergarten teachers’ professional identities in Chinese and other sociocultural contexts to fully consider the underlying mechanisms that can explain the phenomenon of teachers’ professional identity.