Navigating Tensions in Teacher Professional Identity and Knowledge: A Believe-Know-Do-Informed Inquiry into Professional Development in Chinese Higher Education

Abstract

This thesis examined how university teachers in Chinese higher education experienced and navigated tensions within their Teacher Professional Identity (TPI) and Teacher Professional Knowledge (TPK), and how such tensions shaped their ongoing Teacher Professional Development (TPD). Three sub-questions were addressed: (1) What tensions do university teachers encounter regarding their Professional Believing and Doing, particularly in relation to self-perceptions of professional roles, professional beliefs, and enacted professional practices (TPI)? (2) What tensions emerge between Professional Knowing and Doing across teaching and research contexts (TPK)? (3) How do university teachers navigate their TPI and TPK tensions, and how do these processes influence their ongoing professional development? Drawing on qualitative data generated through interviews, focus groups, classroom observations, and reflective accounts with university teachers working in a Chinese higher education context, the study examines professional tensions as situated and recurring features of academic work rather than episodic problems to be resolved. The analysis was guided by an integrated conceptual framework that brings together Professional Believing, Knowing, and Doing as analytically distinct yet interrelated dimensions of professional life. The findings suggest three interrelated patterns. First, tensions within TPI and TPK appear to be routinely produced through the structural and organisational conditions of contemporary higher education, including role multiplicity, evaluative regimes, and competing institutional expectations. These tensions were experienced not as exceptional disruptions, but as normalised features of everyday academic work. Second, while most tensions did not originate as ethical problems, they were frequently experienced and addressed through ethical judgement at the point of action, as teachers deliberated what could reasonably be prioritised, justified, or sustained in specific contexts. Ethical judgement thus emerged not as a cause of tension, but as the medium through which tensions were lived and navigated in practice. Third, teachers rarely sought definitive resolution of tensions. Instead, professional development unfolded through ongoing, relational processes of prioritisation, provisional alignment, and re-alignment across Believing, Knowing, and Doing, allowing teachers to maintain workable and professionally defensible positions under constraint. Building on these findings, the thesis advances four interrelated contributions to knowledge. First, it offers a refined understanding of TPI-TPK tensions by conceptualising them as enduring and structurally embedded conditions of academic work, rather than as temporary misalignments or individual deficits. Second, it introduces the Believe-Know-Do Triadic Lens as an integrative analytical configuration that specifies how TPI and TPK are dynamically connected in contexts of tension. Third, within this triadic configuration, the study foregrounds ethical judgement as an analytically consequential mediating process through which professional tensions are navigated in practice, thereby extending existing accounts of teacher development that focus primarily on reflection, competence, or role adjustment. Fourth, by drawing on the Confucian notion of 知行合一 as a cultural and interpretive resource, the thesis provides a culturally grounded yet analytically transferable perspective on professional development, contributing to international discussions on teacher professionalism in higher education. Overall, the study suggests that university teachers’ professional development is shaped less by the resolution of tensions than by the ongoing, situated judgement through which tensions across Believing, Knowing, and Doing are navigated under institutional constraints.