Making sense of teacher agency within a vocational-academic integration program at a Chinese vocational high school

Four years after the Chinese Vocational Education Reform was initiated, research in this area has found unfavorable outcomes. The implementation of policy and the dedicated reform actions for promoting the status of vocational education has not effectively improved the equity issue with Chinese society. Previous studies have focused on investigating the perspectives of school leaders and on explaining the political and social factors that have hindered school-level policy implementation. These studies have neglected to focus on the role and involvement of teachers in this process and their voices are noticeably absent. According to Ball, Maguire, and Braun (How schools do policy: Policy enactments in secondary schools, Routledge, 2012), marginalizing the critical voice of teachers in policy activities of negotiating and conceptualizing school-level policies causes imminent failure in their implementation. It has been noted that there is an obvious absence in the research literature that identifies teachers as policy agents involved in transforming schools. This study addresses this gap by investigating teacher voice and agency within a vocational high school in Ningbo city, Zhejiang Province, China. Through an in-depth explorative organizational case study, this study focused on the experiences of five high school teachers. The findings revealed that at an institutional level there was disinterest in policy dialogue by vocational teachers. A major reason for this disinterest was a lack of participatory engagement by school leadership and teaching staff on policy matters.