Reconstructing Academic Identity in a Chinese Vocational College: A Collaborative Self-as-Data Narrative Study
This study employs a collaborative self-as-data narrative inquiry, framed by an integrated Sen-Bourdieu approach, to illustrate how a doctoral graduate in a Chinese vocational college reconstructs a hybrid academic identity through reflexive habitus adjustment and capital conversion amidst structural constraints and field-specific recognition rules.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
In the landscape of higher education, a person's professional identity is not a fixed badge they wear, but a story they tell themselves about who they are and what they do. This story is shaped by the environment they work in, the skills they have gathered, and the rules that determine what counts as success. For decades, a specific path has dominated the dreams of many scholars: earn a doctorate, the highest level of academic training, and secure a job at a research university where the primary goal is to discover new knowledge. However, as the number of people earning these advanced degrees has grown faster than the number of available university jobs, many are finding themselves in different places, such as vocational colleges. These institutions focus on teaching practical skills and preparing students for specific trades, a mission that often feels very different from the pure research culture of a university. The question facing these scholars is profound: when the rules of the game change, does the story of who they are as academics break, or can it be rewritten?
This study follows the journey of one scholar, a woman with a doctorate in education, as she navigates this exact transition. She moved from the familiar world of doctoral training into a vocational college in Chongqing, China, an institution dedicated to agriculture and practical training. The research, conducted as a collaborative self-study, treats her personal experience as the primary data. She kept a detailed record of her thoughts, her work documents, and her daily struggles, while a peer colleague, who had chosen a different career path, acted as a critical friend to help interpret the story. Together, they examined how she moved from feeling lost and undervalued to finding a new, hybrid way of being an academic. The process was not a simple adjustment of duties, but a complex reconstruction of her professional self, driven by the need to make her research skills useful in a place that values teaching and practical reform more than pure theory.
The journey began with a moment of sharp dislocation. When she first arrived at the vocational college, the skills and status she had built during her years of doctoral training did not immediately translate into value. In her previous world, her identity was built on the ability to conduct independent research and publish papers. In her new environment, the immediate priorities were teaching large classes of students and helping the college improve its practical programs. She faced a heavy teaching load of 143 hours per semester, teaching general subjects like mental health and aesthetics, which felt far removed from her expertise in rural education. For a time, her academic capital—her degree, her research networks, and her writing ability—felt like currency that the local market did not accept. She experienced a sense of loss, wondering if her career had stalled or if she had made a mistake by leaving the traditional university track. The structural reality of the academic job market, where there are more PhDs than university positions, had pushed her into this new field, but the internal rules of that field did not yet recognize her specific talents.
However, the story did not end in resignation. The turning point came when she was asked to take on a new role leading a project to help the college win a major national teaching award. This was a strategic shift for the institution, which was trying to raise its profile by mimicking the achievements of universities, a phenomenon known as academic drift. The college needed someone who could bridge the gap between their practical work and the high-level language of academic awards. Her specific background, including her connections to her former university and her deep knowledge of education, suddenly became a vital resource. She moved from the periphery of teaching general courses to the center of the college's reform efforts. In this new position, she had to translate her research skills into something the institution could use: writing grant applications, designing reform plans, and collaborating with experts from other universities. She realized that her doctorate was not useless; it simply needed to be converted into a different form of value. She began to see that her ability to analyze complex problems and write clearly could drive the very practical changes the college needed.
As she settled into this new rhythm, her identity began to solidify into something unique and resilient. She was no longer just a researcher who taught, nor just an administrator who wrote reports. She became a hybrid professional who could move fluidly between teaching research methods to future teachers, managing college-wide projects, and collaborating with experts across provinces. She found that the very tasks that once seemed like distractions—drafting five-year plans, attending conferences on artificial intelligence in education, and helping with award applications—were actually weaving together a new kind of academic life. She learned to view these diverse activities not as a scattered collection of duties, but as a coherent narrative of vocational education reform. The friction between her research habits and the practical demands of the college did not disappear, but it became a source of energy. It forced her to be creative, to find new ways to apply her knowledge, and to expand what she believed an academic could do.
The study suggests that this reconstruction of identity is not a sign of failure or a step down, but a dynamic process of adaptation and growth. The scholar did not simply give up her old self to fit into a new box. Instead, she actively reinterpreted her skills, finding new ways to make them valuable in a different context. She discovered that her freedom to be an academic did not depend on staying in a research university, but on her ability to convert her resources into meaningful work within the constraints of her new environment. The vocational college, often seen as a lesser alternative to the university, proved to be a field with its own rules and possibilities. By engaging deeply with these rules, she built a career that combined research, teaching, and institutional service into a single, purposeful whole. The research indicates that for many doctoral graduates entering non-traditional fields, the path forward is not to cling to an old definition of success, but to construct a new, flexible identity that can thrive where they are.
Ultimately, this story offers a quiet but powerful insight into the changing nature of academic work. It shows that professional identity is not a static label assigned by a job title, but a living process that evolves through interaction with the world. When the environment changes, the story of who we are must change with it. For the scholar in this study, the transition from a research-focused university to a practice-focused vocational college was not the end of her academic life, but the beginning of a more complex and integrated one. She learned that the value of her work is not inherent in the type of institution she belongs to, but in how she connects her skills to the needs of her community. In doing so, she found a way to remain an academic, not by preserving the past, but by building a future that fits the reality of her present.
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