This exploratory study sought to unfold the identity construction path from male pre-service teachers' perspective and experience in the most gendered and offensive profession.
We interviewed 10 male pre-service teachers recruited through a convenient purposive sampling from one of the most well-known universities in China, known for cultivating many ECE teachers.
The study’s finding underscores the ration for choosing this profession, their learning-to-teach experience, and the practicum platform that brought confusion and shock that ultimately demonstrates the shaping and shifting of identity development, which potentially offers robust implications for stakeholders.
This study, administered in a non-Western Chinese ECE Teacher Education context, provides a valuable but missing perspective on teacher identity in Western literature.
