Navigating Identity Tensions Through Perezhivanie: Language Teacher Metamotivation in Chinese Private Vocational Colleges

ABSTRACT

Language teachers in marketized educational contexts face identity tensions that generate sustained motivational struggles, yet how teachers monitor and regulate motivation through the cognitive‐emotional dialectic ( perezhivanie ) remains undertheorized. This qualitative multiple‐case study examined the identity tensions that 11 language teachers in Chinese private vocational colleges experienced and how perezhivanie refracted these tensions to shape metamotivational responses within their social situations of development. Data from semi‐structured interviews, field observations, and informal interactions were thematically analyzed, revealing four interconnected identity tensions: college teacher vs. corporate employee; language educator vs. skill‐oriented trainer; novice researcher vs. teaching‐intensive instructor; and contingent faculty vs. career professional. Teachers’ perezhivanie refracted structural conditions into cognitive‐emotional unities, shaping divergent metamotivational responses that unfolded from internal adjustment through boundary management to career reorientation, with relational‐buffering seeking across all stages. The study reconceptualizes teacher metamotivation as identity work, extends metamotivation toward socioculturally embedded processes grounded in the cognitive‐emotional dialectic, and foregrounds the social situation of development for understanding how structural contradictions become psychologically real. The findings call for structural support for marginalized language educators rather than reliance on individual resilience.