Against the backdrop of platform-mediated and datafied educational digital transformation, vocational education and training teachers are increasingly required to reorganize their teaching, assessment, and interactional practices through digital platforms and data-driven systems. These changes profoundly reshape teachers’ professional identity, yet empirical research has rarely examined how VET teachers actively engage in professional identity work under such conditions. Drawing on social constructivism and identity work theory, this study adopts a grounded theory approach to explore how vocational teachers in China construct, negotiate, and sustain their professional identity in platform-mediated, datafied VET contexts. Based on in-depth interviews with 21 vocational college teachers across disciplines, career stages, and institutional settings, the study identifies 62 initial concepts, 14 categories, and four main dimensions—personal background, institutional environment, interactional practices, and identity roles. The findings reveal a dynamic process model in which vocational teachers’ professional identity is continuously produced through cycles of policy sensemaking, platform enactment, data-based reflection, and institutional legitimation. The study further proposes optimization pathways for supporting VET teachers’ professional development by strengthening teacher agency, platform governance, and identity recognition in digitally transformed vocational education systems. 

Kewei Zhang, Haiying Wang. Vocational Teachers’ Professional Identity Work in Platform-mediated, Datafied Vocational Education and Training: A Grounded Theory Study in China. Frontiers in Educational Research (2026), Vol. 9, Issue 3: 14-24. https://doi.org/10.25236/FER.2026.090303.

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