ACTOR in action: A performative stage model for reconstructing teacher professional learning in flipped university classrooms

Flipped university classrooms are widely celebrated for enhancing student engagement and pedagogical innovation, yet the same conditions that empower leaners intensify teachers’ performative demands, exposing instructors to heightened visibility, affective strain, and technologically mediated accountability. This paradox reveals a blind spot in existing Teacher Professional Learning (TPL) scholarship, as neither competency-acquisition nor relational-embeddedness accounts can theorise what happens when the teaching stage itself is reorganised by digital infrastructures. Drawing on Goffman’s dramaturgical theory and Clandinin and Connelly’s narrative framework, grounded in sociomateriality, postdigital perspectives, and emotional labour as generative conditions of TPL, this study examines how flipped pedagogy reconfigures teachers’ professional learning. Interviews with ten teachers and classroom and workshop observations yielded the ACTOR in action model, demonstrating that TPL unfolds as an iterative, identity-constitutive assemblage of Acting, Co-performing, Technologizing, Organizing, and Reflecting. Failing to understand these mechanisms risks misaligning professional development and evaluation in increasingly hybrid higher education.