Constructing the ‘reflective’ and ‘difficult’ teacher: pragmatic policy discourses in China and France (2000–2023)

This article examines teacher policy discourse in China and France between 2000 and 2023 through a comparative analysis of national policy texts. Using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), it identifies two salient policy figures: the ‘reflective teacher’ in China and the ‘teacher in difficulty’ in France. To account for these constructs, the analysis draws on three explanatory dimensions: patterns of educational governance, expert mediation, and historically embedded national policy and intellectual traditions. In China, the ‘reflective teacher’ is framed as a professional ideal serving reform objective, with international educational ideas progressively articulated in relation to Confucian self-cultivation. In France, the ‘teacher in difficulty’ is represented in a discourse marked by both humanistic concern and evaluative and diagnostic categories, within which responsibility for addressing students’ academic difficulties is redefined in increasingly standardised terms. Despite differences in policy language and institutional settings, both cases reflect a shared logic of pragmatic instrumentalism, through which external references and domestic policy and cultural resources are selectively mobilised to legitimise contemporary teacher policy agendas.