Teaching English Under Constraints: Selective Pedagogical Agency and Teacher Identity in Rural Boarding Schools in China

This article examines how rural boarding school (RBS) English teachers’ agency and identity are enacted through English teaching practices under constraint. Drawing on a qualitative multiple case study of 13 English teachers in three RBSs in northwestern China, the study analyses focus group data, classroom observations, field notes, reflective journals and participant information forms. The findings show how limited family support, fragile learning continuity and perceived institutional and parental risk were intensified in English by high-stakes assessment, restricted exposure and practice and cumulative gaps in earlier learning. Across the three cases, differentiated pedagogical investment took the form of intensified support, concentrated attention, redirection, coercive deterrence or withdrawal. The article proposes selective pedagogical agency as a situated, teacher-level elaboration of educational triage. It refers to the identity-mediated process through which teachers allocated limited time, effort, classroom authority and emotional energy as they interpreted learner need, considered whether further effort could support progress, and weighed emotional demands, moral responsibility and professional risk. Coercive deterrence is analysed as an ethically problematic attempt to force participation rather than as acceptable pedagogy, while resigned permissiveness denotes protective withdrawal when further intervention was judged ineffective, risky or emotionally unsustainable. It argues that rural English teacher identity is not formed outside classroom practice but enacted through repeated decisions about whom to push, whom to support, when to withdraw and how to manage moral and professional risk. This conceptualisation contributes to language teaching and teacher agency research by showing how agency may take the form of selective pedagogical investment when English teachers work under limited support, fragile learning continuity and professional risk. It also offers implications for professional support specific to English teaching, realistic curriculum and assessment expectations and institutional protection for English teachers working in disadvantaged rural contexts.