A Cross-Cultural Exploration of Perceived Teacher Expertise: Insights from Chinese Higher Education

Anqian Wang(CITY UNIVERSITY)

Abstract

This review synthesizes recent scholarship (2022–2025) on perceived teacher expertise with a focus on Chinese higher education as a cross-cultural case. We definitionally represent expertise as a configuration of practices either incorporating the disciplinary knowledge (PCK/TPACK), enacted capabilities (adaptive expertise, teacher noticing), and socio-moral identity (fairness, care, professional integrity). We differentiate between the perceived and the actual expertise and demonstrate that the judgments of stakeholders, which are frequently represented by student judgments, reflect the affective and cultural cues, as much as the instructional quality, and require triangulated evidence. Using the heritage culture of Confucianism, we describe how moral authority and relational harmony are kept at the forefront of identifying expertise in China and we combine it with the global standards of dialogic-based teaching and feedback-striking teaching that involves the use of technology. We consider such methodological innovations as task-based tests, discipline-normed observation, and measurement cross-group invariance psychometric level that can be used to make plausible comparisons across groups. Other aspects that we examine include the context of policy such as the Double First-Class initiative, which presents occasions and stressors of identifying and funding expert teaching. The outline includes at its end a synthesizing cultural cognitive framework and an accessible policy, research, international collaboration strategy: match incentives to learning-based evidence portfolios; construct culturally responsive tools, with moral-relational measures on, and tie enactment classroom studies to organizational changes. A combination of the review will reinvent teacher expertise as a culturally mediated, evidence-based ability to transform disciplinary knowledge into consequential learning.

Keywords

teacher expertise; Chinese higher education; pedagogical content knowledge; measurement invariance; Confucian-heritage culture

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12345/jetm.v9i4.31784