ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Occupational Health and Safety
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1645977
This article is part of the Research TopicEvaluating Organizational Health Culture: Tools and Impact on Workplace Health InterventionsView all 10 articles
Double Marginalization: An Ethnographic-Ecological Analysis of Rural PE Teachers' Professional Development Between Urban and Underdeveloped Areas
Provisionally accepted
- 1JiMei University, 厦门市, China
- 2Xiamen University of Technology, Xiamen, China
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Introduction: China's rapid urbanization has exacerbated challenges in rural education, including resource disparities, shrinking student populations, and teacher shortages. Rural Health and Physical Education (HPE) teachers face acute professional development barriers, directly impacting their wellbeing and students' physical health.Methods: This ethnographic study combines ecological and bioecological lenses to analyze rural HPE teachers' professional development. Through three-stage sampling, 35 northeastern Chinese HPE teachers participated in semi-structured interviews and fieldwork. Data were thematically analyzed using an ecological-intersectional (E-I) framework across micro (individual), meso (interpersonal), exo (organizational), and macro (sociocultural) levels.Results: Findings demonstrate ecological interdependencies: Urbanization policies and unequal resource distribution created structural barriers, while school sports culture and support networks mediated outcomes. Teachers' professional autonomy and rural commitment emerged as key adaptive factors.Conclusion: Multilevel interventions are proposed: macro policies (differentiated standards/resource compensation), organizational support (school leadership/home-school collaboration), and individual empowerment (autonomy/innovation training). This study advances the application of intersectional ecological theory in rural education contexts and offers actionable insights for equitable teacher policy development. It advances theoretical understanding of marginalized HPE teachers' development while offering actionable policy insights with global relevance for underserved educational contexts.
Keywords: rural physical education teachers, Professional Development, ecological-intersectional framework, educational equity, urban-rural divide, teacher agency
Received: 12 Jun 2025; Accepted: 31 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Yan and Dai. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Jihong Yan, JiMei University, 厦门市, China
Xinyu Dai, Xiamen University of Technology, Xiamen, China
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