Building Boundary-crossing Infrastructures for Faculty Development in China’s Vocational Universities

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-628-4_15How to use a DOI?

Keywords

vocational universities; vocational teachers; boundary crossing; faculty development; education–industry partnership; tertiarisation; China

Abstract

China’s move to bachelor-level vocational education has intensified a longstanding faculty problem: universities must raise academic capacity while keeping teaching connected to contemporary occupational practice. This study examines how newly upgraded vocational universities organise that connection. An abductive, theory-informed longitudinal document analysis was conducted on the 2023 quality reports of 31 Chinese vocational universities and 26 matched reports from 2025. The analysis identified four connected infrastructures: boundary positioning, boundary access, practice translation and institutional reinforcement. Across the two periods, cross-boundary work became more platform based, and occupational tasks, standards and projects were more often linked to curricula, teaching resources and assessment. Practice translation was the most consequential mechanism because workplace contact affected teaching only when occupational knowledge was reconstructed for educational use. Institutional reinforcement helped retain such work through evaluation and quality routines, although employer participation, translation capacity and digital or applied-research capability remained uneven. The study extends boundary-crossing research by showing how organisational arrangements can make movement between education and work recurrent and institutionally consequential during VET tertiarisation.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yaxin Wang
AU  - Qing Luo
AU  - Tianyi Zhao
AU  - Qiaoyan Huang
AU  - Xuanyu Ji
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/30
TI  - Building Boundary-crossing Infrastructures for Faculty Development in China’s Vocational Universities
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 2nd International Conference on Education Research and Training Technologies (ERTT 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 136
EP  - 144
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-628-4_15
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-628-4_15
ID  - Wang2026
ER  -