The Everyday Professional Experiences of Homeroom Teachers in a Chinese Secondary School

As significant others in the educational process, homeroom teachers play a crucial role in the physical and mental development of students and their adaptation to school life. Much effort has been made to analyze the impact of homeroom teachers’ work on students, but little attention has been paid to the everyday professional experiences of the homeroom teachers themselves. This article examines the perceptions and action strategies of homeroom teachers regarding their daily work, using a typical county secondary school in North China as an example, and to gain insights into the shaping mechanisms behind the individual actions of homeroom teachers, thereby clarifying the structured characteristics of the daily experiences and institutional logic of homeroom teachers’ work. The findings indicate that under the guidance of totalism and instrumental rationality in educational policies, the work of homeroom teachers gradually falls into a vicious cycle of job alienation, compliance burden, interweaving of meanings, and strategicism. This unintended consequence is shaped by mechanisms such as administrative expansion, training disembedding, rigid assessment, insufficient motivation, and lack of social support.