Many governments around the world have been using teacher policy to improve their teacher workforces. While some of those policy endeavors realized intended goals, many others did not. Scholars have proposed theoretical tools to interpret this policy-practice divide, among which the sensemaking framework (Spillane, Reiser, & Reimer, 2002) is the one that emphasizes the central role of policy actors in education reforms, especially how they construct meanings about and act on policy signals. As informed by the sensemaking framework, mounting empirical evidence generated in relatively individually-oriented societies (e.g., United States) has confirmed the agency of policy actors in teacher workforce reforms. But to date, little is known about the agency of policy actors in less individually-oriented contexts, and in what ways sensemaking contributes to the agency of policy actors. Guided by a sensemaking framework tailored for studying teacher workforce reforms, this qualitative case study investigates how six policy actors carry out three teacher policies in one rural county in China. From May to August 2016, I stayed at the research site and collected a range of data, including multiple interviews with each of the participants, observation notes of policy implementation events, and archival data about the policy impact. My analysis of the data was an iterative process of inductive and deductive coding, cross-unit analysis (i.e., participant, policy, and time as a unit), and triangulating emerging assertions with multiple sources of data and external reviewers. My analysis leads to two major findings. First, I identified four sensemaking activities that the participants used to navigate their implementation of the policies. These were sense-orientation—seeking a general sense of direction for policy implementation; sense-specification—mapping out a specific implementing scheme; sense-giving—negotiating collective meanings for implementation; sense-adaptation—adapting thoughts and actions according to the changing circumstances. Second, the participants’ sensemaking caused a ripple effect and ultimately exerted impact on the size, quality, and structure of the local teacher workforce, and the impact was mediated by a set of socio-cultural factors (e.g., anti-corruption campaign, guanxi and mianzi in traditional Chinese culture). This study contributes to the existing literature a conceptualization of policy actors’ sensemaking process. It also suggests that even for those working at the ground level and in a collectively-oriented system, policy actors are not passive followers but active change-makers. The findings also highlight the cultural dimension of policy implementation, which I argue should be addressed more explicitly in future policy studies.
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