Teacher professional identity (TPI) has become central to understanding teachers’ agency, emotions, and career development, yet existing studies remain largely Western-centric and overlook how gendered hierarchies shape identity in Asian higher education. Little research has examined how female English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers with PhDs in Thailand negotiate their professional selves amid prestige-driven and patriarchal institutions. This study investigates how Thai female EFL teachers with PhDs negotiate professional identities within the intersecting pressures of teaching, research, gender expectations, and hierarchical academic systems. Adopting a critical–dialogical self approach that integrates dialogical self theory (DST) with a feminist perspective, we conceptualize teacher identity as dialogical, relational, and shaped by power-laden structures. Drawing on narrative inquiry supported by corpus-informed thematic analysis, life stories of two Thai female EFL academics were analyzed through the lenses of self-, other-, and structural positioning. Findings reveal hybrid “I-positions” (e.g., educator, mentor, supervisor-researcher) negotiated within institutional hierarchies that reward productivity but undervalue care work. Tensions of role overload, emotional labor, and neoliberal accountability shaped participants’ self-efficacy and resilience. The study extends DST by theorizing professional identity as affective, relational, and structurally embedded, urging institutional policies that recognize hybrid roles and foster equitable, emotionally sustainable academic cultures in non-Western contexts.

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Within the Malaysian context, reading is a critical foundational skill in the learning process, particularly during the early childhood education stages where cognitive development is rapid. This study examines the implementation and overall effectiveness of the specifically designed Easy Reading Module in supporting preschool children who face persistent difficulties in acquiring Malay reading skills, emphasizing qualitative analysis as the primary method. The study was conducted in a preschool located in the Jelebu District, Negeri Sembilan, involving a purposive sample of one preschool teacher and the 25 preschool children who experienced reading difficulties. Data were collected over a comprehensive 12-week intervention period through semi-structured interviews with the teacher and non-participant classroom observations of children’s engagement, confidence, and phonological awareness during their use of the Easy Reading Module. The findings indicate that the Easy Reading Module enhanced children’s engagement, confidence, and phonological awareness, while also supporting more active participation in reading activities within the classroom. The study highlights how structured and developmentally appropriate instructional materials such as the Easy Reading Module can support early literacy acquisition and offers valuable implications for teaching practices, instructional design, and policy development in early childhood literacy education to improve long-term educational outcome. Ultimately, the module’s success in improving literacy skills underscore the necessity of structure instructional materials for advancing earlier teaching practices policy.

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The high rate of digitalization of education services has significantly changed the way education agencies recruit, communicate with, and provide services to potential students. In this respect, data-driven online marketing has become one of the strategic tools that provide individualized educational services, which address the needs of various learner profiles and expectations. The current research paper is a critique of how education agencies have implemented the use of data analytics and digital marketing technologies to shape personalisation strategies and improve student engagement. The qualitative research design was embraced, where a semi-structured interview was conducted with the professionals in education agencies to investigate their experiences, perceptions, and practices concerning data-driven marketing. The results have shown that the use of data-informed decision-making can allow the agencies to optimize the audience segmentation, communication strategy, and service delivery during the student recruitment lifecycle. However, the issues of data integration, ethical issues, and organisational capacity still encroach on the largest scale of personalized approaches. The research paper is also relevant to the already existing literature in both providing empirical information regarding the role of data-driven digital marketing in education agencies and in pointing out its effects on the construction of personalized education services in the increasingly competitive global education market.

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