Head-up Behaviors as Expressions of Learner Identity in Vocational College Classrooms: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

This study adopts a learner identity perspective to examine how head-up/head-down behaviors, as visible attentional behaviors in vocational college classrooms, reflect students’ classroom engagement and identity enactment. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 23 students from six vocational colleges in Guangdong Province, China. The interview data were analyzed using thematic coding and contextual analysis in NVivo, with attention to how students interpret and adjust their observable attentional behaviors across different course types, patterns of classroom interaction, and supervisory contexts. The findings are threefold. First, head-up/head-down behaviors are not a single indicator of attention but rather highly contextualized and strategic performances. Second, students’ assessments of a course’s perceived usefulness, the functional demands of classroom tasks, and external supervision (for example, roll call or classroom patrols) jointly shape their visible participation behaviors. Third, before being read by teachers or observers as a “lack of participation,” head-down behavior is frequently justified by students as note-taking, information retrieval, reflection, or a strategy for conserving effort. Based on these results, this paper advocates adopting a composite of multiple indicators for assessing classroom engagement—combining visible attentional behaviors with verbal responses, task outputs, and implicit participation indicators such as resource searches—and offers practical recommendations to enhance vocational relevance in course design to promote substantive engagement.