As the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread all over the world, many educational institutions have shifted to a full-time online teaching mode. Although online teaching has been widely explored, the unprecedented initiatives of mass-scale full-time online education at the secondary school level are yet to be unravelled. By using a qualitative approach and drawing on the conceptualisation of learning engagement and Community of Inquire model as conceptual frameworks, this study explored how secondary school students in China engaged with online education during the COVID-19 pandemic and what factors influenced their sustainable online learning engagement. This research examined the perspectives of twenty-four students and five teachers through semi-structured interviews and observations of online classes. Findings indicate that the students’ online learning engagement involved three inter-related categories: emotional, cognitive and behavioural engagement. Contextual factors influencing the sustainability of students’ online learning engagement were identified by the participants, including teacher presence, parental involvement, and a supportive learning environment/community. The findings in this paper have implications for teacher development, family support and establishment of e-teaching platforms in emergency remote teaching for young students. Finally, the study puts forward best practices for the sustainable development of the emergency remote teaching in the future public crises.

This paper reports on a study of the identity perceptions of undergraduate and postgraduate students of Mandarin at UK universities. Interviews with 26 students were conducted over a three-year period, most of whom were multilingual. Approximately half spoke English as an additional language. The remainder were native speakers of English. The paper shows how identities of learners of Mandarin are complex due to the varied experiences they brought into their studies. In light of the kinds of students found to be learning Mandarin, the paper advocates that approaches to teaching and learning Mandarin need to be more rooted in biographical, social and intercultural understandings of identity. To this end, the paper proposes interculturality in preference to the more traditional notion of intercultural competence as a conceptual frame for the learning of Mandarin. Perspectives based on interculturality question the limitations of traditional conceptualisations of otherness. Such perspectives attempt to locate interculturality within a more nuanced understanding of intercultural difference. The paper argues that in this way the teaching and learning of Chinese as a global language can more readily act as an effective means for learners to orient themselves to the Chinese society and ‘culture’, and to the wider world.

This article draws on interview data to report how students of Mandarin in UK universities were exposed to and responded to ‘Chinese culture' during their studies. The experiences that the students shared and the ways they responded demonstrated their understanding of cultural complexity, incorporating a fluid and dynamic view of culture as interculturality. Participants interviewed tended to move beyond talking about cultural differences. They showed their transnational sensitivity and awareness of cultural diversity, and some reflexivity. Key to understanding participants' responses was their negotiation with discourses about ‘Chinese culture’, engagement with their personal life and their experience of sojourning abroad.

This special section explores the vital and multifaceted relationship between education and social sustainability. It examines the far-reaching role that education plays in addressing the urgent ch...

This study explores how international and interdisciplinary research collaboration is experienced and sustained in practice, with particular attention to the roles of early‐career researchers (ECRs). Drawing on a collaborative autoethnographic approach, we analyse four collaboratively constructed narrative vignettes from a three‐year UK–China research project. The vignettes capture researchers' lived experiences of working across epistemic, cultural and institutional boundaries. The findings show that collaboration is sustained not primarily through formal coordination or technical alignment but through ongoing negotiation of epistemic boundaries, power asymmetries and care practices in collaborative work. ECRs frequently encounter epistemic boundaries as sites of uncertainty, legitimacy negotiation, and vulnerability, shaped by career stage, institutional location and governance contexts. Meanwhile, they occupy intermediary roles as linguistic, disciplinary and cultural mediators, making them indispensable while exposing them to disproportionate epistemic and relational labour. The analysis further shows that care practices, such as attentiveness, reflexivity, emotional support and coordination across differences, are central to sustaining collaboration. When care labour is privately absorbed by ECRs, collaboration risks exhaustion; when recognised and embedded in collective and leadership practices, it supports sustainable collaboration. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the value of CAE for revealing the micro‐dynamics of collaborative research.