Articulation, validation and transformation: exploring the integrated development of teacher professional identity and pedagogical content knowledge among vocational fitness educators

Vocational fitness educators occupy roles requiring sophisticated pedagogical reasoning, yet many enter from industry with limited teaching qualifications and work in commercially constrained, assessment-focused settings. Research has tended to treat pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and teacher professional identity (TPI) separately, while this group remains largely absent from the literature. This study examined how six educators at one private training provider, holding teaching qualifications from Level 3 to Level 7, developed PCK and TPI through three Content Representations (CoRes) workshops over three months. Pre- and post-intervention interviews, reflective journals and successive CoRes documents were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, with themes generated inductively within three research-question domains. Participants moved from tacit to explicit pedagogical reasoning, reorganised content around learners, anticipated misconceptions and integrated assessment with instruction. They developed more educationally grounded identities, greater confidence, a stronger professional community and clearer purpose. Qualification background shaped starting points and trajectories without determining outcomes. Developments in knowledge and identity repeatedly co-occurred in the same episodes and extracts. The study interprets this pattern through three literature-derived mechanisms: articulation, validation and transformation. It proposes an integrated model in which PCK and TPI are mutually reinforcing, with implications for teacher development in vocational education.