Increasingly wider income inequalities have caused severe educational disparities among students with different socioeconomic statuses. To address the problem, solutions have been suggested from perspectives such as school-level organization, student health, living conditions and so on. In this research, we focus on an emerging concept of preservice teachers' competence—equity-oriented teaching competence which can be understood as preservice teachers’ teaching beliefs, skills and practices that foreground equity and social justice (Blömeke et al., 2015; Cochran-Smith et al., 2016). Research has demonstrated the importance of preservice teachers’ equity-oriented teaching competence in promoting educational equity for socially minoritized students (e.g., Chubbuck, 2010; Gorski, 2017). Moreover, studies have shown the crucial role of initial teacher education in shaping preservice teachers’ teaching competence (e.g., Cochran‐Smith, 2010; Milner, 2010). However, most research regarding preservice teachers’ teaching competence and initial teacher education is conducted in Western contexts, which leaves the East, especially China, largely unexplored (for reviews, Liao et al., 2022; Liu et al., 2020).

This research aims to bridge the gap between the East and West by conducting a systematic literature review of how initial teacher education prepares preservice teachers to engage with equity and social justice-related issues in China. More specifically, as equity and social justice are political topics situated in different social contexts (Dyches & Boyd, 2017), we first identified those concepts' understanding in Chinese scholarship. Secondly, we intended to grasp an overview of the empirical research trend of educational equity in teacher education in China. In other words, rather than following a specific theoretical framework to analyze selected empirical research articles, we want to know the research foci, design and findings of equity-related issues in teacher education studies in China. Therefore, the research questions that drive this study are as follows:

1) what is the understanding of equity and social justice in teacher education in the Chinese scholarship?

2) how does initial teacher education prepare preservice teachers to engage with equity-related issues in China?

The objectives of this research lie in two aspects. First, it aims to recommend research gaps for future teacher education studies in China. Second, it is expected to provide implications for education policymakers and teacher training programs.

We followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines and located articles published in both Chinese and English in peer-reviewed journals from multiple rounds of database screening. Particularly, we searched five databases (i.e., China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang Data, Eric-Ovid, Web of Science and Scopus) in December 2023 using three main criteria: 1) included keywords such as “equity”, “initial teacher education”, “preservice teachers” and “China” in the title, abstract and/or keywords; 2)empirical studies published in Chinese and English in peer-reviewed journals; 3) a focus on the preparation of preservice teachers in initial teacher education. It should be noted that articles concentrating on Hongkong, Macau and Taiwan are excluded in this review study as mainland China is our main research context. By applying search terms such as “equity” and “preservice teachers” in the 5 databases, it yielded a total of 2377 articles. In the first round of selection, we removed duplicates and applied criteria such as peer-reviewed journals for English publications and core journal articles for Chinese publications (Liu et al., 2020). It narrowed the pool to 927 articles. Then, in the following round of screening, we used other inclusion criteria like empirical research and research context, and we obtained 258 articles. In the last round of selection, we screened those articles by the criterion of preparation of preservice teachers in initial teacher education, which led to a final selection of 22 articles. To synthesize the evidence base, we adopted the thematic analysis approach with a combination of inductive and deductive methods. Specifically, we inductively analyzed the 22 articles and generated four themes according to their focused equity issues: socioeconomic issues, ethnic issues, disability issues and diversity in general. Then, we deductively grouped those articles into the four themes and identified other sub-categories in each theme: 1) implementing tailored teacher training programs for socioeconomic issues; 2) incorporating multicultural education for ethnic issues; 3) exploring preservice teachers’ understanding of and attitudes towards inclusive education for disability issues; 4) nurturing preservice teachers’ awareness and beliefs for all students. When articles were difficult to be grouped solely into one category, we sought to categorize them based on the most predominant theme (Morrison et al., 2008).

In this study, we aimed to contribute to the global research equilibrium of preservice teachers’ teaching competence and initial teacher education by focusing on one of the inadequately studied contexts—China. To gain a better understanding of equity and initial teacher education in Chinese scholarship, we conducted a systematic literature review of how initial teacher education prepares preservice teachers to engage with equity-related issues. Yet, the data analysis is still ongoing and we will provide the complete results in the ECER presentation. The expected findings from this research are shown as follows: 1) the complex characteristics of equity and social justice in the educational and sociopolitical system of China; 2) the various developmental status of different equity-related issues in China; 3) different measures and solutions in teacher education to deal with equity-related issues in education and society. Our research is expected to identify research gaps for future studies investigating education equity from the perspective of teacher education in China. It can provide implications for educational policies and teacher training programs.

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