<i>Think-Pair-Share was once unthinkable</i> : student-centered instruction, teacher identity, and pedagogical disruption in post-socialist higher education

Student-centered instruction is promoted as a pathway to inclusive and engaging higher education. However, it is assumed that lecturers can readily adopt facilitative roles, overlooking how teaching identities are historically and ideologically formed. This qualitative study critically examines teacher identity reconstruction in post-Socialist higher education, where monologic teaching has long served pedagogical and ideological functions. Drawing on two phases of in-depth interviews with 14 university professors in Mongolia following sustained engagement with dialogic teaching practices, the analysis traces how encounters with these practices destabilized inherited assumptions about authority, legitimacy, and control. The findings show that student-centered instruction challenges the ideological foundations of teacher-centered authority and generates identity tensions that cannot be resolved through technique adoption alone. The study argues that meaningful student inclusion depends on teacher inclusiveness and that pedagogical reform in post-Socialist contexts requires sustained attention to the ideological, emotional as well as professional dimensions of teacher identity reconstruction.