INVESTIGATING THE FORMATION OF PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY AMONG PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS

• In the current paper, we introduce a questionnaire, inspired by socio-cultural tradition [1] and Dialogical Self Theory [2], that was developed to explore the formation of a teacher's professional identity. The questionnaire presents students with six pedagogical dilemmas, using the traditional sentence completion task [3] that provides the temporal profiles of the coordination of personal orientations and professional roles. Next to the dilemmas, students are presented with different solutions that were composed using two dimensions, emotional response to the dilemma and personal or professional role orientation in the solution. Typical situations were chosen that would activate the inner dialogue between "I as a person" and "I as a professional". An empirical study was conducted among 234 pre-service teachers in one university in Estonia to evaluate the properties of the developed questionnaire and to answer the following research questions: 1. How do pre-service teachers solve the different pedagogical dilemmas? 2. What is the relationship between school practicum and pedagogical study experience and the presentation of professional positions in pre-service teachers' answers?

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Utbildningsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Educational Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

professional identity

professional role

pre-service teachers

self

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)