INVESTIGATING THE FORMATION OF PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY AMONG PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS

In the current paper, we introduce a questionnaire, inspired by socio-cultural tradition (Valsiner, 2001) and Dialogical Self Theory (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010), 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 (Symonds, 1947) 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 241 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 work and study experience and the presentation of professional positions in pre-service teachers’ answers?

Data analysis is currently in progress. Preliminary results show that the pre-service teachers with more extended pedagogical experiences communicate somewhat less negative emotions and apply more professional role expectations when solving the pedagogical dilemmas.