MY PROFESSIONAL IDENTITY

As instructors on a bachelor’s degree oriented to the academic training of future professionals on the field of education, questions such as: How do I portray myself as an educator to my students? What kind of practice do I reproduce through my instructional intervention? What kind of a student am I contributing to educate? What kind of an educator am I delivering to society? How consistent is my own educational practice with the educational paradigm that I identify myself with? These questions, among many others, emerge when we think about self-perception and the nature and impact of our daily teaching.

From this starting point, we thought of the idea to open up a space of self reflexion for current students and professors of the bachelor’s degree in education to interact and share life experiences regarding the decision to become an educator.

Albeit, when this project was executed, it was very meaningful that students from other bachelor degrees at the Universidad Autónoma del Carmen, also responded to the announcement and joined.

This is how it was possible to start the dynamic called “My professional identity” in which educational- methodological strategies such as epistemic interrogation, listening, self-narration and a final round up were used.

As part of the planning of this dynamic, at the very first stage participants were asked to answer to the questions about the characteristics of a real teacher vs. the characteristics of an ideal teacher. They were asked to draw a sketch with a limited number of key words. This activity allowed us to identify the different perceptions that our students have conceived around the image of a teacher.

A second stage was dedicated to actual teachers currently involved on the work field for them to share their reasons to become professionals of education, mainly to identify if a previous experience with a specific teacher had influenced his choice and educational practice. Through the questions posed by the participant students, the teacher who was narrating his story realized many things about his own educational practice and its re-signification through time. This was a reference to think about what has been kept or changed in his everyday practice.

During a third stage, participants were given the opportunity to talk about themselves led by questions such as: How did I choose this career? What circumstances lead me to choose this academic program? Did I ever doubt or found and obstacle when I chose this career? Who influenced me to make this choice? Am I able to identify now the individuals who encouraged or discourage me to study this career? The participants started to write their own story to be able to share it later on. They were also asked to include in their story, if that was the case, the experience with their own teachers. The objective was for them to go back in time and tell one’s story and recognizing and incorporating in it the lives of others that might have been meaningful for one self.

To think about the past to understand the present, to recover meaningful moments, experiences, events, feelings or people, at the same time makes us think about what makes them meaningful, and what makes our everyday practice meaningful.