Abstract:

The professional identity of perspective teachers is perceived as agentive and fluid. Therefore, the teacher education is aimed at enabling the perspective teachers to implement innovations and cope with professional challenges. The current research focuses on connection between university education and perspective teachers’ identity formation in terms of attitude towards innovation implementation.

In order to reveal the research problem, the interview and inductive thematic analysis methods were applied. During the research, the pedagogical innovation development and implementation processes were investigated. The data have been collected through the thematic analysis of perspective teachers’ Final thesis (N= 65), interviews with students (N=34) and lecturers (N=7).

The results indicated that the development of pedagogical innovation creates positive preconditions for the expression of the professional competencies and the development of teachers’ identity. The implemented pedagogical innovations mostly refer to didactic methods, curriculum design, social and professional relationship and technology usage in lessons. Empowering students for responsible and creative activities by choosing the object of educational innovation and controlling the process of preparation of Final thesis transforms perspective teacher‘s identity and changes the attitude towards the need to implement innovation in own professional environment.

Keywords:

Teacher identity, pedagogical innovation, pre-service teacher education.