‘I can only learn in dialogue!’ Exploring professional identities in teacher education

Abstract

This article discusses how professional identity, conceptualised as ‘stories professionals tell about themselves at a specific moment in a specific context’, can be portrayed to address its complexity as a dynamic, constructed, cognitive‐emotional, multi‐voiced, and dialogical concept. In order to construct a narrative–biographical method, eight teacher educators reflected on their professional development, using the self‐confrontation method, resulting in self‐narratives. The findings of the study indicate teacher educators’ meaningful experiences can be portrayed in a systematic way using identity components such as job motivation, task perception, task‐feeling, self‐image and self‐feeling. This method can reveal a personal or professional theme to further educators’ development, focusing both on a content level as well as an emotional level. These results were illustrated by one teacher educator’s story. Finally, suitability of this method was discussed for reflection purposes in teacher education and research goals.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Ann for sharing her life‐history and career narrative with us. A pseudonym is used. The authors would like to thank several colleagues from diverse research networks—that is, ‘Interactive Professionalism and Interactive forms of Knowledge‐construction’ and ‘Career‐learning’—for their support as critical friends in the development of this article. In addition, they thank: Dr Ina ter Avest, Free University of Amsterdam; Dr Douwe Beijaard, Eindhoven School of Education; Dr Kathy Brown, University of Chicago; Dr Gaby Jacobs, lector Normative Professionalism, Teacher Training Centre of Special Educational Needs of Fontys University; Dr Frans Meijers, lector ‘Pedagogics of Professional Development’, The Hague University; Dr Paulien Meijer, Institute of Education, Utrecht University; and Ph.D. fellow students Doreen Admiraal, Rita Schildwacht and Jutta König.