‘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.