The ethics of care and the professional identity of teachers: implications for professionalization processes

Abstract

ABSTRACT This work reviews the approach of the ethics of care in education and analyzes how the foundations of this ethicality contribute to the dialogical construction of teachers’ professional identity (attribution, projection, development and transformation). Professional identity is questioned when care is considered an epistemological and ethical approach to educational relationships, thereby encouraging reflection on the interactive components of identity (projection, disposition, worldview and action plans) and on the meaning of professional competence. This reflection produces transversal implications for teacher professionalization processes, which in turn results in the identification of training devices such as narratives, conversations and reflective and operational practices that help to turn the identity and the moral work of teaching into the central topic.