Professional identity among recently enrolled teacher students

Research topic/aim
What understanding of teaching and the teacher profession do recently enrolled students bring along when entering teacher education?
Dan Lortie coined ‘apprenticeship of observations’ (Lortie, 1975) to mean the way teacher students are marked by years of observations of their future occupation. Later, Darling Hammond reconfirmed Lorties point: Because of the many years of observation, teaching can appear as an easy task and there can be a lack of professional understanding of the job as a teacher (Darling-Hammond, 2006).
The presentation will focus on new teacher students understanding of themselves as teachers. What ideas and notions of teaching do they have? How does their professional identity look?

Theoretical framework
When discussing teacher education, there are different types of coherence involved (Smeby & Hegen, 2014). In our survey we have been preoccupied with biographical coherence. The students do not begin their education as tabula rasa. They arrive with ideas, beliefs and imaginations of both their future job and about teaching. As teacher educators, we must take that into account, but we must also qualify and strengthen their preconceptions. ‘Apprenticeship of observations’ is still a matter of concern for teacher educators.


Methodological design
The presentation is based on a survey conducted among 445 new teacher students at University College Copenhagen. The students were asked to imagine their first day as a teacher and then answer what they thought would be the expectations from respectively themselves, the pupils, the parents and the school management. The questions were intentionally open to encourage the respondents’ own wording of their understanding and prevent predefined answers. The answers were coded thematically in the analysis software Nvivo.

Expected conclusions/findings
Our study revealed that new teacher students were preoccupied with themselves as ‘persons’ rather than professionals (Böwadt & Cortsen, 2024). Of importance for the majority were personal features such as being open, smiling and forthcoming. Only few mentioned professional qualifications. Furthermore, their interest in the pupils primarily dealt with relations or an understanding where teaching only is possible, if you in advance have established good relations with the pupils.


Relevance to Nordic educational research
Our study showed that a predominant group of the new teacher students were mainly focusing on very general and personal qualifications, when we asked about their expectations to themselves. Research shows that a strong professional identity can be helpful for new teachers. If that is true, it is important that the teacher students develop a stronger professional identity where general and personal qualifications are supplemented with professional qualifications. The continuation of this study aims to repeat the survey every year and follow the students into their job as teachers the first two years to see how their understanding of themselves as teachers will develop.


References
Böwadt, P. R. & Cortsen, R. P. (2024). Den første professionsforståelse. Københavns Professionshøjskole.
Darling-Hammond, L. (2006) Constructing 21st-Century Teacher Education.
Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 57 (3): 300-314.DOI:
10.1177/0022487105285962
Lortie, D (1975). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. University of Chicago
Press.