Dialogue for Bridging Student Teachers’ Personal and Professional Identity

Abstract

This research on student teachers’ professional identity formulation contributes to the emerging development of utilizing dialogical approaches in teacher identity research. Following the conceptual framework and practical implications of Alsup (2006) and Hermans and Hermans-Konopka (2010), we developed support for professional identity development. The main aim of the support was to facilitate the negotiation and solving of tensions between student teachers’ professional and personal I-positions. Data was collected in the form of written assignments from 50 students from different subject teacher training curricula during a pedagogical course seminar in one university in Estonia. Inductive analysis was conducted on the written assignment by two researchers. The results revealed that the developed support was functional for communicating tensions between conflicting positions and partly functional for solving tensions between positions. Implications for practice and further research are presented.