Construcción de la identidad profesional del docente: Un desafío permanente

Abstract

This paper analyse the need and importance of building up teachers' professional identity in the context of a reflexive, investigative and collegial work. This process is considered one of the key ways to improve the quality of the teaching practice and the students formation as well. Building up this professional identity is both an individual as well as a collective process that starts at the beginning of teacher education and lasts throughout the whole professional career. Critical reflection is considered to be a key practice in teacher education as it permits prospective teachers to contextualise education within the social, cultural, and political factors that condition its practice. Investigative practices may facilitate the construction of educational reality from different approaches as well as the understanding of teaching and learning as processes to be systematically reviewed and analysed . If teachers reflect on and do research work about their own practices with other teachers, they can recover the practice of cooperation and collegiality, and identify the richness and potentiality of living the sense of community. All of these practices constitute a way for realising that the professional identity process cannot be constructed by outsiders, on the contrary, it represents a shared responsibility for teachers.