Chapter 2: The Identity of Student-Teachers: Becoming a Professional

This chapter offers an overview of how student-teacher professional identity is understood and constructed from a dialogical approach during initial teacher education. It employs the Dialogical Self Theory to arrive at a new conceptualization of professional identity, one that is able to reconcile identity’s personal nature with its social and contextual dimensions. Identity construction is viewed here as a transitional process, a move from the position of a student to a professional position. In turn, these positions act to define reciprocal relationships, generating a tension that is constantly changing and re-shaping the identity landscape. In the last section, we pose an approach to a pedagogy of identity and identify the sorts of pedagogically meaningful situations that promote the student-teacher development.