Study On Ests' Professional Identity

Teachers' professional identity increasingly attracts researchers' interests.Student teachers are becoming the popular research subjects.Professional identity is not only the resource and motivation of teacher education,but also it is the effect indicator of teacher education.Previous studies indicated that the development of professional identity had promoted teachers' decision making,well-being,effectiveness,and attrition.Taking the importance of professional identity for teacher into consideration,the current study adopted the mixed methods to explore how ESTs' professional identity were formed and developed in LTEP.This study focused on the current status of ESTs' professional identity,the process of construction and the university influencing factors in order to investigate ESTs' professional identity,based on the social identity theory,self identity theory,and identity status theory.This study was aimed to answer the following questions:(1)What was the current status of ESTs' professional identity in the LTEP? Were there differences in ESTs' professional identity in terms of demographic information,such as gender,grade and hometown?(2)How did ESTs construct or develop teacher professional identity in the LTEP?(3)Which university factors affected the professional identity construction or development of ESTs the most in terms of curriculum,teaching force and campus atmosphere? In order to answer the research questions mentioned above,the author adopted 279 ESTs as research subjects from a normal university in northwest of China.The data was collected from questionnaires and semi-interview.The questionnaires were analyzed by SPSS and AMOS.The results of the research were shown as follows: 1)the overall ESTs' professional identity was relatively high.Among the four dimensions,their professional identity ranging from high to low was professional emotion,professional evaluation,professional cognition,and professional behavior and tendency.2)There were significant differences on professional identity in terms of demographic variables.In other words,the female ESTs' professional identity was higher than that of male ESTs.There was significant difference on professional identity between the female ESTs and male ESTs.The professional identity of ESTs from the village was higher than that of the students from the city.There was significant difference on professional identity between the ESTs from city and ESTs from village.Generally speaking,the ESTs' professional identity was gradually increased as the grade grows.3)ESTs' professional identity was constructed by the communication of the context,which was dynamic,unstable,complex,was an ongoing process in the LTEP.The study found that they underwent identity diffusion stage,identity exploration stage and identity orientation stage.4)The university factors were closely related with ESTs' professional identity.The development of ESTs' professional identitywas influenced by curriculum designed,teaching force,and campus atmosphere.Among of the three factors,the curriculum designed was the dominant factor affecting the development of ESTs' professional identity.The university factors exerted a different influence on professional cognition,professional behavior and tendency,professional emotion,and professional evaluation.Finally,some feasible suggestions of improving ESTs' professional identity and limitations of the current study were put forward.The feasible suggestions of improving ESTs' professional identity included changing the traditional concept of teacher profession,reforming the curriculum system,building humanistic the campus atmosphere,strengthening educators' example roles.