Negotiating personal cases for shaping a professional identity in cyber space

A Teacher Education (TE) on line laboratory offered an asyncrounous environment for “reflective experience” to students, in a framework of blended education. This has been the context for a research project based on four topics. • Professional Identity that receives increasing attention in the field of TE (Korthagen 2004; Berry et al. 2007); • Collaboration as a key aspect for teacher's culture (Woods et al., 1997). • Case based pedagogy that is one way of effectively integrating learning with practice (Ben Peretz & Kupferberg, 2007) and providing student teachers with opportunities to develop “professional” ways of acting (Harrington et al., 1996). • On line, asinchronous, text-based environments that foster communities of inquiry' buildings (Garrison, Anderson, 2003). The research has two aims: to explore different constructions of professional profiles in pre-service and in-service teacher-students, pre-post case-work activities; to analyse the nature of web forum interactions among future teachers and in-service teachers and specifically social cognitive processes. The subjects are: 18 subjects in-service teachers, 29 traditional students. They worked on line for three months. The activities were: 1. the students wrote individually a profile of what it means to be a “good teacher”, before and at the end of the case-work; 2. remembering their scholastic experiences, the subjects shared and built one problematic real life case; 3. they discussed and justified different solutions and wrote a syntesis of these. Data analysis was conducted in three moments: We applied the Specificity Analysis and the Correspondence Analysis to the pre-post profiles, through a software of text analysis. Using Garrison and Anderson’s content categories two researchers coded the social, cognitive and teaching discussion segments. They established an interrater reliability of 84%. We calculated density figures for each forum. Using the Harrington's coding system (1996), we identified the specific aspect of critical reflection of teachers in the written syntesis of cases. Pre-post text analyses have shown that at the end of the activities the students elaborated a more articulate profile than at the beginning. The content analysis of on-line discussions have shown: •a dialogical co-constructive model of discussing in teacher-students vs a “strategic individualism” in in-service teachers; •an extremely embedded professional identity in teacher-students; •the emergence of a professional identity in pre-service students correlated with flexible, personal and social identities. The analysis of case works demonstrate that the students and the teachers solve their cases through different perspectives. The students’writings are student-centred but with references to authoritative and theoretical sources. The teachers’ perspective is more holistic, but the in-service teachers' analysis, and the solutions, are strictly based on experience and practical knowledge with no attempt to link the issue to the theoretical concepts.