Student Teachers’ Professional Identity: Research in the Republic of Serbia

Building professional identities of student teachers at the beginning of their vocational education and professional training provides opportunities to explore diversity of practice and provide external support. In the available literature, there is only a small number of studies that explore the professional identity of pre-service and student teachers. The main problem of this research is to examine self-reported attitudes toward student teachers’ professional identity dimensions. The second aim of the presented study was examining the reliability and concurrent validity of the Student Teachers Professional Identity Scale (Fisherman & Abbot, 1998), which was used for the first time in Serbia. The initial sample of respondents consisted of 158 students from the Faculty of Pedagogical Sciences. Results indicate that university students perceive teaching roles more as a specific job and not as a profession. They are goal-directed towards their job as teachers and perceive their practice as a part of their studies and not as a result of their professional identity development as teachers. The mentioned scale (for one-factor solution with the satisfactory criterion of confirmatory factor analysis) obtained very good reliability (α = .935) and concurrent validity indicators and values. Researching professional identity at early career stages can help educators to emphasize the multidimensionality and complexity of the teaching profession.