The subject matter of this research is to study the identity of teachers in training process, with a view to establishing elements that form their identity as teachers, through assignments they are granted in the courses they take. It is expected, as a result thereof, that the understanding of the attribution and identification or belonging movements may offer information for the improvement of the teacher education processes. It is also intended to promote, along its development, theoretical approximations and articulations with other subjects of the Thematic Project, such as: professionality and social representations, in order to broaden the theoretical grounds for understanding the teaching and its training. As theoretical grounds, we will resort to authors that have been dedicating themselves to the study of the identity, focusing on its constitution process at work and social representations. Thus, we will recapture some ideas of Ciampa, Claude Dubar, Serge Moscovici and Denise Jodelet, whose concepts will form the basis of our analyses. The research is being developed with students attending the Teaching Degree course at a private college of the Western zone suburb of São Paulo. The instruments used in collecting information were questionnaires and half-structured interviews, in addition to analysis of the discipline plans and pedagogical projects of the courses. Conceivably, interviews with some course teachers or coordinators will also be conducted in order to investigate subjects related to the attribution. The data analysis of questionnaires proposed in the 1st Stage is being started. In the first place, we have explored some responses appearing in the research questionnaires about the teachers’ social representations, with a view to surveying evidence of identifications with the teaching profession, and we should conduct an analysis aimed at the following attribution axis: what is the investigated subjects’ understanding on what others attribute to the teacher’s profession and what do the subjects themselves intend to perform? Keywords: identity, representations, subjectivity and teachers’ education

To study identity demands establishing paths, in the search of disclosing their forming processes. When it is about studying the identities at work, from attributions that articulate themselves with the belongings, in a permanent and ongoing process, that is, in a dynamics that sometimes evidences what others attribute to us and sometimes evidences how we identify ourselves with what the other attributes to us, it is necessary to find instruments and ways that allow us to seize the identities without losing their characteristic movement. Investigations about identity have been using narrative as a data collection instrument, generally caused by some incentive that drives the subject to talk about himself. While narrating about himself, this subject recovers his history. Rescuing the past means to have a different understanding of the past and present history, assuming often a critical position or, at least, conferring new meanings on the narrated situations. Thus, the facts and events recovered by the memory and narrated by the subject are always new, in the sense of being revealed under contours of new meanings and senses. Therefore, an investigation that studies identity will not deal with stagnant, static or finished data. The investigator, inserted within the human sciences area, should hear/listen to, observe/see, reflect/feel the processes that are perceived, either through narrative or observation, or even in the analysis of documents. With respect to identifications and non-identifications, it is necessary to analyze the routes whereby and wherein teachers build “identities for themselves”, that is, “the story they tell themselves about who they are.” (DUBAR, 1997:107). At the time in which the present project is generated, we have thought that four methodological data collection strategies might be used in this research, highlighting, however, that new strategies may compose the project and others may be abandoned, depending on the research development. Step 1 – Survey (stage already applied) – Questionnaire: at a first moment, data were collected at a Higher Education Institution of the City of Osasco, which offers the Pedagogy and Language Arts course. A questionnaire in the shape of a Letter was applied, in order to explore the possibilities of future procedures and the availability of students in participating in the interviews. The respondents of these questionnaires were 101 students attending the first year of the Language Arts and Pedagogy program (data under analysis process). The reason for selecting this group is the fact that they are beginning the course, what enable us to identify the representations they bring from their school trajectory, without the involvement at work or a more formalized knowledge of the teaching theory and practice. Step 2 – Data refinement – Half-structured individual interviews with 10 students – future teachers, encouraged to tell their stories, representations and expectations from a verbal stimulation. What was attempted to access is the life history of students, future teachers, focusing on the biographical process (Dubar, 1997) where the subject narrates himself to himself (“tells the story from himself to himself”). Collective interviews with a group consisting of up to 10 investigated subjects (after the above proposed narratives), aimed at identifying the representations that permeate the group. Step 3 – Scenario of institutional attributions – Analysis of documents: pedagogical project of the educational institution and teaching plans of disciplines of the course they attend, because they contain elements that grant attributions to future teachers and constitute their identity. Interviews will be possibly carried out with some course teachers or coordinators, in order to investigate attribution-related questions.

ANALYSIS AND RESULTS The data analysis of questionnaires proposed in Step 1 is being started. In the first place, we have explored some responses appearing in the research questionnaires about the social representations of teaching, with a view to surveying evidence of identifications with the teaching profession. We have found a number of possible articulations and should perform an analysis aimed at the following attribution axis: what is the investigated subjects’ understanding on what others attribute to the teacher’s profession and what do the subjects themselves intend to perform? Given that from and beyond such answers, the means for accessing the data necessary for understanding the identity is the narrative, a preponderant constitutive factor as to what the subject narrates about himself to himself, and given that this process is made through the life history or the relation (reading) of art works, novels, films, etc., we will analyze the individual interview data with ten students of the pedagogy course and ten of the language arts course who answered the first questionnaire within the perspective of the above explained theoretical fundamentals. The identification of explicative categories or cores of meaning seems a fertile alternative for such discussion. With respect to the timeframe, the plan is to accomplish this investigation in three years.