The purpose of this study was to describe the processes involved in the formation of teachers’ professional identity and pedagogical thinking. In this paper we discuss particularly the relations of the reflections between teachers’ professional identity and their pedagogical thinking. Recent studies have focused on the basis of teachers’ pedagogical thinking, such as the conceptions of learning, pupils and knowledge (Meijer, Verloop & Beijaard 1999), whereas some findings reveal that pedagogical thinking is linked to the rhetoric of school curricula and teaching environments (Connelly, Clandinin & Hen 1997). According to Ropo and Värri (2003), the teaching can be described as a process of searching and constructing one’s identity. Hence, it is by means of the identity that an individual teacher’s pedagogical practice is manifested. Still, fairly little attention so far has been paid to the teachers’ professional identity formation processes in relations of their pedagogical thinking, for instance of the everyday practices in the classroom. Professional identity refers to a teacher as a person, rather than the teacher’s subject knowledge, teaching methods or understanding of curricula. Veugelers (2007) has argued that identity is linked to values, morality and the different phases of an individual’s personality and social development. The postmodern conception of identity implies that there is no such thing as a coherent, solid, and consistent identity (see Hall 2002; Ropo & Värri 2003). From the teacher education point of view, this implies that a permanent professional identity, to which students could be socialized, does not exist. Instead, a teacher’s identity is in a constant process through which the teacher gains a better understanding of herself/himself and her/his relationship with the world. The questions to be researched were as follows: a) What kind of conceptions of learning and teaching do teacher students and experienced teachers have? b) What kind of meanings do they give to themselves, their positions and professional tasks as teachers? c) How should the development of teachers’ professional identity be taken into account in teacher education?

The study was carried out with an autobiographical and hermeneutic approach. The starting point was that people have the tendency to tell their experiences as stories (see Bruner 1990). Also, the stories were understood as links to persons’ values and beliefs, and as aspects to whom, when and where the story was told (see Vaugelers 2007). The informants were mathematics and science student teachers (N = 49) and experienced teachers (N = 42). The experienced teachers had worked in their profession for a minimum of 10 years. The data was made up of thematic interviews and written essays. The analysis of contents was carried out in three stages, with a socio-constructivist approach.

The results show that the teachers seemed to arrange their pedagogical thinking through their professional identity. The descriptions of the identity were very closely linked to the descriptions of self, and to the reflections on pedagogical decision making and practices in the school environment. Four different ways of describing teacher identity was detected on the basis of the narratives named as paradigmatic, reflective, narrative, and ethical.Also, a teacher’s identity, pedagogical thinking and everyday practices were intertwined in these narratives, which reflected different zones of pedagogical orientation named as comfort, problem-oriented, interaction and socio-cultural zone of creativity. The results indicate that there is no connection between a teacher’s positions in different zones and the number of her/his working years. The results suggest that the teacher education should provide a sufficient amount of time for the process of a teacher’s identity formation process. Other implications will be discussed in the paper