This paper discusses the role of teacher´s emotional and personal identities in the development of professional identity, using a narrative writing task.  Our point of departure is the feeling that it is not possible to conduct any autobiographical research on education, without making reference to the concept of identity, since this idea reveals particular ways of being and acting (González Calvo & Barba, 2013).

Education researchers claim that policy and curriculum act as powerful discursive resources which define qualified and professional practice (Watson, 2006). In spite of this, a teacher´s perspective focused on technical skills (Korthagen, 2004) and centred on what they best control (Beijaard, Meijerd, Morine-Dershimer, & Tillema, 2005) is not sufficient. Teaching must consider personal aspects such as: enthusiasm, flexibility, affection, humour, honesty and sensitivity, among others (Day, Elliot, & Kington, 2005; Hen & Sharavi-Nov, 2014).

In this sense, the central argument of our study explores the role of personal and emotional identity in teaching, because it is known that teaching is an emotional practice (Hargreaves, 1998, 2000) and becoming a teacher is an emotional experience (Karlsson, 2013), mainly because teaching is a social practice.

The term identity refers to `who or what someone is, the various meanings someone can attach to oneself or the meanings attributed to oneself by others´ (Beijaard, 1995, p. 282), and teacher identity is well acknowledged to play a significant role in teacher development (Izadinia, 2015; Stenberg, Karlsson, Pitkaniemi, & Maaranen, 2014). Many researchers share a common notion that identity is a changing, active process and that teacher identity is influenced by a range of external experiences, such as life experiences, and internal experiences, such as emotions and personal factors. Furthermore, teacher identity is the result of a progressing dialog with students, parents and colleagues. Then, the teaching identity is the result of an interaction between the personal experiences of teachers and the social, cultural and institutional environment.

In this sense, teachers´ emotional and professional identities are important because it is believed to strongly determine how teachers teach, how they develop professionally, how they approach educational changes and how they interact with their pupils (Yan, Evans, & Harvey, 2013). Moreover, according to James-Wilson (2001), there are inevitable interrelationships between personal, emotional and professional identities, because `the ways in which teachers form their professional identities are influenced by both how they feel about  themselves and how they feel about their students´ (p. 29).

So, it is important that teachers identify how their emotions inform the ways that their feelings increase or limit possibilities in their teaching, and how these emotions enable them to think and act differently, because they play a key role in the construction of teaching identity.

For all these reasons, it is necessary to study teacher´s emotional experiences and identities, because teaching is not just a technical enterprise, but is inseparably connected to teachers´ personal lives (Nias, 1996). Besides, teachers invest their selves in their work and so they closely merge their sense of personal and professional identity. As Shapiro (2009) states, through the expression of emotional identity, teachers can develop greater reflexivity, stronger solidarity and bigger sensitivity toward their students.  

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