This paper discusses the results of an investigation on critical professional identity development among student teachers. Our objectives are to present to assess support strategies for the development of critical professional identity through multimedia journaling and the encouragement of the use of ICT as a tool for personal and professional growth among student teachers. In pursuing such objectives, we hope to contribute to enrich the training of education students by supporting them to reflect on who they are and who they want to become professionally.  

Our focus is the development of a professional identity critique in initial student teacher education. We departure from three basic assumptions. First, we assume that professional identity developed throughout academic training and later in the work environment is not always critical, that is, it is not always constructed through processes that include questioning and reflection practices which lead to significant changes in the ways students think and act in education (Trede & McEwen, 2012; Huda & Teh, 2018). Secondly, we consider that it is possible and necessary that support mechanisms be made available to student teachers in their process of elaborating a critical professional identity, mechanisms that facilitate the integration, questioning and interpretation of content learning, on the one hand, and initial contacts with the professional environment in internship centers, on the other (Dvir & Avissar, 2014). Thirdly, we believe that support for the development of a critical professional identity can and should begin as soon as possible, with the first year of university being the ideal time to begin the journey that will lead student teachers to become fully aware professionals, prepared for the challenges of a constantly changing society.  
   

Professional identities are shaped by a range of non-neutral forces, interests and values. The process of becoming a teacher is in part mastering the discursive dimension that shapes the profession and the ICT tools available in the contemporary communicative landscape. In fact, educational practices are essentially communicative events (Rogers, 2011) that materialize through discourse, here understood as a multimodal social practice (Kress, 2003). Discourse reflects and constructs the social world through many different sign systems that are expressed in texts, conversations, still or moving images such as video, sound and other semiotic interactions (Kress, 2018). From a social semiotic perspective, learning is semiotic work that names both the output and the processes of interpretation actively and voluntarily carried out by the learner (Kress, 2018).  

Reflection is therefore critical for the development of a professional identity and the communication skills necessary to the educators nowadays.

In this present study we counted with the participation of 241 students (195 women and 46 men) enrolled in a Teacher Education program. The activities proposed to them are developed in the framework of the research project “Multimedia creation for the development of critical professional identity”. Students’ participation in this research consisted in performing a learning activity proposed by their teachers during the second semester of 2020. Students were requested to create an electronic portfolio (e-portfolio) with four entries. In each entry, they should do a series of guided reflections which were triggered by questions. Students were told that there were no right or wrong answers; they could use any mode they preferred in order to add content to their entries: written text, image, video, audio or a combination any of these modes; and finally, they were reminded that the script which guided their reflections should not be understood as a questionnaire, but as a trigger. The reflection scripts sent to the students had four main themes: 1) Who am I? 2) Who I would like to be? 3) My teaching career and 4) Future expectations 4). The scripts for each theme were similar. Students were asked to think about themselves socially, their communication and teamwork skills, their affective and emotional skills, their physical condition, their academic life and their family. The students had a week to complete each entry.  After the e-potfolio completion, the students were contacted through e-mail to participate in an online survey. In this same email, participants were informed of our research objectives, of the voluntary nature of the study, and the confidentiality and anonymity of their answers. 180 students (24 men, 156 women) answered the questionnaire.   The questionnaire was previously validated by two researchers in educational technology. It was a self-administered online questionnaire with three categories addressing student teachers’ professional identity development, their use of ICT and their experience with Mahara, the e e-portfolio tool chosen for this research project. A 10-point Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 10 (strongly agree) was used.

The overall mean of responses in which student teachers assessed how easy it was to create their e-portfolio was 7.2 (SD. 1.65). When asked how useful creating their e-portfolios was, the overall mean of responses was  7.3 (SD. 2.2). Participants perceived that creating their e-portfolios was more relevant to them in a personal level M.7.31 (SD. 2.17) then to their professional training M.6.83 (SD. 2.2). Creating their e-portfolios mostly helped them reflect on who they are M. 7.78, who they want to be M. 7.28 and on what they would like to change M. 6.94, while 7.8% of the participants felt that creating the portfolio did not help them reflect (SD. 2.17). 72.2% of the participants felt that creating their e-portfolio helped them develop a critical stance towards their personal identity and 71.7% felt the same about their professional identity. 37.2% of the students declared performing the task helped them develop a critical stance tads their university, 30.0% towards their family, 18.3% towards their teachers and 13.9% towards their classmates (SD. 2.17).   In a nutshell, the creation of e-portfolios has proven to be a useful tool for developing a critical stance among student teachers. The task is perceived by them as more useful on a personal than professional level. 

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