Teachers’ professional identity reflects their attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, and how they deal with teaching conditions with their competence (Karousiou et al., 2018). Beginning teachers with low professional identity might feel challenging to adjust to the teaching profession, and accordingly, exacerbating attrition problems (Zhang et al., 2019).Especially in the sector of early childhood education (ECE), the obstacles and challenges are more serious as the profession is globally known for low social status, low professionalism, and low wage (Li, 2014; OECD, 2018). Therefore, professional identity has become a critical issue in preservice teachers’ development as it is associated with their career decision, the effectiveness of learning to teach, and their conceptions of teaching (Berger & Lê Van, 2018; Karousiou et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2016). Given the fact that China needs to train over three million qualified early childhood teachers to support its ECE provision with the nationwide implementation of ‘two-child policy’ (Ye & Chen, 2018) and that there is a dearth of research exploring preservice teachers’ professional identity in early childhood education (ECE), it is essential to investigate Chinese preservice early childhood teachers’ professional identity and its relationships with their commitment and competencies. To address the knowledge gap, this study attempted to investigate Chinese undergraduate students’ professional identity as future EC teachers and the related factors, using a mixed-methods research design.

The formation of professional identity is an ongoing process of professional socialization (Timoštšuk & Ugaste, 2010), in which preservice teachers keep negotiating with others and the environment and further form a sense of identity toward the teaching profession. Korthagen (2004) constructed the ‘onion model’ to frame various levels of factors that might affect the process of teachers’ professional development. In this model, there are six levels of factors, including: (1) environment referring to the classroom, the students, and the school; (2) behavior featuring how teachers cope with the environment such as dealing with students’ behavioral problems; (3) competencies referring to teachers’ knowledge and abilities which act as the foundation of behavior; (4) beliefs emphasizing teachers’ perceptions of learning and teaching which would determine teachers’ competencies and behaviors; (5) identity mainly meaning teachers’ professional identity and their beliefs about themselves as teachers; (6) mission as related to what inspires them to be teachers and the meaning of teaching profession. The inner levels interplay with outer levels. Teaching commitment refers to an individual’s emotional attachment and dedication to the teaching profession (Berger & Lê Van, 2018). This kind of belief can influence their competencies since their beliefs would influence their selection and learning of what they consider to be important. Moreover, the professional identity functions on teachers’ beliefs and competencies since when individuals know more about themselves, they tend to make corresponding decisions and develop certain competencies to realize their desires (Hamachek, 1999). Based on this theoretical model, we employed a mixed-methods research design to investigate preservice EC teachers’ professional identity and systematically explore what are the factors that may contribute to its making in China. And the following questions guided this study: 

(1)    What are the latent profiles of Chinese preservice EC teachers’ professional identity? 

(2)    What are the predictors of professional identity in these preservice teachers?

(3)    What are the factors perceived to be crucial in shaping their professional identity?

We employed a two-phase, sequential explanatory mixed-methods design in this study. In the first phase, a quantitative survey study was conducted to address Research Questions 1 and 2. Cluster sampling was conducted in this study to achieve a satisfactory level of representativeness. All the Bachelor of Education students in the Early Childhood Education programme at three normal universities in the northern, eastern, and southwestern China were invited to participate in this study. A total of 182 participants completed the survey. We used a 14-item Professional Identity Questionnaire for normal university undergraduates (Peng, 2008) to assess the participants’ professional identify from three aspects, including (1) the mental identity referring to students’ interest in ECE; (2) the academic identity evaluating whether they are satisfied with their learning program; and (3) the career identity reflecting their perceptions of ECE profession. The overall Cronbach α coefficient was 0.90. The confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) showed that the overall model had a good fit with the three dimensions (CMIN/DF = 2.332, CFI = 0.924, RMSEA = 0.085, IFI = 0.925, TFI = 0.906), thus demonstrating the valid and reliable psychometric properties of this questionnaire. We also developed a scale to measure the participants’ academic competence. This scale was based on Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives (i.e., knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, and synthesis) which can reflect the depth of students’ understanding of what they have learned (Bloom, 1956). The overall Cronbach’s α coefficient of this scale was 0.86 in this study. Items about participants’ personal information were included in the survey. Following this macro-level analysis, preservice teachers’ professional identity was explored further in the second qualitative phase to address Research Questions 3. Two participants who graduated from each of the three universities were invited to participate in the follow-up semi-structured interviews. They were individually interviewed for 30–60 minutes to understand the factors perceived to influence their professional identity. All of the interviews were conducted and audiotaped in Mandarin Chinese. We followed Braun and Clarke’s (2006) guidelines for conducting thematic analysis of transcribed interview data to capture important meanings or patterned responses in relation to perceived factors that can predict preservice teachers’ professional identity. Firstly, the first author read and re-read the transcripts to familiarise herself with the data. Secondly, initial codes were generated to include factors facilitating or hindering the making of their professional identity. Thirdly, the initial codes were collated into potential themes that could address Research Question 3.

This study has identified three profiles of Chinese preservice early childhood teachers’ professional identity. The latent profile analyses (LPA) revealed a three-class model that yielded a significant LMR likelihood ratio test result at p < 0.05 (Muthén & Muthén, 2010). About 7.1% (n=13) of the participants were classified as ‘low identity’ with the lowest levels of mental, academic, and career identities, 40.7% (n=74) as ‘medium identity’, and 52.2% (n=95) as ‘high identity’. The three profiles were significantly associated with preservice teachers’ teaching commitment and their academic competency. The multinominal logistic regression (MLR) analyses revealed that, teaching commitment was significantly associated with the ‘high identity’ (B = 1.84, p = 0.048, OR=6.29, 95% CI [1.01, 39.04]) and ‘medium identity’ (B = 2.13, p = 0.035, OR=8.42, 95% CI [1.16, 61.02]) as compared to the ‘low identity’. Preservice teachers who were more committed to being early childhood teachers had higher levels of professional identity. Also, the academic competency was significantly associated with the ‘high identity’ (B = 3.44, p = 0.001, OR = 31.08, 95% CI [4.34, 222.67]) and ‘medium identity’ (B = 4.13, p = 0.001, OR = 61.99, 95% CI [4.88, 788.10]). This indicated that preservice teachers with higher academic competency tended to have higher levels of professional identity. Based on thematic analysis, our qualitative findings also extend the onion model by showing that the environment layer should include some other macro-level factors such as professional learning, the social image of EC teachers, and the skill requirements in the workplace. Furthermore, different from Korthagen’s (2004) statement that the influence happens from the inside layers to outside layers or in the reversed direction, our study further indicated that the interactions between the elements at the outer levels (i.e., the environment in real teaching circumstances and the behaviour) could also affect the inner levels (i.e., participants’ professional identity).

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