Amidst the broad range of teacher competencies, professional beliefs and professional identity are two important domains of personal orientations (Metsäpelto et al., 2022). These domains “represent distinct facets of individual differences and universal dimensions of human behavior” (Metsäpelto et al., 2020, p. 156). This study examines qualitative data from a cohort of pre-service students at a Finnish university to explore the following research question:

How do pre-service teachers negotiate their professional identity as teachers after their first year of teacher education studies?

ITE is a time when pre-service teachers are confronted with real-life teaching situations and encouraged to reexamine their philosophies, life-course experiences, and beliefs about teaching and classrooms (Friesen & Besley, 2013). Because of long observation and evaluation of educational settings as students, pre-service teachers enter ITE with implicit beliefs about being a teacher that are intuitive and imitative in nature, and that remain largely unchallenged by external evidence prior to critical reflection in ITE (Harford, & Gray, 2017). Beliefs may be understood as “closely held principles about teaching and learning and how teachers get better,” serving as“a durable but permeable filter” in teachers’ sense-making that reflects and refracts teachers’ identities (Noonan, 2018, p. 2). Beliefs further serve as general patterns of adaptation to work environments (Metsäpelto et al., 2022). A such, beliefs bear on how pre-service teachers interpret and respond to their professional roles, responsibilities, and challenges.

Despite the discrepancies in conceptualizing teacher identity because of different paradigms prevailing in various periods, teacher identity is commonly understood as a fluid concept, which cannot simply be perceived directly (Hanna et al., 2019). One of the early definitions of teacher identity posits that it is “the person’s self-knowledge in teaching-related situations and relationships that manifest themselves in practical professional activities, feelings of belonging and learning experiences” (Timostsuk & Ugaste, 2010, p. 1564). This definition underscores social contexts at work, teachers’ agency, affective orientation towards work, and professional learning. Furthermore, teacher identity is a subjective meaning-making processes “situated within, and therefore co-constructed by, broader cultural, social, and historical contexts” (Buchanan & Olsen, 2018, p. 197). The iteration taking place within context-bound social activity results in not only the transmission of tacit knowledge and skills, but also in new understandings and a changed version of oneself.

To come to terms with the multidimensional nature of identity as a phenomenon in teaching and teacher education, Ruohotie-Lyhty (2018) proposed the concept of identity-agency. Identity-agency has a mediatory role between pre-service teachers’ conditions at work and pre-service teachers’ individual interpretations of their experiences therein as they negotiate their professional identity. This negotiation is an ongoing, dynamic process of defining the self in relation to the profession (e.g., tasks, influences), and may take the form of additive development, transformative development, or defense. According to Ruohotie-Lyhty (2018), additive development occurs when pre-service teachers’ original ideas, expectations, values, and self-concept match their work environment in such a way that pre-service teachers accept new aspects to their work, without necessarily experiencing significant changes in how they perceive themselves as professionals. Transformative development occurs when the mismatch between pre-service teachers’ original identity and expectations at work is considerable, causing tension, emotional load, and uncertainty about one’s competence, thus rendering identity (re)negotiation more demanding. Defending occurs when pre-service teachers actively refuse (re)negotiating their identity when they perceive a mismatch between their original identity and expectations at work.

Despite the focus on Finnish teacher education, the study examines a topic of international interest, as teacher identity, i.e. how one understands themselves as educational professionals, is essential to pedagogical decision-making, agency at work, resilience, and job satisfaction irrespective of teaching context.

The data for this study were collected in Spring 2022 at a Finnish university offering teacher education program. The data consisted of pre-service teachers’ answers to two open-ended questions in an online survey distributed at the end of their first year of teacher education studies. The open-ended questions were: 1. What do you think about yourself as a teacher now that the first study year is almost over? 2. Has your perception of teaching changed? If so, how? If not, why not? The survey, the open-ended questions, and participants’ answers were in Finnish, the participants’ first language. Participation to the survey was voluntary and anonymous. Seventy-two pre-service teachers answered the survey. The pre-service teachers’ answers to the first question averaged 29 words, and to the second question 28 words. The qualitative data were analyzed using qualitative thematic analysis, because of the flexibility it affords data analysis (Terry et al., 2017). The analysis had three phases. In the first phase, each participant was categorized for (A) certain change, (B) moderate change, and (C) little to no change in identity, depending on latent meaning where a participant’s explicit answer was missing. Each participant was additionally categorized for change or no change in their perception of teaching. In the second phase, the answers to the two questions were coded separately; the first question was coded from the perspective of identity, and the second question was coded from the perspective of perception. The codes were developed inductively and semantically from the textual data. Two main themes were developed in response to each of the survey questions. Concerning identity, the themes were transitioning and struggling to transition. Concerning perceptions, the themes were changed perception and unchanged perception. In the third phase, each subtheme was examined individually for additive, transformative, and defensive identity development (Ruohotie-Lyhty, 2018). This study drew on these three concepts to interpret how the participants changed or maintained their understanding of teacherhood.

Most participants indicated a clear transition in their identity when thinking of themselves as teachers after their first year of ITE. However, for many participants identity renegotiation entailed the acknowledgement of a margin for improvement, the incorporation of new elements, and a strengthened confidence in oneself as a teacher. As such, their renegotiated identity did not undergo significant changes, but rather improved its alignment to the notions, concepts, and practices promoted in ITE. Transformative identity development largely concerned their perceptions about teaching as a profession. Many of the pre-service teachers wrote about gaining a more comprehensive picture of teaching, which arose from tension between their preconceptions about teaching as a field of work and what teaching entailed in practice. The pre-service teachers’ transformative identity development was seen in their revised understanding of teaching as a profession, involving realizations about the challenging nature of the profession as well as about themselves in a teachers’ role. The pre-service teachers’ defensive identity development was seen in how they resisted change to their original identity, and how they struggled to find confidence as teachers. Several participants, whose answers suggested a degree of change in their original identity, confirmed or strengthened their perception of teaching, and their expectations were met. For most of these participants, this was due to positive prior experiences as students, work experience in a school, or a family member who was a teacher. The study argues that defensive identity development may also occur when there is indeed a match between a teacher’s original identity and institutional demands, but there has been no change to the teacher’s identity. It provides further support for the notion of identity as social, multiple, and discontinuous (Akkerman & Meijer, 2011), and highlights how identity-agency is conceptually useful in examining teachers’ identity development over time.

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