Professional identity is a central aspect of educators’ professional development. Existing conceptualizations of professional identity frequently struggle to capture its dynamic, relational and context-sensitive nature. In response, this study introduces the Professional Identity (PI) Cube, a dialogical tool designed to address the complex nature of professional identity. Identity can be understood as the human capacity to differentiate and to assemble, or, as Jenkins (2008, p. 5) describes it, to know “‘who’s who’ (and hence ‘what’s what’)”. This broad definition enables us to conceptualize teacher educators as a professional group that shares the craft of teaching while simultaneously negotiating diverse roles, contexts and trajectories. From this perspective, professional identity is viewed as continuously evolving rather than as a fixed or stable construct. This presentation reports on a collaborative project involving six teacher educators working across European contexts, cultures and educational traditions. Adopting a relational ontological perspective, the project explores teacher educator professional identity development through dialogue. To support this inquiry, we designed the PI Cube, which builds on Davey’s (2013) five lenses for describing professional identity: becoming, doing, knowing, being and belonging. To extend this framework, we introduced a sixth, open lens that emerges through participants’ dialogue across the other five lenses. This open lens is highly personal, context-dependent and temporally situated, allowing it to change and unfold over time. The PI Cube was piloted in three workshop itineraries. First, the research team used the tool to explore their own professional identities. Second, teacher educator colleagues in Estonia engaged with the PI Cube. Third, the tool was used with 80 Basque student teachers. Findings from this final pilot indicate the value of engaging teacher educators in explicit professional identity work, particularly in relation to teaching about professional identity in teacher education (Loughran, 2014; Murray & Male, 2005) and in connecting practical and theoretical experiences (Graus et al., 2022). Building on these insights, the next phase of the project (2026) focuses on an in-depth exploration of the dialogue between the five predefined lenses and the unfolding open lens. The guiding analytical questions are: What leads to the emergence and visualization of the open lens? How does visualization as a mode of expression expand understandings of professional identity? Data will be generated through PI Cube workshops with teacher educators and student teachers, supported by a semi-structured survey and visual artefacts of participants’ cubes. Ethical approval has been applied for at NTNU, Norway.

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