Initial Teacher Education (ITE) represents a key opportunity for the construction of professional identity, as it constitutes the first institutional context in which knowledge, practices, values, and expectations about what it means to be a teacher are negotiated. However, this stage has been widely questioned in the international literature, as ITE models tend to oscillate between two opposing poles: technocratic training—focused on practical tools for immediate labor effectiveness—and highly theoretical training, strongly disciplinary in nature and largely disconnected from classroom realities (Wang et al., 2023; Ell et al., 2019). This polarization has not only shaped the curricular design of teacher education programs but has also had direct effects on the identity construction processes of future teachers (Carrasco-Aguilar et al., 2025). Research shows that achieving a balance between these approaches does not depend solely on the prescribed curriculum, but rather on how university professors interpret, negotiate, and enact it, positioning them as central actors in shaping formative experiences (Leite & Sousa-Pereira, 2022). From this perspective, teacher identity in formation is not built exclusively through content, but through interactions, role models, and pedagogical practices that explicitly and implicitly convey particular conceptions of teaching.

Since the 1990s, Initial Teacher Education for Primary School teachers in Spain has undergone a gradual process of reform aimed at fostering a professional identity grounded in pedagogical renewal. This process culminated in the institutionalization of what is now the four-year Bachelor’s Degree in Primary Education, offered by Faculties of Education at universities and affiliated institutions (Luzón & Montes, 2018). Since the integration of Primary teacher education into Spanish universities, teacher preparation has faced multiple challenges related to the system’s capacity to promote motivation toward the profession, the development of socio-emotional competencies, and adequate professional preparation, among others (Garcia-Vila et al., 2021; Magro et al., 2021; Muntaner-Guasp et al., 2021).

Within this context, one of the most significant tensions in ITE concerns how to foster a teacher identity that is both professional and critical. This requires acknowledging that teaching is not a neutral activity, but rather a situated practice shaped by power relations, ethical decisions, and political frameworks. From this standpoint, authors such as Giroux (1997) argue for understanding teachers as transformative intellectuals—professionals capable of critically reflecting on their practice, questioning structures that reproduce inequality within the education system, and acting as agents of change committed to an emancipatory and democratic pedagogy. In initial teacher education, this perspective demands moving beyond the mere transmission of teaching methods and creating spaces to critically examine the social meaning of education.

Promoting this type of identity also requires questioning the formative role of university professors. ITE unfolds within a social environment dominated by processes of standardization, control, and accountability, which tend to restrict space for critical perspectives on teacher education. In this context, educating reflective and politically aware teachers implies that those who train teachers must critically examine their own practices, assumptions, and positions regarding knowledge, childhood, and schooling (Imbernon, 2017). The identity of teacher educators is thus constructed within a relational framework in which pedagogical example and formative discourse become particularly relevant. University professors project expectations onto their students, imagining future professional trajectories that may ultimately shape their career paths.

This paper examines the model of teacher identity that university professors project onto their Primary Education students, focusing on the future expectations they construct about them.

This study adopted a quasi-ethnographic research design conducted within a Primary Education degree program at a public university in Andalusia, Spain. Ethnography, as a qualitative approach, seeks to understand meanings, practices, and social relations from the perspective of those who experience them, through prolonged immersion in natural settings. When such immersion takes place over a limited period of time, it is referred to as quasi-ethnography (Silva & Burgos, 2011). The study was carried out at a university different from that of the research team in order to avoid conflicts of interest. The research process began with institutional contact and authorization, followed by attendance at formal faculty meetings. Classroom observations and observations of informal spaces were subsequently conducted and recorded through field notes. In addition, in-depth interviews were conducted with a total of 15 university professors who taught courses in the Primary Education degree as well as in other programs. Interviews followed an open-ended format guided by a common thematic protocol addressing the professors’ academic and professional trajectories, their understandings of university teaching, their representations and evaluations of their students, their views on the teaching profession in Primary Education, and how they imagined their students’ futures upon graduation. All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019), an interpretive approach aimed at identifying patterns of meaning. The analysis followed six interrelated phases: (i) familiarization with the data through repeated readings and deep immersion in the corpus; (ii) initial, open, and flexible coding guided by the research questions; (iii) theme development through the clustering of codes into broader patterns of meaning; (iv) theme review to assess internal coherence and relevance to the dataset; (v) theme definition and naming, clarifying their analytical scope and distinctions; and (vi) report writing. Researcher triangulation was applied throughout all stages of the analysis. Confidentiality and voluntary participation were ensured at all stages of the study.

The expectations that university professors project onto Primary Education students shape a tension-filled teacher identity. A persistent struggle emerges between a technical-instrumental identity—focused on competencies, content mastery, and system adaptation—and a critical, situated identity that understands teaching as a socially, ethically, and politically engaged practice. While some professors emphasize the need for “rigorous” professional training regulated by normative, curricular, and accreditation frameworks, others—particularly those with school-based or community-oriented trajectories—openly challenge the reduction of teaching to a set of techniques, denouncing the uncritical reproduction of school and university models disconnected from social realities. A cross-cutting theme is the gap between formative discourse and institutional practice. Professors acknowledge that although reflection, inclusion, and active methodologies are rhetorically promoted, the university structure—characterized by massification, bureaucratization, pressure for academic productivity, and standardization—hinders their pedagogical enactment. This contradiction functions as an implicit formative message that affects students’ identity construction, contributing to disengagement, loss of vocation, and the pragmatic instrumentalization of training, particularly in advanced stages of the program. These tensions are not merely individual or didactic, but structural, linked to accountability logics, academic precariousness, and the commodification of knowledge. Finally, the findings show that university professors act as key mediators of identity construction, either reinforcing adaptive teacher identities or opening spaces for reflective and transformative ones. In particular, practices associated with the practicum emerge as a privileged site for contesting meanings, as they allow—when approached through collective reflection—the articulation of experience, context, power, and professional responsibility.

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