The partial results of the project entitled “Initial training of helping professionals and the identity of the educators – the cases of teaching and of nursing”[1] which seeks acquiring knowledge about teacher educators’ identities as situated identities; building knowledge about teaching as a helping profession; and making proposal of training modalities and organization. This communication focuses on the conceptions of teachers educators of their work while seeking to identify the dimensions of the specificity of the teaching profession in the 1st CEB [Primary Education] (the first four years of school) which may indicate the professional to be configured by their relationship with the identities of their educators.

The social and educational contemporaneousness is characterised by profound and intense transformations which, over recent decades, have destabilised the institutional references which are the foundations for the construction of social and professional identities in western countries (Dubet, 2002). The complexity of work in education makes difficult a holistic and profound comprehension which emerges from the more invisible dimensions of the profession or rather the axiological, relational and subjective aspects which are implied in teaching as a support profession. The consideration of teaching as a helping profession is based on phenomenological perspectives about the professions which emphasise the experiential dimension (relative to life experience) as well as the ethics of the process of professionalisation (Sommers-Flanagan e Sommers-Flanagan, 2007). In the particular instance of 1st CEB teachers, the object of their work – the education of children – places a very particular emphasis on the affective dimension of the profession and it’s ethical, relational and support components (Pereira, 2009). The initial teacher education as a secondary socialisation process is responsible for the creation of the conditions of access to and the learning of the knowledge related to the specialised field of teaching in addition to the forming of a basic professional identity or «first» identity (see Dubar, 1996; Lopes & Pereira, 2012). The educators of future teachers are those mainly responsible for this process; it is important to know and understand their situated identities (Hewitt, 1991) - the organisation of the various individual, personal and social identities in a particular situation or rather in the context of the initial teacher education.

In theoretical terms, the contributions from Korthagen (2005) on the complexity of the role of the teacher educator; Swennen, Volman and Essen (2008), Murray (2008) and Boyd and Harris (2010) on the nature of the work and of the identity of teacher educators are focused upon. The theoretical contributions from Popkewitz and Nóvoa (2001) on the initial education of teachers as context for the production of the professional teacher, from Zeichner (2006) on the new social and educational demands on the initial teacher education and Tardif and Lessard (2005) on the specificity of the work of teaching as a profession in human interactions are emphasised.

[1] Project under development at the Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação at the Universidade do Porto, coordinated by Prof.ª Doutora Amélia Lopes and financed by FCT/FEDER/COMPETE.

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