Pre-Service teachers’ views of their own professional identities

One of the significant challenges of teacher education is to provide the pre-service teachers with the theoretical knowledge needed for teaching in such a way that this knowledge can be successfully applied when teachers are in their own classrooms. Moreover, it is difficult to provide the opportunities to pre-servjce teachers to practice their theoretical knowledge in real classrooms. This study seeks to understand how pre-service science teachers identify themselves as teacher in the classroom just before the beginning of their professional career. and combine their theoretical knowledge to the practice. This study is a qualitative study in nature with content analysis and interview. Data was collected from eleven pre-service science teachers enrolled the teaching practice course and they were asked three questions. Namely these questions
are: Why do you want to be a teacher?, How you define yourself as a teacher in the ciassroom and what is your teaching style and approach in the classroom, why? Participants were given questions a week before they shared and discussed their answers with each other in the classroom for two hours. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed, and interviewees' reflections to the questions were collected for content analysis. Some of the students had worked at jobs paylng minimum wage before enrolling in a teacher education
program and they stated comparative cases for work conditions as their answer to why they wanted to be a teacher. It was noticed in the study that being a student for a long time and concentrating on taking exams made pre-service teachers less cognizant of and confident in their teacher identities . However, they gave more concrete answers to the last question and had strong opinions on their own teaching style and approaches. To prepare the pre-service teachers in developing their own identities as professional teachers,
they could be encouraged to think of themselves as teachers before the teaching practice period through the activities or discussions in their educational period.