Professional Identity : How Is Professional Identity Developed?

Abstract

Students entering university have different notions surrounding their future professions. In some instances the profession has a high social status and the students have a clear idea both of what the professional education will be about, and what the work in that area will mean. In other areas, the ideas of what the professional education will mean are less clear and so also is the nature of professional work. In this chapter we discuss the ways in which students develop a sense of identity with their profession, how the nature of the profession impacts on identity formation, how students engage with learning based on their professional expectations, and how their pedagogic experience as a whole leads towards their professional formation. We show how identity formation and engagement can be seen to be a relation with the students’ learning experience – which in themselves build up an expectation of the intending profession – and the manner in which they anticipate or practice professional working life. We postulate that students’ views of their profession and their pedagogic experiences combine to incline them towards a clear or diffuse sense of professional engagement. The context of the learning also seems to play an important role. In particular, it seems that the rational-substantive aspects of knowledge contribute to students’ knowledge about the discipline itself, while the rational-generic aspects allow them to experience the nature of the discipline, and thus contribute to the formation of identity as a professional in the discipline.