Proceedings of the 6th World Conference on Education and Teaching
Year: 2024
DOI:
[PDF]
Exploring the Impact of Professional-Contextual Variables on Pedagogues’ Professional Identity
Senka Slijepčević
ABSTRACT:
Professional identity, a multifaceted entity, whose development is shaped by both psychological and socio-historical and cultural factors. Therefore, the paper examines the relationship between the selected professional-contextual characteristics of respondents and their schools, on the one hand, and the dimensions of professional identity, on the other. The research sample consisted of 434 pedagogues from primary and secondary schools from Republic of Serbia. For this part of the research, the Questionnaire on socio-demographic characteristics (work experience, respondents’ assessment of the professional association of pedagogues activities and their own participation in them, type, location and size of the school) and the Professional Identity Scale of school pedagogues – abbreviated version (PISC-s) which consists of four subscales (Woo et al., 2018 ) were used. The research results showed that the most significant predictor of professional identity is the assessment of one’s own engagement in the profession’s field (p<.01). The respondent’s work experience duration significantly and positively contributes to only one of the four components of professional identity – Knowledge of the profession. Respondents who more positively evaluate the functioning of school pedagogues’ associations achieve higher scores on the PISC-s subscale Attitudes about the profession. Further, the research results showed only following significant predictions: type of school of the Knowledge of the profession, the school size of the Professional engagement (p<.001). In conclusion, further research should be focused on examining various factors that encourage or prevent pedagogues’ active participation in professional associations, i.e. the strongest predictor of professional identity from this variable group.
keywords: professional identity; school pedagogue; length of service; school context; professional associations