Сurrent Personal Identity Of Russian Preservice Elementary School Teachers

What are the features of pre-service primary teachers` identity?

What conditions should be created in the educational process to activate of professional identity of future elementary school teachers?

How do the life aspirations of pre-and in-service primary teachers relate?

How do life aspirations of future elementary school teachers relate to the aspirations of their peers with interests outside the pedagogical sphere?

The pre-service primary teachers (matriculate applicants of psychological and pedagogical direction, SFU) answered to the semi-structured questionnaire about future teaching profession in 2014.

We organized pre-service primary teachers` training in order to activate identity: 1) informal introduction to the specialty (using gaming technologies); 2) early and distributed teaching practice in close connection with auditory and independent tasks; 3) modular project training; 4) the requirement of constant reflexive pedagogical reporting.

Informal introduction to the specialty using gaming technology gives a change in the student's position from the student to the future professional The structure of the intensive seminar included the immersion of participants in the system of relations between children and adults using the example of the famous fairy tale “The Little Prince”. This helped students build the image of modern childhood and school, reflect on their own experience of schooling, identify their own resources and deficiency in solving the problems identified.

There are three main characteristics of the teaching internship, which determined the personal identity of a student. The first is continuity of the internship throughout the course of study. The second characteristic is communication and interaction of student with senior students. The third need is inclusion of practical tasks from the internship in the content of academic disciplines

The content of the internship is discussed in special event called Practice Conference. Students present their methods, their professional successes and failures.

Important about the conferences is that the conference like the teaching practice is of inter-age and network nature: there is a lot to learn from each other creating a prototype of their own professional community.

Modular project training we apply from the third year. Most of the disciplines of the whole semester are combined into modules by content. Initially, students are given the necessary information on the organization, requirements and content of training, discusses complex cases. Students (in small groups) prepare projects during the semester and protect them. Such an organization of discipline development enables the student to gain professional knowledge, develop professionally important competences and understand better themselves - their goals and values.

Much attention was paid to the development of students' reflexive abilities at each stage of teaching training. Students kept reflective diaries in which they described ongoing events and answered questions about their own difficulties and methods for solving them; about interactions within the student group; about relationships with tutors, pupils' parents, and school administrators. The analysis of data from the reflective diaries gave teachers and tutors the opportunity to quickly make the necessary changes to the training session.

The final study of the identity of future elementary school teachers was conducted in 2018 using the methods:

a semi-structured questionnaire of ideas about the future profession;

“Value Orientations” (Rokeach, 1973);

“Aspirations Index” (1996), adapted by Chirkov & Deci (1999), the text of the questionnaire in Russian and the norm by Kotelnikova and Selin (2013).

An analysis of the pre-service primary teachers answers in 2018 showed that future specialists clearly understand what they want to do in four years. 72.7% are going to stay in the field of pedagogy and psychology, planning to develop in it.

On the open-ended question "What exactly attracts in the chosen profession?" 39 specific contextual statements were identified by the quantitative content analysis method. We combined them into 6 semantic units of analysis (Table 01 ).

Students see themselves in the future profession, they understand their resources and goals. Then such a result can talk about a good level of self-determination of respondents, which respondents are realistic about the future profession, and the description does not abuse common phrases and clichés

We compiled a list of 15 attractive features of the future profession (based on the terminal values (Rokeach, 1973) at the end of 4 course. According to the answers, we have identified the first five of the value preferences in the future profession of respondents. Important in choosing a profession, future specialists consider inner harmony, freedom from internal contradictions (81.8%), personal development and self-improvement (81.8%), completeness and emotional saturation, source of vital energy (63.6%), convenience of schedule and place of work (63.6%) , The possibility of expanding their education and horizons (59.1%). Such a choice is expected: age (about 22 years old), gender (female) and occupation (student of the humanities specialty) gives a similar value basis for the relationship of the individual to the world around him, to other people, to himself.

We worked with students of the future helping profession. We expected that such a semantic reading of the profession as an "opportunity to help" would be important to them. In the second five there were variants which we interpret as a value-semantic self-determination in the future profession: interesting projects (54.5%), the opportunity to help people (54.5%), a team of like-minded people, communication with colleagues (50%), good earnings (40% ), and the fullest use of their capabilities, strengths and abilities (36.3%).

We consider this positive dynamics of development of professional self-comprehension of the would-be teachers. This is indicative of their serious attitude to the choice of the future profession, to the content of pedagogical work, development of reflexive skills which are very important in the teacher’s activities.

We compared the results according to the methodology “Index of aspirations” of future teachers (50 students of the last year of study, 21-23 years old) and current teachers (32 elementary school teachers, 27-41 years old) to understand the proximity of the profile of life aspirations. We also compared these results (Table 02 ) with the results of young people without pedagogical interests (38 people, 17-27 years old).

Analysis of the initial prerequisites for choosing the profession of a elementary school teacher shows that applicants have a high level of altruistic aspirations, an undivided understanding of the content of a future profession, inadequate ideas about their own readiness for professional activity and the demands for the professional and personal qualities of a teacher.

The organization of teacher`s training with:

• continuous pedagogical practice, with constantly complicated tasks;

• design-modular training system, requiring the development and implementation of real group projects based on practice;

• constant reflection of one’s own activity, one’s own development;

• solves the problems of activating identity of pre-service primary teachers.

In conditions of identity activation, pre-service teachers refine their perceptions of the future pedagogy profession throughout teacher`s training, activate values that match to the shape of professional pedagogy activity and bring values closer to the values of in-service teachers, and form a more critical attitude to their personal and professional readiness.