From Liminality to Interpretation: Research on the professional self-understanding of student teachers in teaching practicum in China

• In Event: Becoming Teachers: Navigating Identity Across Borders and Boundaries

Proposal

Teacher professional self-understanding is a significant part of the teacher profession. Specifically, teachers are not only the center of the classroom but also the center of the educational process. Thus, the professional identity and self-image of teachers are far more significant compared to other professions, where it is easy to separate the person from the skill (Nias, 1989). Who the teacher is and what kind of person they are matters greatly, both to themselves and to their students (Kelchtermans, 2005).
Moreover, teachers’ professional self-understanding is crucial for student teachers admitted by the teaching community. That is to say, teacher professional socialization is a dynamic process through which individuals transition from ordinary people to teachers and eventually become members of the teaching community (Zeichner, & Tabachnick, 1985). The acquisition of professional identity, learning professional (clinical) work, and learning to interact in a professional manner constitute the three key dimensions of current research on professional socialization (Jenkins et al., 2021). Among these, the acquisition of professional identity is closely related to teachers’ self-understanding.

For student teachers, the teaching practicum provides a “liminal phase” for them to construct professional self-understanding. Arnold van Gennep’s theory of rites of passage posits that the transition between social statuses necessarily involves a liminal phase. As a crucial component of teacher education, teaching practicum equips student teachers with the skills to navigate the challenges encountered during this liminal phase between university learning and actual teaching practice. Within the context of teaching practicum, student teachers occupy a dual identity—they perform as teachers to students while remaining apprentices in professional preparation, as their student status indicates they have not fully entered the profession. Consistent with other professions across disciplines, liminality and rites of passage represent fundamental and requisite processes in becoming a teacher (Petersen, 2017). In this sense, as a form of clinical training, the significance of teaching practicums lies in enabling student teachers to construct their professional self-understanding.

This study focuses on the construction of student teachers’ self-understanding in the teaching practicum and explores how this self-understanding construction influences their professional socialization.

Drawing on in-depth interviews and observation, this paper seeks to explore how student teachers construct their professional self-understanding in teaching practicum and how teaching practicum has an impact on the professional choices of student teachers. This study will adopt a qualitative methodology based on an interpretive approach to yield insight and understanding of student teachers’ professional self-understanding. The choice of methods rests on their appropriateness in serving the research purposes and responding to research questions (Punch, 2006).

When it comes to the perspective, self-understanding refers both to an individual’s perception of the “self” at a given moment and to the ongoing process of interpreting one’s experiences and their impact on the “self” (Kelchtermans, 2005). Within the framework of self-referentialism in teacher identity (Nias, 1989), Geert Kelchtermans structures teachers’ professional self-understanding into five components: self-image, self-esteem, job motivation, task perception and future perspective (Kelchtermans, 2009).

Student teachers understand the teacher profession through constructing the professional self-understanding in the teaching practicum. Specifically, the professional identity of the teacher is a product of both self-image and self-esteem — self-image lays the foundation for the essence of professional identity, while self-esteem is shaped through interactions with the external environment.

Task perception refers to teachers’ understanding of their roles and responsibilities, reflecting “what constitutes a qualified teacher”, while job motivation denotes the reasons for choosing and persisting in the teaching profession (Kelchtermans, 2009). In the process of experiencing and understanding their work, student teachers strive to be “good” teachers — where this notion of “good” is collectively shaped by social structures, school organizational culture and individual reflection. In this sense, the significance of teaching practicum lies in shaping student teachers’ perception of work, guiding them onto a path of structural identification through reflection.

As they approach the threshold of becoming “qualified”, they decide whether to “become a teacher”. On one hand, teaching practicum grants pre-service teachers the legitimate identity of “becoming a teacher”. On the other hand, it shapes their expectations of “becoming a teacher”, enabling them to engage in generative reflection as they face their future professional lives and learn to “think as a teacher”.

The significance of teaching practicum lies in providing student teachers with a liminal phase — allowing them to engage in generative reflection as they encounter their future professional lives, enabling their journey from liminality to interpretation. Teaching practicum represents crossing a threshold, yet it does not necessarily serve as a turning point for choosing whether to “become a teacher”, nor does it guarantee a competitive edge in the labor market. Liminality not only reinforces social structures but also implies the reflexive process through which student teachers negotiate what it means to “become a teacher”.

This paper argues that student teachers construct their professional self-understanding in the teaching practicum, which is the product of both structure and agency. From the perspective of structure, institutional frameworks serve as the foundation of student teachers’ practice. Specifically, their institutional identity is the starting point of their practice, as they fulfill various tasks to meet the standards of being a “qualified” teacher. From the perspective of agency, as liminal participants, student teachers undergo refinement in the teaching practicum, facilitating identity transformation and knowledge conversion with meaning-making embedded in this process.

Theoretically, this study employs the theory of rites of passage to analyze the process of teaching practicums, emphasizing the meaning-construction of student teachers. It attempts to situate teachers’ self-understanding within the framework of professional socialization, using the concept of “liminality” to connect institutional embedding and individual meaning-construction in the teaching practicums.

Practically, this study describes the construction process of student teachers’ self-understanding, discusses its implications for teacher professional identity formation, and investigates the impact of teaching practicums on student teachers’ career choices.

Author

• Yuqing Liu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong