Identity or teaching tradition? Notes for a discussion

Abstract

The lack of consistency of the concept of teachers’ professional identity (TPI) is exposed through the analysis of an ensemble of research papers published in Europe, USA and South Africa in the last 20 years. The critical analysis conducted in this paper corroborates this fact and reveals a similar situation for recent papers published in Chile. In order to establish how TPI relates with the content of the pedagogic and didactic tradition that gives sense to the intellectual craft of teaching is unavoidable to further advance research. It is their practice at school with pupils that allows primary teachers to appropriate for themselves the tradition of teaching, giving them a professional identity that differs from that of secondary teachers. Accordingly, the challenge for Teacher Education is to transmit to all teachers this tradition.